The Theft of Our Democracy

Okay, guys. As of today, we’re on a countdown. It is 10 days until the presidential election.

There are those of us who believe that the last two elections, 2000 and 2004 have not been handled fairly or in good faith, so I want to take a moment to address these issues.

Believe it or not, after the 2000 presidential election, I was one of these people who walked around for about a year saying “Gore lost. I don’t like it either, but get over it.” As certain facts became clear to me, however, I discovered that my simplistic attitude was not at all accurate.

1) When it was all said and done and the smoke had cleared, Gore had half a million MORE votes than Bush. Bush “won” the election by taking the electoral votes of the embattled state of Florida. For those who don’t know, the electoral college was set up by the founding fathers in an attempt to make sure that every vote got counted. It simply wasn’t feasible to count every vote from every state at that time. So what they did was to count the votes BY STATE, and then have “electors” ride to DC to express their vote as the will of the people. Now it IS possible for every vote to be counted, and so it should. The electoral college should be eliminated.

2) In the state of Florida, George Bush’s brother was governor.

3) The Florida secretary of state, responsible for a fair and legal vote was Katherine Harris, who also happened to be co-chair of the “Bush for President” campaign in Florida. This is a little like suing someone and then discovering that the judge is the brother of the person that you’re suing.

4) The night of the election, long before the votes had been counted, GWB said in an interview “I know that I’m going to take Florida – my baby brother (Florida Governor Jeb Bush) promised me that I would!”

5) You may have seen the “protests” on TV that featured “angry Floridians” demanding that the vote be counted. In fact, every single one of those young men were aides and assistants to republican congressmen, sent there by their bosses to shut down the recounts.

6) Among several Diebold voting machine irregularities was one in Broward county, Florida where the voting computer was counting Gore’s vote BACKWARD, ultimately subtracting 13,000 votes from his total. Lord only knows how many of these machines were doing similar mischief, but were never discovered.

7) Punch-tab voting machines in predominately poor and black districts (historically large turnouts for the democratic party) were old machines that had not had the chads (the small pieces of punched paper) emptied out of them in an unknown period of time. The result was that many of the ballots didn’t punch all the way through, resulting in the famous “hanging chads” which allowed these ballots to be cast out.

8) Florida state police set up “vehicle inspection points” in these same neighborhoods, delaying some voters in some cases for hours, until finally they were just too fed up and went home without voting.

9) Felons lose their right to vote. This is the law. Every election cycle a “purge” list is printed up so that felons can be removed from the voting record. For Ms. Harris, this was simply not enough. She also instructed the private firm that she had employed to do this not only to purge the felons, but to purge anyone with the same NAME or BIRTHDATE as the felons. The result was that, as later court documents stated, “tens of thousands” of African Americans were denied their right to vote including police officers, judges and grannies. In one small district, I forget which one immediately, the entire district (all African American) were illegally denied their right to vote.

10) When a Jewish resident of one old-age home in Florida discovered that ALL of the votes from his home went to anti-semite Pat Buchanan, when he intended to vote for Gore, he said “I would have sooner voted for Louis Farrakhan than Buchanan.”

11) Speaking of Buchanan, when he discovered how many votes he got in largely Jewish Florida, Mr. Buchanan said “As much as I’d like to see Bush win this election instead of Gore, it’s pretty clear to me that those votes should have gone to Vice-President Gore.”

Isn’t it strange that all of these “errors” favored George W. Bush? Finally, Mr. Bush took the case of the Florida recounts to the supreme court. The court, in violation of all state’s right’s laws, stopped the recount and declared GWB the winner of Florida and thus of the election. They also bizarrely stated that this case could NEVER be used as precedent for another case. My question is now and has always been that if GWB had nothing to hide, why did he work so hard to hide it?

So along comes 2004. Personally, I hoped that Kerry would defeat Bush, but knew that this was historically unlikely. America has NEVER unseated a president during wartime. The battleground state that this election came down to was Ohio. So what happened in Ohio that year?

1) The republican Ohio secretary of state refused to allow international election observers into the polling places.

2) A consulting firm called Sproul and Associates, hired by the Republican National Committee was caught shredding new democratic voter registrations.

3) In Miami county, a largely republican district, an astronomical (and nearly impossible) ninety-seven percent voter turnout was reported. A polling place in a poor area of Cleveland (a democratic stronghold) reported an equally bizarre seven percent turnout.

4) In Warren County, officials concocted a non-existent terrorist threat to prevent the media from monitoring the elections.

5) One quarter of Ohioans turned up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the voter registration forms.

In Ohio and other states, in districts where Diebold (a major republican supporter) voting machines were used, independent exit polls showed Kerry the winner, but those districts were almost unanimously given to Bush by exactly the same percentage. So, for instance, if the exit poll had Kerry winning by 54 percent to 46 percent for Bush, the numbers came out flipped, so that in that district the result came out for Bush by 54 to 46 percent.

In one town, I forget which one it was, with a population of around 300 people, the vote came out as 3000 votes for Bush, ten times the population. A voter turnout of 1000%, in other words. When Diebold was confronted with this, they said that the machine was “fatigued”. I wonder how many other machines this happened to that were not reported?

So how can we stop this? Use a paper ballot rather than a computerized voting machine. The machines are too easy to rig, and leave NO paper trail.

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. Many democrats in battleground states received phone calls, supposedly from the elections office, telling them that the election had been postponed until Wednesday, the day AFTER the presidential election. It was later discovered that this fraud was perpetrated by republican operatives.

If you live in a battleground state such as Ohio or Florida, be prepared to spend as long as you have to getting to the polls. If you can, take the day off work and go first thing in the morning. If you have kids, get a sitter so that you don’t feel pressure to give up. In these states in both 2000 and 2004, poor and overwhelmingly democratic districts were given far too few voting machines for the population, resulting in people spending hours in line to vote. In the freezing rain in a lot of cases, so bring a raincoat and some layers of clothing.

If you can, volunteer. Election offices are in dire need of volunteers. Also, offer to shuttle people with no transportation to the polls. It will cost you some gas, but think of the good that it will do for our democracy. Besides, gas is back on the cheap side… at least until AFTER the election.

If you are voting on a “punch” machine, make sure that your punch is clean with no “hanging chad” before you put it into the lockbox. If it didn’t go through at all (a “dimpled chad”), then repunch the ballot. If the chad hangs, either repunch the ballot or brush the chad clear of the ballot. If you are using a “fill in the dot” ballot, and you make an error, ask for a new ballot. They are required by law to give one to you. Do not try to erase your erroneous mark, or mark the ballot twice. These will be discarded.

Check with your local elections office to see if your state is offering “early” voting. If they are, take advantage of it, especially if you live in a battleground state.

I kind of feel bad that I live in such a “blue” state. Washington state hasn’t elected a republican president in twenty-odd years, so there’s not a lot that I can do from here, except encourage others.

Okay, brothers and sisters. That’s all that I can think of for now. As someone said recently, “It’s not enough for Obama to win this election… he has to win by such a large margin that the election cannot be stolen.”

Peace.

Randal