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-Caveat Lector- GOP Disrupts the Ohio Vote
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20283/
Republicans have announced that they're dredging up some dusty old law to send thousands of recruits to polling places in Ohio on Nov. 2 to challenge the qualifications of Americans as they try to cast their votes. You know what the Republicans are up to?
The party of pre-emptive war is trying to pre-empt democracy.
They couldn't find any weapons of mass destruction, now they're trying to manufacture weapons of mass disruption ... to disqualify likely Democrats from voting.
It's all over the news. In Ohio, the state Republican Party has challenged the eligibility of 35,000 newly registered voters. ... It's necessary they say, to prevent fraud in a state where polls show President Bush and John F. Kerry are in a statistical tie. Most of the 35,000 you'll not be surprised to hear, live in urban, which is to say, multi-racial, which is to say, Democratic, areas.
The Party's also announced that it's dredging up some dusty old law to send thousands of recruits to polling places Election Day to challenge the qualifications of Americans as they try to cast their votes. Ohio election officials said that the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. The challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.
Hmm. Let's see, what chapter in U.S. history does that remind you of?
Officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for the same thing. It's all part of an organized effort by Republicans to challenge new voters at the polls.
In Philadelphia, Republican operatives made a last ditch attempt Friday to relocate 63 polling places â many of them in Black neighborhoods â all of them in districts where Democrats have an advantage ... luckily the move came too late ... but it's a sign of the times â the Bush and Cheney crew are freaked.
They don't call it the GOP â the Good Old Boy Party for nothing.
But you know what? That was Jim Crow America, Mr. President, Mr. Cheney. That was the America of Jim Crow.
This is the America of Barack Obama. This is Tiger Woods' America.
Majority America is not going to let democracy be denied us forever.
We've lived through that century already.
Dredge up dusty laws from history? Can't you do any better than that? We've fought that battle before, Mr. President and guess what, our side won. For all of the 20th century, Democracy's been on the rise. Blacks got the vote, women got the vote, 18-year-olds got the vote â African Americans have had to fight the same fight many times over, just like immigrants.
Voting in America's never been easy. The rich white guys who wrote the rules, set it up that way. But that just means the upstarts get smarter and better organized.
Why is the GOP so darn freaked? Because 21st century America, the New America, Majority America is turning out in droves.
The Washington Post reports that record numbers across the country are voting early â and they're disproportionately Democratic. When it comes to new voters, Dems have out-registered Republican voters from coast to coast.
The union movement reports the largest member mobilization in its history.
Students are registered as never before â 87 percent, and they intend to vote, they told a Harvard poll released this week. And 52 to 39 percent say they'll vote for Kerry over Bush. Even children polled by the TV channel Nickelodeon say they'd prefer Kerry over Bush 57 to 43 percent. They may not be voting age yet, but for the last four presidential elections the Nickelodeon poll's been right.
Your down-with-democracy days are over Mr. President.
The same Majority America that never voted for you the first time, is going to make sure you're defeated once and for all a week from Tuesday.
Because there are two Americas, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney. Ours is new and yours is old.
And if you think you're going to take us back, with your dusty old laws from American Apartheid history ...
And if you think your attorney general and your Supreme Court judges are going to hand our country over a second time ...
Well let me remind you, Mr. B: That attorney general of yours was defeated by a dead man.
And that chief justice we already know. He's an old hand at voter supression. He's got no credentials when it comes to supporting democracy. He spent his early year intimidating voters in minority precincts in Arizona. That's right, William Rehnquist was part of a GOP voter challenge effort that tried to prevent blacks and Hispanics from voting in Arizona in the 1960s.
We know these tactics Mr. President, Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. Attorney General. We've been down that road.
And this is a new century. A new rainbow century of democracy and diversity.
And sooner, not later, the American Majority is going to send you throw-backs home.
This commentary first appeared on The Laura Flanders Show on Air America Radio.
_____________________________________________________________________
The whole country â never mind the woefully inadequate electoral system â is now living on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Little wonder, then, if many are predicting some sort of collapse on Nov. 2.
"Only a miracle, it strikes me, can prevent this election from descending into post-election chaos," John Dean, the Watergate-era White House counsel who knows a thing or two about electoral dirty tricks, wrote last week.
