Wednesday night Greg Palast, author and journalist for the British Broadcasting Corporation, spoke to an enthusiastic crowd of about 300 students and community members in 180 PLC.
Palast, whose most recent book is “Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans – Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild,” focuses primarily on his belief that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were corrupt and his concern that the 2008 election will be similarly tainted.
Using numbers from the United States Election Assistance Commission, Palast said that in 2004 more than 150,000 votes were not counted in Ohio, and Republicans challenged more than 3,000,000 nationwide – primarily in districts with high populations of minority voters.
Switching sources to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, he also claimed that black voters had a 900 percent higher chance of having their votes rejected than white voters, while Latino votes were 500 percent more likely to be thrown away.
To make his case that the Bush administration stole the 2004 election, Palast relied heavily on e-mails written by Karl Rove, President Bush’s deputy chief of staff.
One of the most damaging e-mails was a list of names that Rove’s office claimed were donors to George Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, but the address listed for many people on the list turned out to be a homeless shelter. Palast then took the list to a group of lawyers who specialize in election law and they told him it was a caging list.
Caging is an illegal technique used to suppress opposition votes.
When caging, a political group compiles lists of names of registered voters they think will vote for an opposing candidate. They then send a piece of mail to each of those names requiring a signature. If the mail is not signed, it can be used to challenge that person’s registration, possibly invalidating their registration altogether. This effectively steals a person’s right to vote without them even knowing until they try to submit their ballot. Palast said this could block the vote of – among others – students studying abroad, people serving overseas in the military, people living in homeless shelters, or people who just don’t want to sign for a strange letter.
Palast said that the majority of people on this list were minorities who are several times more likely to have their votes discarded than white Americans.
Palast moved into a brief talk about the role of oil in the Iraq war.
He explained that the real goal was to go into Iraq and “turn off the spigot,” saying that if the supply of oil was reduced, the price of gas would go up.
To end his lecture, Palast told the audience that he didn’t have many solutions for the problems facing America. He said that all he could do was find the facts and report them, but that the American media are not covering these stories. As a result, he hasn’t copyrighted “Armed Madhouse,” and he encouraged the audience to disseminate pieces of it any way that they could.
“Take the section on No Child Left Behind,” he said, “and send it to every teacher you know.”
Audience member and local jazz musician Mary Elizabeth Holby said, “That’s amazing. You can put it on your MySpace page or blow it up and paste it to telephone poles.”
Graduate student Frederik Kohlert was dismayed by the lack of hands that went up when introductory speaker and radio host Alan Siporin asked how many students were in the audience.
“I think Alan made an interesting point that there were almost no young people,” Kohlert said – “that’s scandalous. We’re on a college campus in what’s supposed to be a progressive state.”
Freshman Darcy Basque described the lecture as shocking.
“This stuff about all the votes being thrown away because people were overseas really hit home because I have a friend who’s about to be sent back (into overseas military service) in September even though she’s supposed to be out in August.”
The proceeds from the event will be donated to the Common Ground Collective, a nonprofit group that helps victims of Hurricane Katrina.