The end of democracy?
Re-elect president Gore in '04 -popular Usenet sig.
It may very well be that the 2000 US presidential election is the last free national election the country will have.
When this respect isn't there, when winning is more important then holding a fiar election, elections are meaningless, exercises in futility. They no longer present the will of the people, they present the will of whoever controls the voting apparatus. When a country has come to such a point, it has become a dictatorship in all but name.
I fear that for the US, the watershed was reached with the 2000 presidential elections. As I will detail below the elections were corrupted, not from any premeditated plan or conspiracy, but because the opportunity was too good to pass on and the belief in the importance of the democratic proces over winning by any means fair or fowl wasn't there.
Throwing the election
Both before and during the 2000 election systematic efforts were undertaken to rob Democratic voters of their vote. This is an attempt to catalog them. It's hard to say whether these efforts were the result of a pre-arranged, deliberate strategy or if they were just opportunistic profitering from a chaotic situation. Actions like purging voter rolls before the elections and active harassement of black voters on the election day itself add more weight to the first hypothesis.
A similar effort is available at Avram Grumer's excellent website.
The purging of voter rolls
In Florida, people convicted of a felony automatically lose their vote. Even after they've fully served their sentence they don't get their voting rights back. To ensure they cannot vote, the state of Florida checks the lists of registered voters before an election. They also do this to catch ex-convicts who've moved into Florida from other states.
It's easy to understand that this is a complicated procedure that has to be handled carefully to ensure innocent people do not lose their voting rights. To further complicate the matter, in only fourteen states of the US do convicts lose their voting rights forever; in the other 36 states ex-convicts who have served their sentence regain their rights.[1]
Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program
If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.
Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of Texas.
THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME
How the "felon" voter-purge was itself felonious
In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex- felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.)
Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African- American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler," (1); a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris’s elections office files, next to DBT’s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: "DON’T NEED."
An analysis of what went wrong with the voters purge in Florida and ways to improve the process.
Harassement of black voters
Black voters in the US have a long, sad tradition of being harassed when trying to use their voting rights. One needs only to remember the odious Jim Crow laws several states used to have after blacks gained the vote in the nineteenth century, or the lynchings that happened even fifty years ago. This seems a far cry from the modern day US so it's all the more disturbing to find that black voters were indeed actively harassed during the 2000 elections.
The most worrying example happened in Tallahassee (FL.), where on election day there was a police roadblock directly located on the way to the local polling station.
Florida Cops Accused of Harassing Black Voters
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (APBnews.com) -- As the world awaits a recount in Florida to learn the outcome of the presidential election, some black voters here are charging that they were deliberately harassed by state troopers who set up a roadblock near a polling station. At the urging of several black motorists, the State Attorney General's Office today is looking into whether the Florida Highway Patrol deliberately set up a checkpoint just one mile from Woodville First Baptist Church. The church is the polling place for a precinct where more than one-third of the voters are black, said Assistant State Attorney General Paul Hancock.
In a post to rec.arts.sf.fandom --where the elections were discussed in great length-- Kevin J. Maroney showed the position of the roadblock in relation to the polling station as reported.
Additional information on the Tallahassee situation.
On 11 november 2000 the NAACP held a hearing on the voting irregularities and harassement encountered by black people:
NAACP VOTING IRREGULARITIES PUBLIC HEARING
Summary of the Testimony
"Our country faces mounting evidence that large numbers of voters, qualified voters, were denied the right to vote, were denied the right to cast a meaningful vote and have it counted, and were harassed and intimidated by officers of the state or local government in efforts to prevent them from voting. And I would submit that the real constitutional crisis is how we respond to these allegations and to our efforts to find the truth and to address whatever that truth turns out to be."
-Penda Hair: Co-Director The Advancement Project.
The United States Commission on Civil Rights has commissioned a report on the racial impact of the rejection of ballots cast in the 2000 presidential election in the state of Florida.
In Florida’s 2000 election, about 2.9 percent of all ballots cast (about 180,000 ballots out of slightly more than 6 million ballots cast) did not contain a vote that could be counted as a vote for president. The great majority of these invalid ballots were recorded as either overvotes or undervotes, with overvotes outnumbering undervotes by nearly two to one.[8] Counties that separately recorded overvotes and undervotes rejected about 107,000 ballots as overvotes and about 63,000 ballots as undervotes.
An analysis of the entire state using county-level data and at Miami-Dade, Duval, and Palm Beach counties using precinct-level data, demonstrates that blacks were far more likely than non-blacks to have their ballots rejected in the 2000 Florida presidential election. As illustrated by Graph 1, statewide there is a strong positive correlation between the percentage of black registrants in a county and the percentage of rejected ballots. The linear correlation (termed R) between the percent of ballots rejected in the presidential election and the percentage of blacks among voters[9] is .50, with a squared correlation of (R2) of .25. This means that when we look at the variation in the ballot rejection rates for each county in Florida, about one quarter of that variation can be explained solely by knowing the percentage of blacks who were registered to vote in that county. This relationship is statistically significant at levels far beyond the conventional standards used in social science.[10]
Republican sabotage
There is some evidence that sabotage of votes by Republican operators happened during the election. Certainly the riots against the recounting in the Miami-Dade County voting district in Florida were directed by Republican officials.
