Month: June 2004

THE WEATHERS REPORT

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date June 27, 2004

THE NEXT PRESIDENT’S FORTY-YEAR TERM

There has not been a new appointment to the United States Supreme Court in almost 10 years–the longest the court has ever gone without change. Change is coming. If you care about the future of this country, you will cast your presidential vote this November with the Supreme Court, above all other things, in mind.

U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist is 79 years old. He’s been on the court for 32 years. Associate Justice John Paul Stevens is 84 years old. He’s been on the court for 29 years. Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is 74 years old. She’s been on the court for 23 years.

Supreme Court justices are, of course, appointed for life. It is not unusual for a justice to serve for 20 or 30 years or more–witness the examples above. As life expectancy increases, the tenure of justices will likely increase, as well. Clarence Thomas was confirmed as a justice at the age of just 43. Don’t be surprised if he remains on the court for 40 years or more.

There is a good chance that the next president of the United States will get to appoint at least three, and possibly four or five, Supreme Court justices. Rehnquist and Stevens are old; they are almost certain to be replaced in the next four years. O’Connor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 71) have had some health problems in recent years; either or both could leave the court soon. Justices Antonin Scalia (68), Anthony Kennedy (67), and David Souter (64) are each at an age when serious health problems are not unusual.

What this means is that the man we elect president in November is likely to determine the fabric of the law in this country until the year 2034 and beyond. This election is not about the next four years, it is about the next forty years.

Forget foreign policy–a president can change that on a whim. (See George W. Bush’s about-face regarding the United Nations in the last year.) Forget economic policy–the economy generates too much of its own momentum to be controlled by politicians. Forget legislative policy–elections in the House of Representatives can turn that upside-down every two years.

But the rulings of the Supreme Court affect all of us immediately and for generations. A Supreme Court decision today will control the law for decades. Witness last week’s decision that, according to most analysts, left federal sentencing guidelines in chaos.

In the past, presidents appointed justices who defied “liberal” and “conservative” labels. President Eisenhower, a Republican, appointed Earl Warren, who was later villified by conservatives as a superliberal. President Kennedy, a Democrat, appointed Byron White, who voted against abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. But things are different today. If George W. Bush is elected, his neocon handlers will demand that he appoint justices as predictably and consistently “conservative” as Scalia and Thomas, who almost always come down on the side of the police and the corporations. If John Kerry is elected, he is almost certain to appoint “liberal” justices like Ginsburg and Stevens, who believe in individual privacy rights and strict limits on police powers.

Over the next thirty years, the soul of our nation will be up for grabs. Two things make that inevitable:

1) There will be more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil–terrorists never go away–and when that happens, it is almost certain that the response of the Congress will be to pass laws that put more and more power into the hands of the FBI, the CIA, the police, and other elements of the so-called “security” establishment. Congress will also pass laws that cede more unilateral, unchecked power to the executive branch. That is what Congress has always done in the face of fear; it’s what the Alien and Sedition Acts did in 1798 and what the U.S. Patriot Act did in 2001. Today our nation is closer to an imperial presidency, with the executive branch having greater unchecked powers and more control over the dispensation of “justice,” than at any time since the Sedition Act of 1918.

2) Technology will bring Big Brother closer to reality than ever before. Progress in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, robotics, computer technology, and surveillance systems will make it possible, even easy, for the government to find out everything about us and to use it in ways we can never discover. (A relevant digression: researchers are very close to increasing life expectancy to 120 years or more. The next set of Supreme Court justices may serve for sixty or seventy years or more. This is not science fiction.)

Together, these facts mean the next Supreme Court will decide where on the scale from fascism to democracy this nation will settle for at least two generations. These are some of the questions that that Supreme Court will have to answer in the next 40 years:

¥Does the executive branch, in the name of national security, have the right to read our e-mails without a warrant?

¥Does it have the right, without a warrant, to examine what we look at on the Internet?

¥Does it have the right to put cameras in every public place to watch every citizen’s public movements?

¥Does it have the right to use nanotechnolgy or heat-sensitive cameras to watch us through the walls of our bedrooms in the name of national security?

¥Should every citizen be required to carry a national I..D. card with our genetic fingerprint on it?

