Spoilage is something you might think normally relates to food -- bad vegetables or something -- and you'd be right.  Normally. It also applies to voting and vote-counting. This November 7, we must make sure that all votes count if we are to truly support the results of the GOTV effort, otherwise -- what's the use?  If your vote isn't counted, it makes no difference whether you cast it.

And therein lies the problem.

Greg Palast has been alerting Americans to the compromise of our votes and elections for years now.  Kossack OrangeClouds115 recently caught up with him and diaried about the encounter that took place at Fighting Bob Fest in Wisconsin. (Read her diary -- it contains important tips on ensuring that your vote counts!) In an article published on October 21 in Yes! Magazine, he draws our attention -- such that it is -- to the problem of a dirty little secret in American voting:

A nasty little secret of American democracy is that, in every national election, ballots cast are simply thrown in the garbage

That may appear to be common sense -- errors happen, don't they? -- but it's something that has been more than influential in American politics, particularly over the last few election cycles.

Let's make sure it isn't a factor in this next, most crucial one.

To quote again from Greg's article,

In Ohio, during the 2004 Presidential election, 153,237 ballots were simply thrown away -- more than the Bush "victory" margin. In New Mexico the uncounted vote was five times the Bush alleged victory margin of 5,988. In Iowa, Bush's triumph of 13,498 was overwhelmed by 36,811 votes rejected. The official number is bad enough -- 1,855,827 ballots cast not counted, according to the federal government's Elections Assistance Commission. But the feds are missing data from several cities and entire states too embarrassed to report the votes they failed to count.

Correcting for that under-reporting, the number of ballots cast but never counted goes to 3,600,380.

[Emphasis mine.]

Greg sums it up nicely, too:

Spoilage, not the voters, picked our President for us.

Votes cast, but not counted.

There's a strategy and methodology to the practice. To quote a final bit from the article (I strongly recommend the whole thing),

• Provisional Ballots Rejected. An entirely new species of ballot debuted nationwide in 2004: the "provisional ballot." These were crucial to the Bush victory. Not because Republicans won this "provisional" vote. They won by rejecting provisional ballots that were cast overwhelmingly in Democratic precincts. The sum of "the uncounted" is astonishing: 675,676 ballots lost in the counties reporting to the federal government. Add in the missing jurisdictions and the un-vote climbs to over a million: 1,090,729 provisional ballots tossed out.


• Spoiled Ballots. You vote, you assume it's counted. Think again. Your "x" was too light for a machine to read. You didn't punch the card hard enough and so you "hung your chad." Therefore, your vote didn't count and, crucially, you'll never know it. The federal Election Assistance Commission toted up nearly a million ballots cast but not counted. Add in states too shy to report to Washington, the total "spoilage" jumps to a rotten 1,389,231.


• Absentee Ballots Uncounted. The number of absentee ballots has quintupled in many states, with the number rejected on picayune technical grounds rising to over half a million (526,420) in 2004. In swing states, absentee ballot shredding was pandemic.


• Voters Barred from Voting. In this category we find a combination of incompetence and trickery that stops voters from pulling the lever in the first place. There's the purge of "felon" voters that continues to eliminate thousands whose only crime is VWB -- Voting While Black. It includes subtle games like eliminating polling stations in selected districts, creating impossible lines. No one can pretend to calculate a hard number for all votes lost this way any more than you can find every bullet fragment in a mutilated body. But it's a safe bet that the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands of voters locked out of the voting booth.

[Bold-italic emphasis mine.]

There's a pattern there, more pronounced than the patterns of attempted disenfranchisement that take place prior to and during every election cycle. And it's a pattern that we must break.

It's all well and good to watch out for electronic manipulation. It's good to Get Out The Vote (GOTV).  It's even better if you can help ensure that the votes are counted, and not discarded out-of-hand.

Why are Karl Rove, George Bush and "Deadeye" Dick Cheney so confident that they'll retain the House and Senate? Perhaps they are giggling with glee at the thought of merely casting aside enough votes that they can pull out a victory through minor other eliminations, or later toss up a smokescreen regarding Venezuelan interference.  It matters not.

What does matter is the absolute imperative that we ensure an atmosphere of follow-through. We must make certain that all the other efforts at raising funds, canvassing for candidates, encouraging voters to the polls and derailing negative propaganda are not all for naught.

Watch out for patterns of disenfranchisement, and for critical (criminal) use of spoilage to twist and turn the outcomes.

Let's do this right, and wipe the smirks off the faces of those folks who may be the next to air on "America's Most Wanted: Federal Edition."

Crossposted at DailyKos, ePluribus Media, Booman Tribune, My Left Wing, Never In Our Names, Progressive Historians.