We have a president who was selected rather than elected. He stole the
presidency through family ties, arrogance and intimidation, employing Republican
operatives to exercise the tactics of voter fraud by disenfranchising thousands
of blacks, elderly Jews and other minorities.
~ Barbra Streisand at BarbraStreisand.com.
Introduction
I wrote this essay before the extent of the outright fraud in the US
presidential election had come to light. The Harris fraud
in removing black Democrats from the rolls and the rigged electronic voting
machines dwarf the effects of the butterfly ballots and Scalia's legal fiddles.
To skip to the chase, look at the links below that get into
the fraud. The bulk of this essay is about the systemic inequity.
Because the 2000 presidential election was so close, it magnified many
inequities in the American election system. This essay discusses those
inequities and suggests remedies.
Constitutional Inequities
When the USA was formed, it was created by the coalescing of thirteen separate
countries. The founding fathers were far more concerned about he equality and
rights of these separate states than they were about the equality and rights of
the individual citizens. That concern survives to this day. Senate power is
allocated equally to the various states. This means a citizen is a small state
such as Rhode Island has more voting power than a citizen in a large state like
California. You could assign senators by state population the way the house
works, but then the senate would keep expanding. Perhaps it would be better to
give each senator as many votes in the senate as there are voters in his state.
The founding fathers were also concerned that every region had a say in the
running of the country. This means that a citizen living in a sparsely populated
part of the country such as Utah has more voting power in the House Of
Representatives than a citizen in a densely populated state like New Jersey.
The founding fathers did not believe in democracy as we know it today. They did
not trust the "mob" to govern. They wanted a republic where well-educated
elected representatives made all the decisions. The masses should never be
permitted to directly make any decision. There were no national
newspapers, no TV, and no Internet. The average citizen did not even know the
names of the candidates. So the founding fathers set up an indirect system
called the electoral college to elect the president. A group of impartial, non-party-affiliated,
educated men, who were familiar with the presidential candidates, made the
selection. In the constitution, the electors are not even required to vote for
the candidate they are pledged to. 27 states have laws to bind them, but these
laws may be unconstitutional. The penalty is typically a $100 fine, and being
kicked out of the party. The constitution even made provision for a state
legislature to select these electors in any way it saw fit. Legally the state
legislature need not even hold an election to choose the college of electors.
This harks back to the days when the states were nervously considering the
possibility of union, and wanted to retain every possible power to themselves.
The state legislatures originally directly chose the electors for president,
without holding an election.
Further, in most states there is a winner-take-all-the-electors rule, which
leads occasionally to the strange anomaly that the president chosen is the one
with the fewest popular votes.
Modern Americans may consider these founding fathers' notions in violation of
the democratic principles of "all men are born equal" and "one
man; one vote". However, as Jimmy Carter pointed out, these rules are
almost impossible to change because they are burned into the constitution. They
require 38 states to agree before they can be changed. Small states and sparsely
populated regions are not about to give up their privileged positions, even if
they recognise that privilege is unfair.
Jimmy Carter said the most we can hope for is an abandonment of the winner-take-all-rule,
because that change does not require a constitutional amendment, and because it
can be done a state at a time. If states apportioned presidential electors in
proportion to votes, most of the probability the anomaly of the winner in the
electoral college getting the fewest popular votes would disappear.
Abolish The Electoral College?
The arguments for abolishing the electoral college include:
A direct vote for president would make all votes of all Americans equal. It is
the only scheme that would truly implement the democratic principle of one man
one vote.
A direct vote avoids the politically embarrassing situation of the loser of the
popular vote winning the electoral college.
It avoids the problem of the faithless elector, an electoral college member who
breaks ranks and votes for a candidate other than the one they were pledged to
vote for.
Constitutional changes are not impossible. The constitution has changed to keep
up with changing times. At the time of the founding fathers, there were no
political parties. Washington and others considered them evil. State legislators
nominated the presidential electors and the senators directly, without holding
any election. Senators were not elected by popular vote until 1913.
It is simpler and cleaner.
States are simply groupings of people. Why should people in a smaller grouping
be more important, have more say than people who belong to a larger grouping?
What counts are people, not groupings. The whole idea of equality of groupings
is a bit of legerdemain to disguise the fact Group A has successfully fooled
Group B into giving Group A's citizens more importance than the citizens of
Group B. The notion of equality of states is bogus; people are equal, not states!