¥Should that national I.D. card contain a chip, like those in toll-booth E-Z passes, that can tell the government every store we’ve entered and every house we’ve visited? Should it also contain a global positioning chip that can tell the government where we are at any moment?

¥Should the FBI be permitted to create a DNA profile (from loose hair samples, for instance) of any citizen it wants, in the name of national security?

¥Should insurance companies or employers or police be given access to our DNA profiles, to find out if we might be prone to, say, heart attacks or alcoholism or criminal behavior?

¥Does the government have the right to “tag” people it thinks might have terrorist potential by implanting computer chips under their skin, perhaps at birth?

All this, of course, goes beyond questions that the Supreme Court must answer much sooner, in the next two or three years:

¥Is the so-called War on Terror really a war, when no war has been declared by Congress?

¥Does the “War on Terror”–an expression with no meaning in the law–justify giving the President unending war powers?

¥Can any President, ever, hold people in jail indefinitely, without giving them access to courts not controlled by the executive branch?

¥Can the executive branch order the torture of prisoners for any reason?

¥Can the FBI or the Transportation Security Administration maintain a list of people who are not allowed to fly on airplanes?

Let me finish with a current real-world example of the kind of issue the next Supreme Court will have to decide. Today, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security fund a program called “Matrix,” which stands for “Multi-State Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange.” The Matrix program includes a computerized data-mining system that provides state and federal agencies with massive amounts of information about U.S. citizens. Recently, the company that came up with the Matrix data-mining program provided the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service with a list of 120,000 people in the United States who have “high terrorist factor scores.” Because of their names, their ethnicity, their neighbors, their divorce records and who knows what else–their friends? their political columns?–120,000 people in the U.S. are now on a list. You may be there for reading this. I may be there for writing it. The government isn’t really saying how the list was determined or who is on it. They’re not saying if the list is being used to decide whose luggage gets searched at the airport or whose emails get read or who gets stopped in traffic. Very little has been revealed about Matrix.

The current administration doesn’t want you to know about Matrix, but it is real. (For more on the subject, go to http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18311890 or http://www.aclu.org/Privacy/Privacy.cfm?ID=14257&c=130 .)

Sooner or later, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to decide if Matrix represents a constitutionally appropriate defense of national security or an unconstitutional threat to the privacy of American citizens. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, George Bush’s declared favorite justices, are on record as saying that the U.S. Constitution does not give American citizens the right to privacy. For the sake of your children and grandchildren, you might remember that when you vote in November.

News The Fly-By

GRATEFUL DEAD

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date June 27, 2004

Shelby County has hired native Memphian and U of M grad Dr. Karen Chancellor to replace Dr. O.C. Smith as county medical examiner. Chancellor s qualifications for the office include never having tied herself up with barbed wire and never having hung a homemade bomb around her neck. And really, isn t everything else secondary?

Plante: How It Looks

News The Fly-By

The Blotter

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date June 25, 2004

Are you sure they weren’t filming a beer commercial: On June 18th, a woman at Home Depot gave a female a ride to a nearby Burger King. There, the passenger met up with a male and the two tried to scam the Home Depot shopper. The passenger said she had inherited $80,000 but couldn’t take it back to Africa with her, so she would give the man $30,000 and the nice woman who had given her a ride $50,000, but only if she would contribute $5,000 first. The victim withdrew $5,000 from her bank and gave it to the female scammer, who wrapped the money in a red do-rag. At this point (at this point!), the victim became suspicious and a struggle ensued. The man grabbed the money and ran off, but the women continued to fight. The victim pulled off the suspect’s top and bra. This — naturally — caught the attention of a nearby male witness. As the suspects fled in a maroon van, the witness followed them from Poplar to White Station but lost them. The top, bra, and do-rag were filed as evidence.

This week’s zany accidental shooting: On June 18th, a woman on Cedarhurst went into her bedroom to get her gun. When she brought it into her living room — loaded and cocked — her dog jumped on her. Fido escaped unscathed, but the woman shot herself in the left foot and went to the Med in noncritical condition.

Wait, that won’t be gross if you step on it: In a bizarre combo of several old pranks, a couple on Willett was awakened June 20th by a knock on their front door and the ringing of their doorbell. They looked out the window and saw a small fire on their concrete porch. Officers on the scene discovered that the fire was a roll of burning toilet paper.

