Widespread voting irregularities mar 2004 elections

Compiled by Willy Rosencrans

Nov. 3 (AGR) — George W. Bush’s victory in the Nov. 2 presidential election, coupled with GOP gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives, suggests Republicans may be building a sustainable majority that could dominate US politics.

Bush claimed a second term as president with, as currently tallied, the biggest vote total of any president in US history. He amassed 51 percent of the popular vote after three straight presidential elections in which the winner failed to win a majority. Bush’s Electoral College margin was close but clear at 279-252.

Republicans also tightened their grip on the House and the Senate, boosting their majorities and seizing more power over the nation’s agenda at home and abroad. Their Senate strength also could help Bush appoint more conservative jurists to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice William Rehnquist is suffering from thyroid cancer and several elderly justices are expected to retire within a few years.

Bush, his rival Sen. John Kerry, their political parties and allied groups spent more than $600 million on advertising for this election, triple the amount spent on TV and radio commercials in 2000.

But the voting process was marked by many of the same irregularities which resulted in the 2000 presidential election fiasco, in which the Supreme Court halted a recount in Florida and handed the election to Bush. The margin of victory in this election was wider, which apparently obviates the need for a recount, but allegations about unreliable e-voting machines have cast doubt on that margin.

In addition to e-voting concerns, critics of the elections cite widespread efforts to disenfranchise eligible voters through intimidation or misinformation at polling stations and elsewhere; vote challenges mounted against presumably Democratic voters on voter lists by Republicans, or by partisan poll watchers stationed inside the polls; lost or falsified voter registrations; thousands of lost absentee ballots; and other irregularities.

E-voting problems reported to hotline

Voters across the United States reported problems with electronic touch-screen systems on Nov. 2 in what critics said could be a sign that the machines used by one-third of the population were prone to error.

The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), an online database in which volunteers with the Election Protection Coalition, a coalition of non-partisan election observers dedicated to preventing voter disenfranchisement, are recording and tracking voting problems, began collecting information from 23 call centers and 40 legal assistance centers around the country. Volunteers noted everything from malfunctioning electronic voting machines to voter intimidation and long lines.

Volunteers fielded 50,000 calls in just the first few hours after polls opened on the East Coast, logging more than 7,400 incidents before 2pm EST, including about 500 incidents linked to electronic voting technology; at the end of the day more than 1,100 problems had been reported with the ATM-like machines, from improperly tallied choices to frozen screens that left their votes in limbo. That number represents the fraction of upset voters who knew the hotline number.

Voters in Maryland said congressional candidates were left off ballots, while some in Florida told hotline volunteers that their ballots had already been filled out when they stepped up to vote.

Voters from at least half a dozen states reported that touch-screen voting machines had incorrectly recorded their choices, including for president.

Voters discovered the problems when checking the review screen at the end of the voting process. They found that the machines indicated that they voted for one candidate when they had voted for another. When voters tried to correct the problem, the machine often made the same error several times. While in most cases the situation was reportedly resolved, many voters remain uneasy about whether the proper vote was ultimately cast. Meanwhile, voting experts are concerned that other voters are experiencing the problem, but failing to notice that the machine is indicating the wrong choice on the “summary” screen.

Election observers with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) reported that the problem, which some voting officials initially attributed to fluke “voter error,” is evidently widespread and may even be relatively common with touch-screen machines. Incorrectly recorded votes make up roughly 20 percent of the e-voting problems reported through EIRS.

Minority voters targeted

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has compiled a lengthy list of misinformation and intimidation tactics used to keep black and other minority voters away from the polls. The report includes other irregularities as well.

For example, the week before the election, flyers were circulated in Milwaukee under the heading “Milwaukee Black Voters League.” The flyer included warnings that anyone who had already voted this year cannot vote in the presidential election; that anyone convicted of any offense, however minor, is ineligible to vote; that any family member having been convicted of anything would disqualify a voter; and that any violation of these warnings would result in ten years in prison and a voter’s children being taken away.

In Columbia, South Carolina, a fake letter purportedly coming from the NAACP made similar claims, saying that voters with any outstanding parking tickets or unpaid child support will be arrested. The letter also says voters must provide a credit check, two forms of photo ID, a Social Security card, a registration card and a handwriting sample.

Other flyers said that voting was being extended due to higher-than-expected turnout and encouraged voters to show up on Nov. 3.

In New Mexico, officials at several Indian Health Service (IHS) hospitals and clinics stopped an on-site, nonpartisan voter registration program, saying that even nonpartisan voter registration was prohibited on federal property. Clinic staff involved in the registration complained, noting that the federal government has encouraged registration on military bases. IHS officials would only say that employees are expected to follow the Hatch Act, the law restricting partisan activity by federal workers.

