-Caveat Lector-
Bill Kling
POLITICAL ANIMAL
The Daily Journal
Prince William County (Manassas), Virginia
Thursday, November 16, 2000
Page A1
_________________________________
Making ugly with elections
By BILL KLING
Political Animal
`Those who cast the vote decide nothing,'' goes the
distressing quote. ``Those who count the vote decide
everything.''
As Florida's scandalous presidential election debacle rages,
that quote has been appearing on Web pages and e-mail listservs
on the Internet, baldly attributed to Josef Stalin, the old
Soviet Union's murderous tyrant. None, though, have cited a
verifiable source.
Because of the Florida vote situation, we have a
gut-wrenching realization that our electoral system has been in
shambles for a long time, fraught with the potential for stuffed
ballot boxes and stolen elections, its vote counts suspect and
its statutory safeguards enforced hardly at all.
The system's broke and needs fixing - in Chicago, New
Orleans, Boston and any other jurisdiction with a history full of
rumors, wisecracks and braggadocio about election illegalities.
That's so, too, in Virginia, where felons are barred by
statute from taking part in elections. Since January 1999,
however, state election officials have had to purge 17,000 felons
from voter registration roles, listed there because of the
``motor voter'' law enacted several years ago and pressuring
everyone to sign up when applying for a driver's license, welfare
payment and such.
And there might be problems even here in Prince William
County, where County Registrar Gary Wilson has looked with great
trepidation on voter roles over-padded with ``motor voter''
registrants.
And where, except in the case several years ago of a
single-mom candidate who fudged her residential address,
Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert routinely finds no reason to
prosecute election-law violations even when, to us lesser
mortals, the evidence seems overwhelming.
That makes the Stalin quote seem even more sinister when, as
Gore and Bush campaigns squabble over the Sunshine State's vote
count, it pops up on radio call-in programs and ``talk'' shows.
That quote stirs particularly upsetting thoughts as one of
America's dirty little secrets, so destructive of our faith in
our representative form of government, is wrestled harshly into
full public view, its warts and blemishes exposed for all to see.
No matter who ultimately ``wins'' the White House after this
catastrophe, it'll be inescapably unpleasant in our minds
because, we now know, the system with which we choose our
national, state and local government leaders is flawed. The
various manners in which we cast our ballots all have their own
built-in error factors, producing inaccurate vote returns, and
the officials who run our elections from coast to coast have been
aware of it all along.
``Your vote counts,'' we've been propagandized since the days
we were kids in elementary school.
Maybe, we realize now, not exactly. Perhaps that's been a
whopper all along, an American myth conceivably never true.
``Vote the rascals out,'' goes an old political battle cry
intended to spur staunch partisans to action. We realize now, as
some have observed, that the rascals might not have been voted
in.
Others have known that for years.
British playwright Tom Stoppard wrote a line in the first act
of his play, ``Jumpers,'' in which a character observes: ``It's
not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting.''
And Anastasio Somoza, the late Nicaraguan dictator, was
quoted June 17, 1977, in The Guardian in London as saying:
``Indeed, you won the elections, but I won the count.'' That, of
course, was before the communist Sandinistas overthrew him,
launching that Central American country into years of bloody
strife.
Alarms have long been sounded by such groups as the Voting
Integrity Project, which from its headquarters in Arlington
County has sought to inform the public of how easy it is to
frustrate the will it expresses at the ballot box.
The Stalin quote has been a long-standing fixture on the Web
page of Citizens for a Fair Vote Count, organized in Cincinnati,
Ohio, in 1996.
And the quote's also on a Web site of Pat Buchanan, the
Reform Party's presidential nominee and erstwhile senior White
House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and
George Bush, the elder.
A question remains.
Did Stalin really utter those words now being attributed to
him?
I could find no authenticated record that he did, but it
really doesn't matter very much.
Whether he made the remark or not, it wouldn't make it any
less grievous or any less true, would it?
Nor would it change my brand-new, deep-seated resolve that I
will never, not ever - for any reason whatsoever - want to live
in Palm Beach County, Fla.
I have standards. You couldn't pay me enough to want to
settle among the harpies and the sharpies in that otherwise
luxurient and brightly sunlit clime.
Bill Kling, former national political correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune and The Washington Times, lives in Coles
Magisterial District and was chairman of the Prince William
County Republican Party from January 1992 through March 1996. His
``Political Animal'' columns appear Mondays and Thursdays. His
e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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