Throw Out the Vote

Yesterday on ATC, Mara Liasson ran a story that presents an unfounded assertion--if not an outright lie--as if it were fact. She stated that in 2004 the Republicans had "a highly centralized and very effective program to identify and turnout voters; in 2004 it helped them win even in the face of strong national antiRepublican sentiment." This might fly if not for Greg Palast and the BBC. You see, Greg Palast doesn't just assert that the Republican's cheated to win in 2004, he provides loads of evidence--purge lists, emails, cage lists etc. If you like you can do the math yourself: First note the US Census Burea's Official number of actual voters in 2004 (125,736,000), then subtract the House Clerk's official vote tally from 2004 (122,349,480) and what do you get--3,386,520! That's right, over THREE MILLION THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND votes disappeared--"poof." I bet you'll never hear those numbers investigated on NPR. And if you think these magical disappearing votes affect Republicans and Democrats equally guess again--the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has statistics that show otherwise.

So what NPR and Liasson should have emphasized was not that the GOP has a great get-out-the-vote strategy, but that they have an even better Throw-Out-the-Vote strategy--one that worked extremely well in 2000, 2004, and will probably prevail again in a) 2006, b) 2008, c) 2010, or d) all of the above.