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Opinion > op/ed
Silencing the vote
By David Lytel
Originally published December 9, 2004
PEOPLE FROM all over Ukraine have gone to Kiev to protest dishonest vote counting in their presidential election. Exit polls, so trustworthy that they are used worldwide to uncover election fraud, showed the opposition candidate had won, and the people didn't believe the news when it reported the government's surprise victory.
To those of us who doubt President Bush won the election in the United States, the key differences between here and Ukraine are the methods of fraud and the passivity of the news media.
Here the party in power used unverifiable computerized voting to boost its totals and intimidation and misinformation to suppress the vote totals of its opponents, but the news media haven't investigated it.
The recounts by the Libertarian and Green parties in Ohio and by the Ralph Nader campaign in New Hampshire are not being covered by the commercial news media, despite being under way for more than two weeks. And that's not even the most consequential story the national press has not yet seen fit to print.
In Franklin County, Ohio, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a Bush campaign official, distributed voting machines so that Republicans could vote efficiently while ensuring that Democrats had to give up hours of their time waiting in line because of a shortage of voting machines in their districts, thus reintroducing a poll tax that the Constitution forbids. Mr. Blackwell did the same elsewhere. One polling place in Howard County, Ohio, that was under court order to permit everyone in line to cast their vote sent them all home at midnight because the order applied only to Election Day itself.
Warren County, Ohio, closed the vote count to outside observers on the advice of the Department of Homeland Security. This county in suburban Cincinnati is of no interest to al-Qaida but it is the single most important county in the nation to Mr. Bush's re-election, having produced nearly one-third of his statewide margin. Democratic registration improved by one-third from four years ago, while Republican registration dropped by 10 percent. Mr. Bush's performance statewide dropped, too, but despite all the arrows in the other direction, Mr. Bush's vote totals mysteriously increased.
Mr. Bush's total increased dramatically over four years ago in the 26 Florida counties using the optical scan equipment manufactured by Diebold Elections Systems, Inc. Democratic performance apparently plummeted everywhere Diebold equipment counted votes.
Multiple counties in these states recorded more votes than there are registered voters.
Exit polls nationwide showed more voters casting ballots for Sen. John Kerry than for Mr. Bush. But instead of explaining the accuracy of exit polling and the dubious trustworthiness of the voting machinery, the news media have refused to investigate.
About 70 percent of Ohio's voters cast punch card ballots. The recount may undermine Mr. Bush's very narrow victory in Ohio. In New Hampshire, we'll learn if voting equipment manufactured by corporations openly in Mr. Bush's camp gave him a bonus. All of these "glitches" and "irregularities" nationwide and not one improperly credited vote to Mr. Kerry? What are the chances of that being random?
Finally, we deserve an investigation because there are so many of us. According to a post-election Harris Poll, 38 percent of Democrats and 37 percent of people who are not enrolled in either of the two major parties believe there were either "some" or "many" attempts at unlawful vote suppression.
The most conservative estimate would be 37 percent of the millions of Democrats who voted, or 18 million Americans. When the independents are added, the total is 30.3 million Americans who do not trust the legitimacy of our own presidential election.
We oppose faith-based voting and demand complete transparency in the vote casting and counting. Like Charlie Brown trusting Lucy to hold the football steady enough to kick, the leaders of our party seem determined to ignore both reason and experience.
Unless we act, the nation will get the same result as in 2000 -- no investigations, no indictments, no convictions and more fraud. We suspect that if the votes had been tallied honestly, we would be preparing for the inauguration of the candidate who authorities with a huge stake in the outcome tell us lost the election.
David Lytel, founder of ReDefeatBush.com, served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the first Clinton administration.
Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun
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Whitewashing Election Fraud
By Greg Moses, ILCA Associate Member
Racism is best known among white folks for the overt ways that bigotry chooses to abuse.
This is what allows white liberals to excuse themselves from charges that they are racist, because (God bless 'em) they don't set out to hurt anybody. But Ralph Ellison titled his classic novel Invisible Man, because racism is a grim problem also of what white folks do not see. And this problem persists insufferably, right down to this morning's news.