Opinion Viewpoint

[VIEWPOINT] Straight Talk?

Post author By Norman Solomon
Post date June 25, 2004

Political myth-making goes into overdrive every four years. With presidential campaigns fixated mostly on media, an array of nonstop spin takes its toll: When heroes are absent, they’re invented. When convenient claims are untrue, they’re defended.

Many supporters come to function as enablers — staying silent or mimicking their candidate’s contorted explanations to try to finesse gaping contradictions. Fast talk substitutes for straight talk.

President Bush, for example, keeps repeating statements about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or supposed links between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein that were explicitly refuted on June 16th by the 9/11 Commission — a mendacious propaganda exercise. The president’s supporters can’t possibly be honest about those lies while speaking to journalists or appearing on radio and television.

Meanwhile, the presumed Democratic nominee is criticizing the war in Iraq following an invasion based on distortions that he helped to propagate before the war began. In a speech on Oct. 9, 2002, for instance, John Kerry let fly with this rhetorical question: “Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don’t even try?” Kerry also sought to justify his decision to vote for the congressional pro-war resolution with the statement that “according to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons.” Yet you can bet that countless Democrats who oppose the current war and never bought the WMD “evidence” will keep pretending — in public, anyway — that there’s nothing much wrong with Kerry’s Iraq stance and general hawkishness.

Partisans are frightened off from engaging in candor because they’re afraid of being accused of simply settling for the lesser of two evils. Yet such foggy evasions degrade political discourse. In the case of the 2004 presidential race, all military hawks are not alike.

The gang in control of Bush’s presidency is beyond even the sort of militarism implemented during the 1980s by the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bush the First. In a new documentary film, Hijacking Catastrophe, Noam Chomsky comments: “They happen to be an extremely arrogant, dangerous group of reactionary statists. They’re not conservatives.”

Usually the media game is to choose your presidential candidate and then sing that candidate’s praises. But for progressive advocates, the most telling — and honest — way to support Kerry would be to openly acknowledge his pro-corporate and militaristic positions while pointing out that, overall, Bush is significantly worse.

The crying need to defeat the incumbent president is so clear that presidential candidate Ralph Nader says his campaign this year will aid in ousting him. In March, he said: “I’m going to take more votes away from Bush than from Kerry.”

But the Progressive Unity Voter Fund’s “Don’t Vote Ralph” site provides a chart and backup data from independent polls (a total of 37) gauging Nader’s impact on the race. Titled “How Much Nader Is Helping Bush” (the chart is posted at www.dontvoteralph.net/pollwatch.htm), it demolishes Nader’s assertion, while graphically showing why Karl Rove must be thrilled that Nader is in the race. Nader is trying to get on the ballot in every state — a big gift to the Bush-Cheney ticket in more than a dozen swing states.

Supporters of Bush, Kerry, and Nader differ on many issues. But all too often they’re similar in this unfortunate respect: They are willing to go along with absurd pretenses rather than publicly acknowledge that their candidate is blowing smoke.

Norman Solomon writes for Alternet, where this column first appeared.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Post author By Chris Herrington

Post date June 25, 2004

Halfacre Gunroom’s ace alt-country debut.

Wrecked

Halfacre Gunroom

(Icarus)

On their debut, Wrecked, recorded last year at Easley-McCain Studios, Halfacre Gunroom’s straightforward, Southern-rock- and punk-inflected alt-country evokes the spirit of that scene before No Depression magazine and puritanical roots fetishists turned the genre into self-parody. They don’t so much sound like Uncle Tupelo or ’80s precursors such as the Blasters and Long Ryders, but they feel that way, matching the rough spirit of country and punk coming together free from self-consciousness.

Compared to other recent rootsy Memphis bands such as Lucero, the North Mississippi Allstars, and the Riverbluff Clan, Halfacre Gunroom is less distinct musically (which means they seem less intent on carving a sonic identity than putting across the songs), but the group boasts perhaps a sharper songwriting voice. The band (singer/guitarist Bryan Hartley, guitarist Brian Wallace, drummer Justin Fox Burks, pianist/organist Aaron Brame, and bassist Christopher Cary) attacks Hartley’s songs as an alternating mix of punk-rocking rave-ups and country dirges, with Hartley’s deep, rough, rich voice up top.