Republican operatives in Pennsylvania working in support of President Bush failed in a last-minute bid to relocate 63 Philadelphia polling places, most of which are located in African-American neighborhoods. The Republicans argued that they had made the request in the interest of voter “comfort” and to make polls more accessible to disabled voters.

Vote challenges detailed

Republicans have long tried to suppress minority turnout because of their presumed allegiance to Democrats; indeed, Chief Justice Rehnquist, who was nominated to the Court by Richard Nixon in 1971, participated in challenges of minority voters 40 years ago when he was a Republican activist in Arizona.

But the party is believed to have mobilized tens of thousands of attorneys and poll-watchers for that purpose this year, particularly in so-called battleground states, such as Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio.

Over the weekend, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that the Ohio Republican party has already challenged the validity of over 35,000 new voter registrations in the state, while Wisconsin Republicans announced plans to initiative what it called “background checks” on newly registered voters. In addition, reports have surfaced of Republican plans to mount aggressive challenges against the credentials of voters in “urban areas” where minority voters are predominant.

A secret document obtained from inside Bush campaign headquarters in Florida suggested a plan — possibly in violation of US law — to disrupt voting in the state’s African-American voting districts, a BBC Newsnight investigation revealed.

Two e-mails, prepared for the executive director of the Bush campaign in Florida and the campaign’s national research director in Washington, DC, contain a 15-page so-called “caging list.” It lists 1,886 names and addresses of voters in predominantly black and traditionally Democrat areas of Jacksonville, Florida.

An elections supervisor in Tallahassee, when shown the list, told Newsnight: “The only possible reason why they would keep such a thing is to challenge voters on election day.”

There have been no reports as of yet on vote challenges based on that list.

Also in Florida, Haitian voters were challenged at the polls by individuals who allegedly identified themselves as “Republican lawyers” who tried to prevent volunteers from assisting Creole-speaking voters. Republican observers allegedly demanded that volunteers speak English when assisting Creole-speaking voters. Though the ballot questions were printed in Creole, some voters are illiterate and turned to volunteers for assistance.

Voter registration fraud uncovered

Partisan registration drives have swept through battleground states such as Nevada, Ohio and New Mexico. Hundreds of thousands of new registrations have poured into county and state offices and strained the systems in these states.

But as workers closely examined some forms, they found clear cases of fraud. In some instances, stacks of registrations had the same handwriting. In others, names were lifted from phone books and signatures forged. And many of the new registrations were duplicates of already registered voters.

Financed by political parties, wealthy advocacy groups and grass-roots organizations, liberal and conservative organizations have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to register voters. The crush, along with the irregular registrations, has bred chaos across the nation.

The Republican National Committee has funded one company at the center of allegations, Voter Outreach of America Inc., which is active across the nation. It was set up by Nathan Sproul, former chairman of the Arizona Republican Party.

Broke and disabled in Las Vegas, Tyrone Mrasek Sr. took a temporary job late this summer registering voters for the Sproul group. The job paid about $8 an hour and allowed workers to go home early with full pay on days they managed to register 18 Republicans.

The employer primarily wanted President Bush supporters, but they were not easy to find. So Mrasek handed out cigarettes to drunks and ex-felons at a homeless shelter in exchange for signatures. Later he found a stack of signed registrations for Democratic voters in a trash can outside the company’s office, he recalled.

Sproul also has run into trouble in Oregon, where Secretary of State Bradbury opened an investigation this month into allegations from three Sproul employees that the organization had destroyed Democratic registrations, a felony.

In Arizona, too, the organization is alleged to have thrown out the registrations of Democrat voters. Aaron “A.J.” James, the group’s director, referred to employees accused of throwing out registrations as “independent contractors” who were reimbursed by a number of different groups.

James said there is no incentive to throw registrations out because you can always find somebody to pay for them. “There were several groups paying for Democrats,” he said.

James, in fact, sold some of his non-Republican registrations to Arizona Leadership Institute, a group working in Arizona that was paid by USAction Education Fund, which said it registered more than half a million voters in 19 states this year. According to a press release, USAction is a nonpartisan effort to register “voters who have been disenfranchised or under-represented in the past - primarily unmarried women and African-American and Latino voters.”

Juan Camacho, Southern Arizona director of Arizona Leadership Institute, said USAction paid his group $3.33 per registration.

Some of those, Camacho said, were non-Republican registrations that he bought from James. “A.J. was registering people in Maricopa County. He turned them in to us,” he said.

