Greg Palast is working it again
Black Americans discovered by Democratic party
Greg Palast - GregPalast.com
07.20.04 - Like Christopher Columbus blinking in shock at first seeing an American Indian, John Kerry has just discovered African-American voters.
On Thursday afternoon, Kerry landed at the NAACP convention, stepped off his slow-moving campaign boat and announced that he was exploring for one million missing Black voters.
Let me explain -- because the New York Times won't. In the 2000 elections, 1.9 million ballots were cast which were never counted -- "spoiled" is the technical term. Ballots don't spoil because they are left out of the fridge. There's always a technical reason: a stray mark, or my favorite, from Gadsden County, Florida, writing in Al Gore's name instead of checking a box.
According to data from the US Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard University Law School Civil Rights Project, about half the nation's spoiled ballots -- one million -- were cast by Black folk. Just as African American communities get the worst schools, the worst hospitals, they also get dumped with the worst voting machines, which eat, mismark, mangle and void ballots. [P6: emphasis added]
Poof! A million Black votes gone, zapped, vanished.
…Senator Kerry is no Corrine Brown. The man who would be President is first trying out the 'D' word in front of the friendly natives at the NAACP. But still, it's a first step: mentioning out loud the massive, systematic Disenfranchisement of the Black vote.
But the real change won't come until Kerry can say the 'D' word in front of say, a gathering of the members of his wife's country club. And until he confronts the boys holding the electoral lynching ropes in both parties.
I have a dream. I imagine John Kerry taking this message to the floor of the convention next week and proclaiming, "Three decades after Martin Luther King's murder, one million African-Americans cast ballots never counted. This will not stand!" Imagine it: At that moment, for the first time in a generation, the Democratic Party will have nominated a Democrat.