But Hartley’s songs themselves are the showcase: Wrecked conveys a grit-lit sensibility — the band’s name comes from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!; one of the band’s promo photos shows an amp emblazoned with the words “I Heart Donna Tartt” — that’s both plainspoken and sneakily poetic. The album feels autobiographical, whether it is or not, a lovesick-bruise of a record that contains enough relationship-gone-bad songs to come off as a concept album. With certain images connecting different songs — the blasted November wind, the year 1989 — Wrecked feels like a 15-year journey through a couple of broken relationships (one viewed with anger; the other, loving regret, or so it seems) that also serves as a coming-of-age trip from high school to adulthood.

As with so many male song-cycles about girls who got away, one yearns to hear the other side of the story, but Wrecked avoids the casual misogyny that so often afflicts albums of this sort. Part of what rockets it past such potential pitfalls is the palpable, lived-in detail of Hartley’s songs (he’s writing about a girl, not the Girl) and the class animus that underscores the record’s most bitter moments: “1989,” set a decade after the titular year, looking back on a young love that didn’t last, ends with the kissoff “He bought you a house right off Poplar/He’s alright, but he ain’t no doctor/I’m sure he makes a mighty fine check/I’m sure he’s everything your momma expected.” And the mocking “East Memphis Girls” spits, “East Memphis Girls only want to get married You better have some money, she don’t care about cool.” But there’s also a generosity to the memory-soaked laments in other songs.

If the tales on Wrecked really are as personal as they sound, Hartley is skilled enough to make strangers care. The closing “The Winter Wind” cryptically connects the global to the personal, but by the end you’ll feel like you remember that September party as well as his friends. And then the epic “Wheels Roll North” points to a future beyond the confessional. Like a good short story in song form, it dances around a bowling-alley moment of decision between a girl who thinks she’s a lesbian and the boy who loves her still. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Halfacre Gunroom will celebrate the release of Wrecked Saturday, June 26th, with a 5 p.m. performance at Shangri-La Records.

i

The Magnetic Fields

(Nonesuch)

“No synths,” boasts the liner notes for i, the newest Magnetic Fields album. Based on i‘s goodness-not-greatness, it seems like a tactical blunder for an avowed and accomplished ironist like Stephin Merritt to sing solo without the cover of the most ironic pop instrument ever invented. The synthesizer (which can produce a sound like another instrument, but not really, get it?) was present on almost all of the band’s previous releases, and it played an important role in the band’s conceptual intelligence and its consciously deconstructive musical and lyrical approach to moon-June-spoon rhyme schemes and the pop song’s historical and emotional limitations. Me, I really enjoyed the contrast between the huge, electronic walls of synthetic sound and Merritt’s steadily low, blank voice. It sounded like Hank Williams’ tone-deaf ghost fronting Kraftwerk or HAL 9000 if he were programmed to create music instead of pilot a spaceship. And I gradually made peace with the fact that Merritt and his cohorts never meant a word of any brilliant “love” song they ever sang, even if 1998’s masterful 69 Love Songs broke my heart in a million ways.

So if other Magnetic Fields records have been concept albums about tropes like “the road” and “loneliness” and “love,” then this new release is about “the self.” And as it turns out, the band does not find “the self” or the letter “i” very interesting. That is okay. It’s hard to write honestly or dishonestly about who you are or who you might be, and it’s often unnecessary. The masquerade and the false image are useful, possibly essential tools for long-term success in the pop world. But one thing a mask can’t hide is a lazy, good-for-nothing, slow melody that goes no place. And there are some serious snoozers here, with “I Die” and “I Was Born” the worst offenders. Some songs — “If There’s Such a Thing as Love” and “It’s Only Time ” — would fit very well on a delicate mix tape for a bright, special someone, but this pains me because such surgery has been difficult to perform in the past. It pains me more that my absolute favorite song here (and a personal suggestion for anyone who takes this group too seriously), “I Don’t Believe You,” is also six years old. — Addison Engelking

Grade: B

LP

Ambulance LTD.