And no action has been taken in a complex fraud, where more than 4,000 Florida students were allegedly conned into signing a form which could lead them to be doubly registered and void their votes. The Florida Law Enforcement Department has told the complainants that it is too busy to investigate.

60,000 absentee ballots vanish in Florida

The deputy supervisor of elections in Florida’s Broward County, Gisela Salas, said 60,000 absentee ballots, accounting for just over 5 percent of the electorate in the county, were sent out between Oct. 7 and Oct. 8 to voters who would not be in town on election day.

While some had begun to be delivered, her office had been inundated with calls from anxious voters who still had not received their ballots.

“It’s really inexplicable at this point in time and the matter is under investigation by law enforcement,” Salas told Reuters.

US Postal Service Inspector Del Alvarez, whose federal agency is independent from the US Postal Service, said it had yet to be determined if the ballots reached the post office.

“It’s highly unlikely that 58,000 pieces of mail just disappeared,” he said. “We’re looking for it, we’re trying to find it if in fact it was ever delivered to the postal service.”

Salas said the missing absentee ballot forms did not represent a major election problem because people had the option of voting early, before Nov. 2.

Poll workers were able to cross-check, through lap top computers hooked up to a central database, whether voters had already sent in absentee ballots. On election day itself, those who requested absentee ballots were only able to vote in person if they brought the blank absentee forms with them.

Sources: ACLU, Arizona Daily Star, Associated Press, BBC, Common Dreams, The Guardian (UK), Knight-Ridder, LA Times, NAACP, The Observer (UK), OneWorld.net, Reuters, St. Petersburg Times

25,000 working as slave laborers in Brazil

By Cahal Milmo

Nov. 1 — The knock on the door Valdemir Maria de Jesus had been hoping for came at 3am. The early hour was strange but after three and a half months of clearing rainforest, the salary owed to him and his friend Antonio was finally to be paid. It was a moment for celebration.

Like thousands of Brazilian laborers working in the Amazon, the meager $1,500 the two men had earned from their back-breaking efforts in the frontier state of Para would provide them with the means to start new lives, enough to build a new house, marry or support their families.

But when Valdemir went to the door, it was not a wad of banknotes but a gun that his boss, Maciel, was brandishing. “I opened the door and he shot me,” said Valdemir, a slight man in his twenties who still has the bullets lodged in him. “When the first hit me, I fell down and pretended to be dead. He shot me a second time. Then he went over and shot my friend. After he finished with him, he came back and kicked me several times in the head to check if I was dead. After he left, people found me and they somehow got me to hospital.”

Valdemir is now in hiding at his father’s home, hundreds of miles of away in another province, awaiting surgery to remove the bullets.

Antonio was not so fortunate. The wife and children he left behind to seek his fortune in Para probably do not even know he is dead. His identity card was stolen by his murderer and nobody else knows his surname.

Perhaps the most shocking element is that, far from being an isolated incidence of greed and inhumanity, it is part of the dark secret that lurks in Brazil’s rural heartlands. Valdemir, whose real name has been withheld to protect him from reprisals, and Antonio were among 25,000 men working as slave laborers, forced to destroy thousands of acres of virgin rainforest or work in Dickensian conditions to work off debts that can never be paid.

The figure of 25,000 — an estimate accepted by the Brazilian government — has been reached by analyzing satellite footage of the Amazon to calculate the rate of clearance. By working out the number of fresh acres of rainforest cleared and the amount of workers necessary to destroy that area, an insight is obtained into the human and environmental cost of Brazil’s slavery.

The laborers, illiterate and deeply impoverished, are recruited from Brazil’s north-eastern provinces with offers of well-paid jobs to clear the land and tend crops and livestock or work in charcoal plants. Although a few of the offers turn out to be genuine, the harsh reality is that they will find themselves on remote farms, watched by armed guards and under the power of landowners, some of whom will kill rather than pay the most vulnerable.

Valdemir, from an isolated village in north-eastern Brazil, was among eight laborers recruited by Maciel, a gato or cat, meaning a gangmaster.

Valdemir said the reason for the shooting was plain. “I am sure Maciel wanted to kill us so he did not have to pay us. We were not from there. Nobody would have known it was him. Everybody would think a thief came for the money.”

The Brazilian government insists that, despite recognizing the scale of the slavery problem, murder and bloodshed remain rare in labor camps. Campaigners disagree. They point to figures which show that in south Para, 534 rural workers were recorded as killed in the 30 years to 2001, some 26 times the national murder rate.