On this day after the election-fraud hearings led by John Conyers and his Democratic colleagues at the Judiciary Committee, I am beginning to feel the effects of racism’s one-two punch. On the overt side, we have the written testimony of Judith A. Browne, acting co-director of the Advancement Project in Washington, D.C.
For Browne, whose testimony to the Conyers committee is posted online, "voters of color" have been targets of Republican-led disenfranchisement in the elections of 2000 and 2004.
http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/b...testmt12804.pdf
"In 2004,” writes Browne, “it became clear that there were efforts underway to dust off Reconstruction Era statutes in order to disenfranchise voters, particularly minority voters."
"There were clear warnings that challenges would be used to disenfranchise voters," says Browne. "Prior to Election Day in Nevada and Ohio, 17,000 and 35,000 challenges were filed, respectively, disproportionately in urban areas. (Over 17,000 of the Ohio challenges were filed in Cuyahoga County.) In addition, poll observers registered in unprecedented numbers in Florida and Ohio, with the intent to engage in massive challenges inside polling places."
Browne is referring to laws that allow pollwatchers to act as self-deputized vigilantes at voting precincts, thrusting their bodies between ballot boxes and voters, demanding proofs of identification and registration.
If you have never seen this process at work, then you might not feel the nausea. But I have seen them, the close shaven, starched-pants Republicans who show up on election day to a black community center and lean over old women with their dirty questions. Makes you want to spank them on their freshly cut heads. Didn't their mothers teach them no manners?
"The targets," Browne reports, "were new voters in urban areas." Or to put it more plainly, new Black voters, the "Vote or Die" crowd that P-Diddy was trying to mobilize.
Add to this the "felon purge" technique, in which Republican Party officials, knowing that they are working with “felon” lists "tainted by racial discrimination", set out to challenge thousands of voters by the batch.
"This," says Browne, "is voter suppression in 2004." And this is what we may call racism of the overt bigotry kind. Racism type one. On this form of racism, Browne's statement continues for several more pages at the Conyers hearing website.
Which brings us to racism type two, the invisibility maneuver. For this type of racism, it's best to begin with liberal columnists. Scan their morning-after reports for words like "minority", "black", "civil rights." Or try this Google test. First do a news search for Conyers hearings. Very good, lots of fresh hits. Now try a news search for Judith Browne Advancement Project under "News." See there. Your search did not match any documents (at 9:25 am CST).
Overt racism by right-wing Republicans is the core dynamic at work here, but it is aided and abetted by invisibility racism found in left commentators and media reports, who fail to center the civil rights struggle. An issue that is clearly about racism and civil rights has been whitewashed into "voter fraud" generica. Type one racism answered with type two. Browne's careful citation of race-based discrimination followed by Browne's invisibility in the press. The one-two punch continues.
There may not be much that can happen to change the results of the presidential election, so the whitewashing of “election fraud” may not have an immediate consequence for those who are focused on the Bush machine today. But here in Texas, Republicans are taking three newly elected Democrats into a costly process of hearings before a Republican-controlled chamber. “Election fraud” is the allegation that Republicans are bringing against the Democrats.
In Texas, therefore, the generic cry of “election fraud” will very likely make invisible the crucial civil rights component that ties together the fates of three would-be state legislators with racist powers in Ohio and Florida.
In particular, take the case of Hubert Vo, a Vietnamese immigrant who beat a Republican powerhouse by about 30 votes. If the Vo election is overturned by a Republican-led Legislature on whitewashed charges of “election fraud”, then the losers will be a coalition of urban voters who worked hard on this grassroots coup. And the winners will be white suburban voters, again.
Yet, if the pattern of injustice in "voter fraud" is a pattern that seeks to favor white suburban voters over struggling urban voters, wherever they are, then making this pattern visible, for once, could tip this 30 vote scale in Vo’s favor, and reverse for the first time in more than 30 years a steady trend toward Republican domination of Texas politics.
The white left is meaningless without a civil rights coalition. The sooner the white left embraces this, in deed and word, the sooner we’ll be able to see a real future in front of us. The sooner, also, that a national movement of progressives can make a real difference in the South.