What has been striking is the sheer nastiness of the fight. In Oregon, Pennsylvania and Nevada â all swing states â a Republican political consulting group called Sproul & Associates has been accused of passing itself off as a non-partisan or even a Democratic civic organization to collect voter registration applications outside libraries and supermarkets. In at least two instances now under criminal investigation, company employees have been accused of processing the applications of declared Republican voters while throwing the forms marked Democrat into the nearest rubbish bin. Sproul, which has received more than $600,000 (Â330,000) from the Republican National Committee, has denied ever endorsing such practices. Still, the discarded voter registration forms have been paraded on television for all to see.
In Ohio and Florida, it is the Republican secretaries of state â who oversee elections â who have been accused of putting partisan preference above their solemn civic duties. Ohio's Ken Blackwell won points from voting rights activists earlier in the year when he chose not to go ahead with a massive statewide buy of electronic voting machines. Since then, however, he has tried to insist that all voter registration forms be submitted on 80 pound stock paper â a ruling struck down by the courts after he was accused of blatantly attempting to suppress the votes of likely Democrats.
He has also tried to make life harder for provisional voters, saying their ballots will be recognized only if they show up at exactly the right precinct. This too was struck down in court because it was deemed likely to suppress votes â especially among transient students and low-income workers. But Secretary Blackwell has continued to implement the policy in defiance of the court order, prompting a harsh rebuke from the judge.
In Florida, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has been repeatedly accused of doing the political bidding of the man who appointed her â Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. Her more recent exploits include directing county supervisors to throw out registration forms where applicants have signed a statement declaring they are U.S. citizens but have forgotten to check a citizenry box elsewhere on the form. This, too, is seen as a vote-suppressing mechanism. It, too, is now in the courts.
Secretary Hood has also been waging a months-long campaign to ban what limited manual recounts the electronic voting machines permit. Her initial ruling was struck down by the courts, but now she has come up with a staggeringly devious rewrite. The state will now permit analysis of the computerized machines' internal audit logs in the event of a close race, she said, but if there is any discrepancy the county supervisors are to go with the original count. In other words: we will do recounts, but if the recounts change the outcome we will disregard them.
Secretary Hood's actions illuminate the real attraction of the electronic voting machines in the states where they have been introduced. They may work no better than the old punch-card machines â studies suggest they fail to record as many votes as their predecessors. In the absence of an independent paper trail, however, all evidence of problems is hidden away in the binary code of an electronic black box and is, to all intents and purposes, invisible.
This raises intriguing and troubling questions about what a post-election contest might look like. One can reasonably anticipate â based on past experience â an avalanche of stories about voters turned away from polling stations, told they are on a felons list even if they have no criminal record, or kept waiting for hours because of technical glitches. No doubt people will tell some of those thousands of lawyers how they pressed the screen for one candidate, only to have the other's name light up.
The problem is, even if lawyers for the losing candidate are able to prove that the system failed, they will find it very difficult to talk specific numbers and demonstrate that enough votes were lost to alter the outcome.
How the courts will react to this hypothetical state of affairs is anybody's guess. They could accept the given election results, however flawed. They could allow the arguments to rage until December, when the electoral college is supposed to meet, or even into the new year, when an undecided election would be thrown into the House of Representatives.
Or they could be trumped, once again, by the Supreme Court. The most disconcerting possibility is that the highest court in the land could remove the electoral process from the voters altogether and turn it over to the state legislatures. Technically, they can do this under Article II of the Constitution, which offers no automatic right to vote. We know from the deliberations in 2000 that two, possibly five, of the nine justices have doubts whether the people should be the ultimate arbiters of presidential elections â a strict, literal reading of the Constitution that no modern Supreme Court countenanced before the current crop of ultra-conservatives. "After granting the franchise in the special context of Article II," the majority declared in its Bush v. Gore ruling, "[the state] can take back the power to appoint electors."
Were this scenario to play out it would leave the fate of many of the electoral battlegrounds in the hands of Republican-controlled state legislatures (in Florida and Ohio, for starters), who would promptly hand the election to George Bush. Talk about a nightmare scenario â which is why every elections official and every "small d" democrat in the land is praying it won't get that close.
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