Or this

Florida's push for electronic voting machines is supposedly a response to the 2000 election fiasco, where thousands of punchcard ballots were improperly marked. But as noted investigative reporter Greg Palast points out, the problem lies not with those who cast the ballots but with those who design the ballots - and who count the ballots.

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. "Spoiled votes" is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 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. ...

How do you spoil 2 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.

Especially when, for example, what constitutes a "stray mark" - and what happens when one appears - depends on how election officials set up the voting.

Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state - and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 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 other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

That this was the result of the difference in treatment, not the difference in voters (despite some who suggested it was because "uneducated" blacks had difficulty dealing with the voting process), was shown in 2002 when, after a public outcry, procedures in Gadsden County were changed to those used by white counties. "Spoiled votes" almost disappeared.

Altogether, Florida officials invalidated 179,855 ballots, 53% of which were cast by blacks, working out to a rejection rate 10 times that of white voters. (Quick math: Blacks who had their votes counted went nearly 90% Democrat. Assuming that same rate applied to discarded votes, even if those remaining went 95% for Bush, Gore still would have won had those votes been counted.)

But wait - that's about 180,000 lost votes. Palast said nearly 2 million were lost. Where are the rest?

Everywhere else.

Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, 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 1 million votes - were cast by nonwhite voters." ...

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

And as Palast notes, "going digital won't fix the problem" because

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 once again, the history of computer-voting glitches 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.

The famous quote from Stalin is apocryphal but fitting: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."