10.24.2008

reminder: obama can't win if they don't count the votes

As the US "election" draws closer, I find it so frustrating to watch the mainstream Canadian media treat the US circus as if it's completely legitimate. Not a whisper about fraud, not a mention of disenfranchisement, no context even suggesting that the last two presidential elections were stolen.

I don't scour the mainstream media, so perhaps I missed some twenty-word paragraph buried on page 23 somewhere, but as far as I can tell, Canadian media act as if the US election is everything it purports to be. The Democrats are liberal, the Republicans are conservative, and whoever gets more votes wins. To quote one of my favourite comedy bits: "Fake, fake, fake, fake."

Alternative media isn't much better. Most progressive Canadians I know are expecting Obama to win, and - bizarrely - expecting the US to "turn around" after he does. These people generally know the US for what it is. They know that Bill Clinton would have been a great fit for the old Conservative Party of Canada: reversing 60 years of social policy by ending the federal guarantee of welfare, massive deregulation that eventually led to the current banking crisis, war crimes, and free trade, to name just a few acts that call the liberal label into question. They know what the US was like under Reagan and Bush I - and for that matter, under Lyndon Johnson. Yet they act like Obama is going to turn the US into Canada under Trudeau.

But for me, the most frustrating part is that most progressive Canadians also treat the US election as if it's real. In the US, many liberals are still under the thrall of magical thinking, about the election and the Democrats. I expected more in Canada, but I've been disappointed.

If you haven't read the story in Rolling Stone by Greg Palast and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. outlining the Republican plans to steal the 2008 election, I hope you will. You'll recall that Kennedy published a long article in the same magazine proving that the 2004 election was stolen. Here's the pre-game for 2008.
Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP's electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today's Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. "Many of our Christians have what I call the 'goo goo' syndrome — good government," said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. "They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Today, Weyrich's vision has become a national reality. Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election — and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high. To purge registration rolls and discard ballots, partisan election officials used a wide range of pretexts, from "unreadability" to changes in a voter's signature. And this year, thanks to new provisions of the Help America Vote Act, the number of discounted votes could surge even higher.

Passed in 2002, HAVA was hailed by leaders in both parties as a reform designed to avoid a repeat of the 2000 debacle in Florida that threw the presidential election to the U.S. Supreme Court. The measure set standards for voting systems, created an independent commission to oversee elections, and ordered states to provide provisional ballots to voters whose eligibility is challenged at the polls.

But from the start, HAVA was corrupted by the involvement of Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, who worked to cram the bill with favors for his clients. (Both Abramoff and a primary author of HAVA, former Rep. Bob Ney, were imprisoned for their role in the conspiracy.) In practice, many of the "reforms" created by HAVA have actually made it harder for citizens to cast a ballot and have their vote counted. In case after case, Republican election officials at the local and state level have used the rules to give GOP candidates an edge on Election Day by creating new barriers to registration, purging legitimate names from voter rolls, challenging voters at the polls and discarding valid ballots.

To justify this battery of new voting impediments, Republicans cite an alleged upsurge in voting fraud. Indeed, the U.S.-attorney scandal that resulted in the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began when the White House fired federal prosecutors who resisted political pressure to drum up nonexistent cases of voting fraud against Democrats. "They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments that would scare these alleged hordes of illegal voters away," says David Iglesias, a U.S. attorney for New Mexico who was fired in December 2006. "We took over 100 complaints and investigated for almost two years — but I didn't find one prosecutable case of voter fraud in the entire state of New Mexico.

There's a reason Iglesias couldn't find any evidence of fraud: Individual voters almost never try to cast illegal ballots. The Bush administration's main point person on "ballot protection" has been Hans von Spakovsky, a former Justice Department attorney who has advised states on how to use HAVA to erect more barriers to voting. Appointed to the Federal Election Commission by Bush, von Spakovsky has suggested that voter rolls may be stuffed with 5 million illegal aliens. In fact, studies have repeatedly shown that voter fraud is extremely rare. According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. "The claim of widespread voter fraud," Minnite says, "is itself a fraud."

Allegations of voter fraud are only the latest rationale the GOP has used to disenfranchise voters — especially blacks, Hispanics and others who traditionally support Democrats. "The Republicans have a long history of erecting barriers to discourage Americans from voting," says Donna Brazile, chair of the Voting Rights Institute for the Democratic National Committee. "Now they're trying to spook Americans with the ghost of voter fraud. It's very effective — but it's ironic that the only way they maintain power is by using fear to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to vote." The recently enacted barriers thrown up to deter voters include...

For more on this, see the wmtc category election fraud.

And a reminder: the US military is quietly training for domestic operations.

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