Democracy in the United States

Every line of serious work that I write now is written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarian media and for the creation of democratic communication, as I understand it.  (Yes, I'm attempting to rip off Orwell here.)

We may never know which candidate, Bush or Kerry, truly won the 2004 presidential election.  And if you believe in any kind of democracy, that should really tick you off.

In 2000 we knew more people cast their ballots for Gore than Bush, both nationwide and in Florida.  (Some 20,000 Jewish "Gore and Buchannan" votes, when they meant "Gore and Lieberman," easily swamps the phony 537 endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

This time, there's no way to recount half the votes cast in Florida on paperless touch-screen machines, and in both Florida and Ohio central tabulating computers could be rigged to give false vote counts.  They may not have been, but they could have been, and there may be no way for us to know.  That's a problem.  Especially because there is reason to believe that key tallies are fraudulent.
Before anything else, let's take our country back, intellectually.  This may be a lifesaving intellectual endeavor.  I've read a couple people suggest that the citizens of the U.S. are no longer innocent of their government's horrific deeds (constant bombing of civillian targets in Iraq, use of cluster bombs – air-dropped land mines – in Afghanistan, support of Israel's land-grabbing and community-destroying military fence in Palestine, and complicity in the increasingly bloody coup in Haiti, to name a few).  I myself have wondered if the people of the world will be so kind in their distinction between the bad U.S. government and the good U.S. people.  If, God forbid, people from the populations we've oppressed consider terrorism (practiced on September 11th by those who've suffered least from U.S. empire), let me make a few points in defense of my 288 million or so country-people.

• By any count, nearly 56 million of us voted against Bush the uber-aggressor.
• Some 78 million of us are under 18 and can't vote.
• Some 21 million of us, 7%, are not citizens and can't vote.
• Over two million of us are in prison, and can't vote.
• A total of 12 million of us have been stripped of the right to vote due to criminal convictions.
• I am certain millions more do not vote to avoid contact with the government, or do not know they still have the right to vote.  A friend of mine in New Mexico did not register to vote because he has a warrant for his arrest from another state stemming from not paying a tax on an old car.

There is overlap in these numbers, and probably the voting age shouldn't be below 16, and some non-citizens are only visitors, but this is still some 40 million people who, compared to those who did vote, would vote more moderately and even more caringly for the rest of the world.

And in this election there were very specific, public crimes (in the sense that denying one's vote is a crime against humanity) committed by my government against its citizens.

Felony disenfranchisement

"Nearly half a million felons statewide," Debbie Cenziper and Jason Grotto wrote in the Miami Herald October 31, "are tangled in Florida's secretive, laborious and often error-ridden clemency system, the only recourse for ex-cons who want their rights back."  (Some 75,000 people are in Florida's state prisons.)  These disenfranchised voted at similar rates to other people prior to their convictions, according to the Black Commentator.  (Not for the same candidates, though: involvement in the police and prosecution systems, convictions, and removal of voting rights are all racially biased.)

"Since Bush took office six years ago, the board has blocked more people from regaining the right to vote than at any other time in recent Florida history," Cenziper and Grotto wrote in the Miami Herald.  "Florida's three Cabinet members also sit on the board, but the governor is the most important player. Without his vote, no one can regain rights."

Since Bush took office, the Clemency Board has denied rights to more than 85 percent of all applicants, The Herald found.

The details behind the denials are anyone's guess. Nearly all clemency records, including the most basic information about who applied and why there were denied are not open to public scrutiny unless the governor releases them.

The Herald asked. Bush refused.

The governor says the all-Republican Clemency Board is reasonable and fair.

This is over half-a-million   The largest claim of victory I've seen for Bush in Florida is "nearly 400,000 votes" by the New York Times today, in an article lauding the hitherto unheralded Republican get-out-the-vote initiative.  Voter suppression was a feint, reporters quoted "a senior Republican strategist"   "Come Election Day, they worried about how to protect their vote. Aside from a big head fake in the media, we spent our time worrying about how to get out our vote."

People of color/poor/Democratic-disproportionate vote spoilage

More people in both Ohio - enough to give Kerry the victory - and New Mexico voted for Kerry than for Bush, Greg Palast argued Friday persuasively based on public studies of these states in the 2000 election.  The rate of uncounted votes is far higher in poor communities with older equipment – especially if Republican officials run the election in that district – even though a hand recount could easily read these votes.

Large scale electronic fraud?

I have a couple long-standing "suggestions for reporting" that I should have introduced properly a while ago, but here they are put into emergency use.

• News reporters have the responsibility to seriously and publicly consider the worst when people who should be accountable to the public deny access to information.  If nothing else, this is a matter of self-defense for a news organization.  If stonewalling benefits a government, say, it will always do it.
• News organizations must follow-up on previously reported stories.

Taking the second point first, the issue of voting machines without a paper trail and hackable central vote-counting servers has been followed by most people who care about democracy.  Now, after the election, would be a strange time to drop this topic, but many of the Left's best writers don't want to talk about it, in the interest of moving to the next battle or perhaps in a misguided attempt not to be seen as sore losers or conspiracy theororists.  But this is not like a basketball game, where Larry Bird says that if we lose because of one bad call, we didn't do our job.  As [http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/4/224812/643
Hunter wrote on the Daily Kos], "this is not a Kerry issue; this is a democracy issue."

And the suggestion of electronic fraud doesn't even rise to the level of conspiracy theory because in the key states it involves only one company, Diebold, the president of which infamously promised George W. Bush to deliver the vote in Ohio.

The reasons to suspect electronic fraud, other than the shown willingness of the Republican operatives to use any kind of fraud to steal the vote in 2000, are mostly the discrepancy between polls and the outcome of the election.

Most polls showed Kerry even or leading as the election approached, historically leading to the defeat of the incumbent.  This, combined with the many younger voters and people of color mobilized by progressive get-out-the-vote efforts, who would not be included in polls of likely voters, made the Kerry position look very strong.  On the eve of the election Zogby suddenly announced that the dead heat was broken and Kerry would win the swing states.

More damningly, exit polls, historically and internationally dead-on accurate, called Ohio and Florida, among other states, decisively for Kerry, before the released results announced Bush as leading decisively.  These five-point turnarounds occurred in states with networked central computers adding up the votes.

Because our governments and corporations running our elections won't or can't prove what the actual results are, we do have an obligation to consider the worst – fraud – especially when there is cause to be suspicious.  Well before the pre-election polls or exit polls, Infernal Press, among many others, predicted a fraudulent Bush victory.

Call the Democratic National Committee (202-863-8000) and tell them to monitor acceptance and rejection of the provisional ballots.  (They told me to call the Ohio Democratic Party... bad sign.)  Ask them to demand a recount, where they can get one, so all spoiled ballots are counted and to check if the electronic tabulators added correctly, for those non-touchscreen areas we can check.

The U.S. public and the world has a right to know if this election was or was not fraudulant.

But regardless of the outcome of this struggle, the fight must go on.  "To ignore the power of the vote altogether would be folly.  But to fixate on it as the only path to change is equally retarded," wrote Al Giordano.

And for all our goals, including winning and defending mere elections, we must create our own networks for the production and dissemmination of news and enlightenment (and enlightenment is is what all "entertainment" should be about, at least in at least some tiny way).