Miami's rent-a-riot
The incident -- the ugliest single set piece of the Election 2000 epic and possibly the most decisive one -- was set in motion by one imported GOP operative: Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., who from an office in that same county building has led the Miami fight against the recount. But Sweeney wasn't alone. According to the Miami Herald, he had a few helpers, including Elizabeth Ross, a staffer for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Thomas Pyle, an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas.
[...]
On hearing of the decision to move the vote tally, Sweeney uttered a three-word order to his troops: "Shut it down." Those words were reported by Paul Gigot, who was in the room with GOP operatives, in his Wall Street Journal column Friday. Within minutes, some two dozen GOP recount observers and other Bush supporters had begun pounding on the doors and windows of the county elections tallying room on the 19th floor of the building. They demanded to be admitted and chanted, "Stop the count. Stop the fraud." Television cameras showed the protesters trying to force their way into the room.
Muffled away in a small corner of this column some of the officials involved are identified. I put up a local copy as well.
After the election: the payoff
Bush would not have become president if he didn't have the support of both big business and the religious right.
Big business
Cash, Relationships Help Explain Bush Administration's Hands-Off Policy in California Electricity Crisis
Top Power Suppliers Gave Millions to Republicans; Two Key Power Companies Headed by Men With Close Ties to Bush
WASHINGTON, D.C.Nine power companies and a trade association that stand to gain the most from President Bush s hands-off policy in California contributed more than $4 million to Republican candidates and party committees during the last election, and some of the company heads have close personal ties to Bush, according to new Public Citizen report.
Three of the companies Enron, Reliant Energy and Dynegy are based in Texas and gave more than $1.5 million to Bush's campaign, his inauguration committee, and the Republican National Committee, which served, in effect, as an arm of the Bush presidential campaign. Two companies Enron and Reliant Energy are headed or steered by Kenneth Lay and James Baker III, both close Bush advisors.
Speaking of big business, the handouts continued after the 11 september attacks, but money for fired airline workers? Not possible, according to the Republican House leaders. That would be unamerican.
House Republican Leaders Balk at Any Help for Laid-Off Workers
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 - House Republican leaders balked today at the idea of helping thousands of laid-off workers by extending unemployment compensation and health care benefits despite a commitment last Friday by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert to consider such legislation.
"The model of thought there, and quite frankly, the model of thought that says we need to go out and extend unemployment benefits and health insurance benefits and so forth is not I think one that is commensurate with the American spirit here," said Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the majority leader. He said a higher priority was to pass an economic stimulus bill.
So fifteen billion for the airlines, but not a fucking cent for the hundred thousand workers they've laid off already. That's $150,000 per worker laid off. Pretty good, huh? To add insult to injury, the bill included a provision safeguarding the salaries of the directors!
Further payoffs to big business are collected on the Bush Wall of Shame, collected by Kirsten Selberg for the Voters March West website. Some examples:
-
Significantly eased field-testing controls of genetically engineered crops.
Village Voice, February 13, 2001 -
Suspended rules that would have strengthened the governments ability to deny contracts to companies
that violated workplace safety, environmental and other federal laws.
Washington Post, March 31, 2001 -
Interior Department appointee Gale Norton sends out letters to state officials soliciting suggestions
for opening up national monuments for oil and gas drilling, coal mining, and foresting.
MSNBC, March 28, 2001 -
Suspended rules that would require hardrock miners to clean up sites on Western public lands.
Reuters, March 21, 2001 -
Repealed workplace ergonomic rules designed to improve worker health and safety.
Reuters, March 20, 2001 -
Interior Secretary Gale Norton goes forth with controversial plan to auction oil and gas development
tracts off the coast eastern of Florida.
Associated Press, April 19, 2001 -
Announced intention to open up Montana´s Lewis and Clark National Forest to oil and drilling.
Missoula Independent, April 12, 2001 -
Proposes to redraw boundaries of nation monuments which would technically allow oil and gas drilling
"outside" of national monuments.
Washington Post, April 10, 2001 -
Renegotiating free trade agreement with Jordan to eliminate safeguards for the environment and
workers´ rights.
Washington Post, April 10, 2001
I think this reveals a consistent pattern of rewarding Big Oil and Big Business for their support.
Religious right
After he stole the election, Bush appointed John Ashcroft as his Attorney General, a notorious racist and fundamentalist. Ashcroft lost his senate seat in the election, his constituency rather seeing a dead guy elected then having him back again.
- John Ashcroft's troublesome past
- John Ashcroft's admiration for the Confederacy
- More Salon about John Ashcroft
Notes
[1] Source: http://www.hrw.org/reports98/vote/usvot98o.htm
Webpage created 26-11-2001, last updated 22-08-2003
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