Greg Palast: Felipe Calderón's new best friend

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."