Xavier Plassat, of the Pastoral Land Commission, the charity campaigning to end the slavery and which brought the attack on Valdemir and Antonio to light, said, “Cases such as this are just the ones we hear about. For each murder or incidence of violence, many more go unrecorded, uninvestigated or unnoticed. These are people who have no choice other than to believe in the false promises made to them. They come from places where survival is a daily struggle to work to destroy the Amazon or as slaves in the richer south.

Historians put down Brazil’s modern bonded labor to its unhappy past and rigid social structures. In 1888, the country was the last in the Americas to abolish slavery, and a lack of land reform means that despite one of the richest agricultural outputs in the world, from cattle to coffee, few of Brazil’s 30 million rural poor own smallholdings or farms.

The result for the 25,000 peáo is a life of profound destitution. After being recruited from their homes, the laborers travel by bus or truck for up to a week to reach their destination, more often than not a remote farm or plantation at the end of a mud road.

After they arrive, they are told they have a debt to pay for their travel expenses, food, tools and other provisions, including toothbrushes. The working day lasts from dawn till dusk, cutting through swaths of rainforest to make way for cattle and crops, mostly soya and maize, or stoking vast charcoal-makers for steel production.

Accommodation consists of hovels and shelters scraped together from plastic sheeting and timber. One group of workers said they had to eat their food from canisters that had been used to hold pesticide.

Angelika Berndt, a worker for the London-based Anti-Slavery International, who returned last month from Brazil, said: “Each worker is kept indebted until the job is done. Then, when it is finished, they are either sent away without pay and told their debt is paid or they are handed on to the next landowner. It is a vicious circle.”

To complete the degradation, each peáo becomes nameless, a working machine stripped of individuality. Instead of being referred to by their names, they are referred to by their state of origin, such as Maranhao or Piaui. If there are several workers from the same state, they are simply numbers, Piaui 1, Piaui 2 and so on. A large part of the reason that Antonio’s family have not been informed of his murder is that he was known to his colleagues only as Maranhao 2. Berndt said, “The men have no value to their captors other than as workers. They are treated worse than livestock. At the least the landowners care if their animals are hurt or injured.”

But this humanitarian scandal has not gone unnoticed by Brazil’s government, and President Luiz Ignacio “Lula” da Silva, the trade unionist and former shoe-shine boy who was elected on an anti-poverty ticket in 2002. In an unpublished report this year, the Geneva-based International Labor Organization (ILO) praised the government for its efforts to tackle slavery. But the report, an in-depth survey of Brazil’s slave-labor market, has remained secret amid claims that it shows the US is benefiting from the work of slave laborers by importing crude pig-iron produced in rainforests for use in US mills.

The Brazilian authorities say they are dedicating significant resources to the problem, spending $5.5 million last year from an austerity budget.

Shortly after taking office, Lula announced an ambitious campaign, a national plan for the eradication of slave labor, by setting up armed inspection teams to swoop on farms holding slaves, arrest their captors and liberate the workers. To date, this task force has set free some 8,000 peáo, paying each a sum in compensation and offering training and education to establish them in legitimate work.

Tough new legislation has also been promised which will allow the authorities to confiscate the land of those who are found to have used bonded labor. Last week, it was announced that nearly 10,000 hectares (38sq miles) of land in Para province, enough to provide farms for 250 families, had been seized in the latest task force operations.

It is, the Brazilians say, evidence of a long-term determination to rid themselves of a source of shame. A London-based Brazilian diplomat said: “This is a campaign that is being conducted on many levels and we are making some progress. But for it to work we not only have to free these workers but educate and change our society so this conduct is no longer accepted by anyone.”

Local politicians and judges in states such as Para are said to be among the landowners perpetuating the system.

Raids on suspected gangmasters were halted in January this year when three members of a Swat-style inspection team were ambushed and murdered on a dirt road in Minas Gerais, another northern state. The killings were attributed to vigilante gangs employed by rogue landlords to scare their workers and repel unwanted interest.

The anti-slavery groups say the new confiscation law has become bogged down in the Brazilian legislative process after the “ruralists,” the political bloc based in the provincial heartlands, refused to accept the wording. Plassat said: “This is an issue to be addressed by the government. Even if it is passed, this new law will not solve the problem. It is symbolic because it will not be backed by the money or the resources to cause the landowners to fear. What we are engaged in here is a process that will take many years. It is about changing a culture.”