(TVT)

Another week, another heavily hyped band from New York City. Like so many second-tier groups — Stellastarr*, Interpol, On!Air!Library! — Ambulance LTD. flaunt an overpunctuated band name and a sound heavily influenced mostly by older New York bands such as the Velvet Underground. (They even cover Lou Reed’s “The Ocean” on a hidden track.) However, unlike some of their Big Apple contemporaries, Ambulance mold their obvious influences into sturdy, catchy pop on their surprisingly solid debut, simply titled LP.

The lead-off instrumental, “Yoga Means Union,” switches tempos and styles to form an overture from which songs like “Heavy Lifting” and “Stay Where You Are” derive their moody, dreamy pop and “Michigan” and “Sugar Pill” their moody atmospherics. Singer Marcus Congleton has a knack for urbane melodies and thoughtful lyrics. His intentions are not always clear (“Ophelia”) and occasionally he lapses into uninspired motifs (“Stay Tuned”), but usually his words add to the sense of loss that pervades the album (“Michigan”).

LP, however, is as much about sound as it is about songs: Besides the instrumental opener, which is one of the album’s longest tracks, “Heavy Lifting” switches abruptly from propulsive pop to a lengthy, airy coda, and the stand-out track, “Stay Where You Are,” begins with almost two full minutes of keyboards and backward-running guitars, which will surely frustrate mix-tapers.

Still, Ambulance lack many of the pretensions that plague some of their peers. Even if they draw from the same well of new wave and shoegazer influences, the music never sounds like part of a scene. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Steppin Out

Post author By Bianca Phillips

Post date June 25, 2004

There’s just something about a good, organized-crime film that puts people in touch with their inner gangster, has them uttering “Fuggedaboutit” or “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse” in poor Italian accents for hours, days, years after the credits have rolled. At least, that’s been the experience of local actor/writer/producer Forrest Pruett and his pals from Red West’s Actor’s Studio in Bartlett.

Pruett and a group of guys in his acting class spent so much time spouting their favorite gangster phrases over after-class beers, they decided to make a movie about guys pretending to be mobsters. They’ll be screening Almost Made for the first time at the Stage Stop in Raleigh on Sunday, June 27th.

“You watch these [mobster] films and you just get so pumped up,” explains Joe Smith, who plays Joey Girth, the leader of the wannabe mobster family. “It’s like back when people would go see Rocky, and they’d come out of the movie theater wanting to go kick someone’s ass. With mobster films, you’ll see these normal people, like truck drivers, pretending to be Tony Soprano. It fascinates me.”

In Almost Made, five guys who have seen far too many movies form a “family” of their own, only to end up in over their heads. When the guys get a little rough with a customer at their regular bar, a police officer witnesses the entire incident.

“They get a real quick dose of reality when they get in the first bit of trouble,” says Pruett. “They realize they’re not mobsters.”

Writing the film was a first for Pruett and fellow actor Stan Prachniak. They toyed around with ideas at T.J. Mulligan’s one night and decided that the first thing they’d need were gangster names.

Pruett became Mickey Two Times, since he’s in the habit of always ordering two Michelob Lights. Smith was dubbed Joey Girth, which was a reference to both his body size and the size of, um, other things. Classmate Freddy Mitchell was known for his muscular stature, and he became known as Freddy Gunns. The guys were always poking fun at Tim Sherrod because of his high-pitched voice. He was named Timmy Hi Tone. Prachniak, the ladies’ man of the group, chose the name Stanley Pick-Ups.

“Stan would just go up to women and say things like, ‘Is that a keg in your pocket? Because I’d like to tap that ass.’ Or, ‘Are you from Tennessee? Because you’re the only 10 I see,'” says Pruett.

Almost Made features the group’s acting coach Red West, who was once a bodyguard for Elvis. West plays Red Rogers, the bartender at the family hangout, appropriately called Red’s Bar. According to Pruett, they presented their script to West in class, and when he allowed the class to act out the scenes, he was “rolling on the floor laughing.” He told Pruett if they decided to film it, he’d act in it. And Pruett says West ended up becoming a major asset on the set.

“After the initial impact of, wow, this was Elvis’ bodyguard and he was in Roadhouse, he becomes a regular guy. He helped all the actors on the set by making quiet suggestions. Red really helped things move along quickly,” says Pruett.

