Greg Palast: Felipe Calderón's new best friend

Posted by Joshua Holland at 8:05 PM on July 7, 2006.

Imagine for a moment that you're Felipe Calderón, a conservative trying to become the next president of Mexico, and you want to rig the election. To pull off your plan, you need a list of Mexican voters.

Here's a simple question: would you want an accurate list of all registered voters that's kept up-to-date by the federal election authorities, or would you want an old list from your buddy George W. Bush that's at least 6 million voters short?

I know which one I'd want, but Greg Palast thinks it's a toss-up.

Three times this week Palast has insinuated that ChoicePoint, Inc. -- the company that he made infamous for removing tens of thousands of Democrats from Florida's voter rolls in 2000 -- may have had a hand in the Mexican election.

He needs ChoicePoint in the mix because it's the only thread that can connect Bush to the Mexican vote. Yesterday, Palast wrote:

I noted that the Bush Administration, under the guise of a secret War on Terror contract, hired ChoicePoint Inc. to filch the voter and citizen files of Mexico... Were the Mexican rolls "scrubbed" with Dubya's help?

The answer is: No; Calderón had no use for voter data from Dubya.

Because what Palast's not telling his readers is that the ChoicePoint story is over three years old. It made a sensation when it was reported in April of 2003. In November of that year, the AP explained that the firm "assembled a database containing the personal information of 65 million voting-age Mexican citizens, information which the U.S. government purchased."

But during the three and a half years since then, voters have moved, new voters have registered and others have died. During the 2006 election there were 71 million registered voters in Mexico (and the 65 million in ChoicePoint's database weren't even registered voters -- they were citizens of voting-age).

Palast wants to make the Bush connection stick so he writes , disingenuously, that his "news team" reports "that operatives of [Calderón's party] had access to voter files that are supposed to be the sole property of the nation's electoral commission."

That's true, they're the sole property of the Federal Election Institute (IFE), but all of the parties have access to the info. El Universal reports: "Although the parties are allowed access to the voter rolls - known in Mexico as the "padrón" - they are forbidden to use them for campaign purposes." Chuck Collins, a scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies who's been helping AlterNet cover the election, told me that Calderón's party "and all the other parties had the voter lists. That's not news. PAN broke the rules by putting the info on their internal web site for their organizers to use."

I've been going back-and-forth with Palast the last couple of days, trying to get him to retract some of his "reporting" so I wouldn't have to write this. At one point, he wrote: "I don't have the answers to all questions and so state in my article. (Indeed you stretch my findings beyond what I clearly say)." It's a fair point; he never says explicitly that Bush was fixing the election with his three year-old voter list. But the title of the piece is "Stealing Mexico," and the first line is: "George Bush's operatives have plans to jigger with the upcoming elections." Ok, it wasn't a fair point.

I also have to note that Palast has been proven dead wrong with essentially the exact same story in the past. In August of 2004, Palast predicted, confidently, that the ChoicePoint data was going to be used to fix Venezuela's recall election:

[Hugo] Chavez is expected to win this coming Sunday's recall vote. That is, if the elections are free and fair.

They won't be. Some months ago, a little birdie faxed to me what appeared to be … a contract between John Ashcroft's Justice Department and a company called ChoicePoint, Inc., of Atlanta.

He used the same kind of dark insinuation in that piece, writing: "Chavez' recall organizers… claim to be armed with computer lists of the registered. How did they get those lists?" It's a valid question, so I put it to Mark Weisbrot, a Latin America expert at the Center for Economic Policy and Research. He said: "my memory is that [the opposition] compiled it themselves."

Chavez, of course, beat the recall with millions of votes to spare in a vote the Carter Center certified as "free and fair." D'oh!

Now, believe it or not, that's not what I asked Palast to retract. After all, it may be silly to connect an old story about ChoicePoint with the 2006 election, but it's factually correct that the company made a list and that Calderón was accused of using some voter data improperly.