Source: Independent (UK)

Over 100,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom

Compiled by Patrick Byrne

Nov. 2 (AGR) -- The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since their country was invaded in March 2003, more than half of them women and children killed in “precision” air strikes. The figures would mean 150 civilians have died each day since the conflict began. The research was carried out by the Center for International Emergency Disaster and Refugee Studies, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Columbia University, and published in the British medical journal, the Lancet. The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September 2004. They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighborhoods. The study concluded that the risk of death for Iraqis was two-and-a-half times higher after coalition forces entered the country. Previous estimates based on think tank and media sources put the Iraqi civilian death toll at up to 16,053 and military fatalities as high as 6,370. Despite the claim of the former head of US Central Command General Tommy Franks, that “We don’t do body counts,” the US military does collect casualty figures in Iraq. But since 1991, when Colin Powell was head of the joint chiefs of staff, the figures have been classified to avoid the kind of controversy of Vietnam.

A limited post-war nutritional assessment carried out by UNICEF in Baghdad found that acute malnutrition has nearly doubled to what it was before the war. That assessment also found that seven out of ten children suffered from various degrees of diarrhea. Hundreds of thousands of tons of raw sewage are still being pumped into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers every day. Because water cleaning chemicals have been looted or destroyed, the quality of water in homes is extremely poor. The survey also shows that since March 2003, over 700 primary schools have been damaged by bombing, more than 200 burned and over 3,000 looted.

Talks are still taking place over whether to begin an imminent asault on Fallujah between Iyad Allawi’s interim government and a delegation from the besieged city, with the government’s main condition that the militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi be handed over. Residents of Fallujah deny any knowlege of Zarqawi and say the demand is deliberately impossible to meet. Iraq’s President Ghazi Yawer, a Sunni with a largely symbolic role in the government, has meanwhile spoken out against the government’s plans.

Since the US opened their cordon for departing families, more than 70 per cent of the population of 300,000 have left, leaving behind a city the Mujaheddin shura has declared a free Islamic emirate.

The US has 2,500 troops around Fallujah. In the battle to take Samarra last month, 3,000 US and 2,000 Iraqi government forces were needed to fight 500 insurgents. Fallujah is estimated to contain between 2,000 and 2,500 militants. US military commanders believe that a force of 10,000 is necessary to take and hold the city. In the mean time, daily air strikes continue to number in the dozens.

Prime Minister Allawi and several other top officials have accused the US military of “gross negligence” in the training and supplying of new Iraqi security forces. Officials complain that in their rush to get recruits, allowing the Bush administration to say how the security forces are being boosted, US officials are making little or no background checks. Allawi blamed this practice for instances like last week’s execution of 49 new Iraqi soldiers. The heavily-assaulted Iraqi police force, meanwhile, is operating with as little as one firearm for every five officers.

New US intelligence assessments show that the insurgents have significantly more fighters -- 8,000 to 12,000 hard-core militants -- and far greater financial resources than previously estimated. Intelligence reports indicate that new gangs specializing in hostage-taking have been entering Iraq recently. Since the start of the holy month of Ramadan two weeks ago, violence has increased by 30 percent.

Iraqi police officers and National Guardsmen fired wildly at civilians on a road south of Baghdad after insurgents attacked a US convoy on Saturday Oct. 30. The Iraqi forces shot and threw grenades at three minibuses and three vans, killing 20 people and injuring 10 others. Police also broke into the Osama bin Zayd mosque in the same area and detained its cleric and two guards.

Eight marines were killed and nine others wounded west of Baghdad when a suicide car bomb rammed into their convoy on Oct. 30, resulting in the deadliest day for the US forces since May.

A rocket attack missed a US army base and hit a hotel in the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit on Oct. 31, killing 15 Iraqis and wounding others.

Fierce battles broke out in the rebel stronghold of Ramadi between US troops and Iraqi resistance fighters on Monday, Nov. 1, killing three civilians, an Iraqi journalist, and one US marine. On the previous two days, seven people, including women and children, were killed and 11 wounded in clashes. Residents said US artillery had shelled eastern districts and said there had been air strikes.

A video released by the militant group, Ansar al-Sunnah, showed eleven recently captured Iraqi soldiers being killed. Another video released featured an abducted Polish woman begging for her life, while the body of a kidnapped Japanese traveller was found beheaded in Baghdad.

The deputy governor of Baghdad, Hatim Kamil, was killed Nov. 1 when gunmen opened fire on his car in the southern Doura neighborhood. Two of his bodyguards were wounded in the attack. In the town of Baquba, north-east of Baghdad, unknown gunmen killed retired lieutenant-colonel Athir al-Khazraji.

Meanwhile, amid FBI investigations of no-bid reconstruction contracts awarded to Haliburton, the Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq.

Sources: Al-jazeera, AP, BBC, Independent(UK), New York Times, and Reuters

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