The film was directed by West’s son, John Boyd West, who acted in Deep Cover and 21 Grams. West told his son about the script and after attending a class where the guys acted it out, the younger West agreed to direct it.

Most of the actors came from West’s acting class, although some were people Pruett had met when working on another local film, Dog Me: Potluck.

Almost Made was shot almost entirely at the Stage Stop. Smith says it was the natural choice since the bar was his and Pruett’s favorite haunt back in their “long-haired ’80s metal days.” Customers were allowed to come in and drink during filming so long as they remained fairly quiet.

Shooting began in September of last year and finished in February. They were only allowed to shoot one day a week at the bar, and they had to take a month off in December due to an overwhelming amount of Christmas decorations. It was too much work to take the decor down once a week for shooting time.

“Continuity was almost impossible, especially when Christmas rolled around,” says Pruett. “That place went from looking like a rock bar to the Enchanted Forest.”

Now that filming and production are wrapped up, Pruett says his company, Backwards Cap Productions, plans on entering Almost Made in this year’s upcoming film festivals, such as Indie Memphis and the Media Co-op’s Digital Film Fest. n

Almost Made will be shown in free, public screenings at the Stage Stop (2951 Cela Lane) on Sunday, June 27th, at 4 and 6 p.m. For more information, go to AlmostMade.2ya.com.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

friday, 25

Post author By Tim Sampson

Post date June 25, 2004

Lots of art openings tonight, may of them during the South Main Trolley Art Tour, including: Jay Etkin Gallery for work by Chuck Johnson and Sandy Robinson; UniversalArt Gallery for work by Rollin Kocsis; Durden Gallery for work by Brad Troxel and Jennifer Albright; and D Edge Art & Unique Gifts for work by George Hunt, N.J. Woods, and Rosa Jordan. Other openings around town are at the Wings Gallery inside the Wings Cancer for work by six cancer survivors; Delta Axis in Marshall Arts for work by six former Delta Axis curators; and at Midtown Galleries for work by 12 local artists. At the Stax Museum of American Soul Music tonight, Put on Your Gospel Shoes is a special presentation/concert by music Veteran Jesse Boyce, who has worked with everyone from The Mighty Clouds of Joy and Shirley Caesar to The Temptations and Little Richard. Ingram Hill is in concert at the New Daisy. Breakfast at Tiffany s is tonight s Orpheum Classic Movie Series feature. There s a Dan Montgomery CD-Release Party with Melissa Dunn, Harlan T. Bobo, Holly Cole, Okraboy, and The Ruffin Brown Band at Earnestine & Hazel s. At Overton Park Shell today, A Cry For Joy no.2: A Celebration of Improvisation and Jazz features Bart Galloway, Gerald Stephens, Matt McClellan, Chad Anderson, Chip Henderson, Lawrence Miller, Earl Lowe, Henry Warner, Kelly Hurt, Alvin Fielder, and Chris Parker. Go Fast and The Subteens are at Murphy s. As always, The Chris Scott Band is at Poplar Lounge. And last but certainly not least, it s opening day of Michael Moore s documentary, Fahrenheit 911.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Spoiled Ballots

Post author By Greg Palast

Post date June 25, 2004

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. “Spoiled votes” is the technical term. About one million of them — half of the rejected ballots — were cast by African Americans, although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden in the appendices to reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last election.

How do you spoil two million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It’s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in Florida — and the highest spoilage rate. One in eight votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in “Al Gore.” Optical reading machines rejected these because “Al” is a “stray mark.”

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee’s white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let’s not get smug about Florida’s Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, “It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. — about one million votes — were cast by nonwhite voters.”

This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Governor Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote-count procedures.

Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Illinois, has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let’s shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated that Florida’s black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, these blacks were too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After the disaster in Gadsden, public outcry forced the government to change that county’s procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 midterm election. Ballot design, machines, and procedure, says Klinkner, control spoilage.

So it’s clear, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named “Help America Vote Act,” signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corporation’s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And the history of computer-voting glitches also has a decidedly racial bias. Florida’s Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won’t fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts. In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing one million black voters’ ballots. n

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, from which this article is taken.

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