I asked him to retract his Guardian post, "Grand Theft Mexico," which hangs entirely on a claim that's simply false.

Here's the heart of it:

As in Florida in 2000, and as in Ohio in 2004, the exit polls show the voters voted for the progressive candidate. The race is "officially" too close to call. But they will call it - after they steal it.

Reuters reports that, as of 8pm eastern time, as voting concluded in Mexico, exit polls showed Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the "leftwing" party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) leading in exit polls over Felipe Calderón of the ruling conservative National Action party (PAN).

He explains the significance:

We've said again and again: exit polls tell us how voters say they voted, but the voters can't tell pollsters whether their vote will be counted…

He adds that in the Ukraine, "the divergence of exit polls and official polls" led the Bush administration to refuse to recognize elections in 2004. He's right; it's a serious charge.

But here's the problem in this case: Reuters never reported that López Obrador was ahead in the exit polls. Reuters ran a story that evening titled: "Mexico election too close to call, which they amended an hour later to read: "Mexico election too close to call - exit polls."

That's because no independent exit polls showed a López Obrador lead on Sunday. Reuters reported: "With emotions running high, and reports of irregularities trickling in, most media groups declined to reveal the actual results of their polls. Only TV Azteca reported precise numbers, showing Mr. Calderon with a two-percentage-point lead -- within the poll's margin of error. The newspapers Reforma and El Universal and the TV network Televisa said only that the race was a tie."

Another exit poll, from GEA-ISA -- a firm that always had outlier polling showing Calderón up by suspicious margins leading up to the elections -- gave the conservative a 4-point lead over López Obrador.

So let's be clear: all of the independent exit polls -- Palast says "exit polls" or "the exit polls" four times -- showed either a dead heat or a slim Calderón lead, exactly what the official quick-count showed.

Now, did Greg Palast just make it up out of whole cloth? Almost; here's the Reuters report upon which he presumably bases the column (he didn't deny it when given the chance):

While the top election official said it was too close to call, left-wing candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his party's exit polls showed he won by 500,000 votes ...

But his rival, Felipe Calderon of the ruling National Action Party, immediately shot back by saying independent exit polls showed him ahead ...

So López Obrador -- a candidate -- claimed that his own exit poll -- one private exit poll with no known methodology, no precise results, no known margin-of-error, no known sample size and no polling director we can call up to find out that stuff (campaigns keep internal polling data close to the chest) -- showed he was in the lead.

Such claims are, of course, standard operating procedure in a close race, and have nothing in common with the kind of discrepancies we saw in Florida, Ohio or the Ukraine -- where multiple independent polls diverged from the official results -- which is the central claim of the column. But Palast won't retract the piece.

Greg Palast is not at all happy I'm discussing these issues. In an E-mail, he wrote: "smearing a reporter as a 'conspiracy theorist' will always get a laugh. From the conspirators." (Isn't he a witty writer? Seriously, I still love Greg Palast.)

But the truth is, this nonsense about ChoicePoint's old, incomplete voter list and the exit polls that supposedly showed López Obrador in the lead only helps one person: Felipe Calderón.

Calderón's position right now is simple: it was a close race, but the election was perfect -- only conspiracy theorists are arguing otherwise -- and López Obrador should throw in the towel. By mixing fact and fiction, Palast just makes his case.

Yesterday's post on GregPalast.com is a great example. Palast raises some really important issues having to do with ballots discovered dumped in the trash and an undercount of presidential votes on ballots that had votes for Senators and Deputies -- an allegation made by credible observers that I pointed to yesterday. But he just had to throw ChoicePoint in there, and that makes what are serious charges look less credible. On Monday, the Washington Post dismissed Palast as "a hyperbolic blogger on the Guardian website."

Greg Palast is jetting down to Mexico as I write this, and I wished him luck. I told him that I hoped he'd report out some good stories, but I also asked him to kindly stick to the facts. They're all we need; as Stephen Colbert says: "the facts have a liberal bias."

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.