The arguments for keeping the electoral college include:
It is too difficult to change. It would require 38 states to ratify the
constitutional change. It would also likely require concomitant changes to the
constitution to give the federal government powers over how elections are
handled so that the same rules would apply in every state. It is politically
impossible.
You would need overwhelming popular will to make the change. Right now support
for it is evenly divided on partisan lines because of the accident that the
electoral college system favoured Bush in the last election. It could just as
easily go the other way in the next election.
It makes the votes of citizens of small states somewhat more important than
votes of citizens of large states. They need this edge because the economics
campaigning and TV advertising favour spending only in large states.
It would bring into question the election rules of the senate, which treats all
states, even ones 500 times larger than another absolutely equally with two
senators per state. A senatorial vote in a small state is 500 times more
powerful than in a large state. The electoral college is nowhere near this
unequal.
It is not that broken. It is a fine tradition. It has only caused serious
problems four times in history.
It simplifies vote counting. Each state is counted independently. If you had a
very close federal election, you would have to recount everywhere. On the other
hand, the odds of a federal election differing by only a 1000 votes are much,
much less likely than a state election differing by only 1000 votes, so nearly
always the result would be clear on election night with a direct vote.
You can address 90% of the inequity without abolishing the college. Just get rid
of the all or nothing rule, which would not require a constitutional change.
Fraud Inequities
The American election is designed to make fraud easy, especially in absentee
voting. Voters are sometimes, but not always, required to show id. If you are a
black voter, much more likely ID will be demanded. If you are black, much more
likely such ID will be declared invalid. Absentee voters are not even required
to provide the number on the voter ID card if they plan to vote Republican or
Democratic, because those two parties are given the list of voter id
numbers to apply to absentee ballot requests that the parties print, mail out,
and validate before submitting them. In other words, those people voting
Republican or Democratic by absentee ballot need never show any id at all,
ever! They can vote as many times as they want without even the risk of showing
up at the polling place.
The ids are issued by a single canvassing officer in each county, without any
uniform accounting scheme, or cross checking of canvassing officer's integrity.
It is a simple matter to discover which voter ids belong to voters who rarely
vote, and submit phony absentee ballot requests for them, using the computer
tapes provided to the Republican and Democratic parties. It is like giving the
mint's printing plates to the Republican and Democrat Parties and telling them "We
trust you not to use them to print any money".
The solution is a proper voter id card, ideally a smart card with embedded
digitally signed photo of the voter. This makes it forge proof. You must
always use this card to get an absentee ballot or to vote, no exceptions. The
voter id card should contain a digital fingerprint so that you can ensure no
duplicates are issued. The fingerprint itself exists only in the card. When you
apply for a new card, that automatically invalidates any previous card you were
issued. The voter id card ensures you vote only once and in only one place.
Ballot Machinery Inequities
There are a number of different voting schemes used in various parts of the
country:
Electronic: e.g. touch screen.
Optical scan
Paper ballot
Punch card
The electronic systems are pretty well fool proof. They won't let you
accidentally vote for two candidates for the same office, for example. It is
still possible to accidentally forget to vote for a presidential candidate. You
could accidentally hit the wrong button, but even then you can recover. Perhaps
you could be totally flustered by the new technology and be frightened off
voting altogether, or leave the booth without completing your ballot. Humans are
not involved in counting, so barring computer fraud, you get a 100% accurate
count. On the other hand, they can easily be programmed to give any result the
voting machine company desires.
The optical systems are almost as foolproof as the electronic ones. You fill in
your ballot with a pencil. Then you poke it into a slot. If there is anything
wrong with it, it spits back out at you, and gives you a chance to correct the
problem. There is still a chance you won't understand what the problem is, or
how to make the correction and give up. If you don't make the marks dark enough
the machine will erroneously think you decided not to vote, but it won't warn
you.
The paper ballot is fairly straightforward. The problems come in design. Butterfly
ballots, multipage page ballots or folded ballots can confuse voters. These
have to be counted by hand, so the counts are never exact. Humans look at the
marks, and have to use subjective judgement to decide if they are dark enough,
big enough, of the correct shape etc. etc. The conscious or unconscious partisan
bias of the counter can affect how ballots are tallied.
The punch card is the worst of the balloting schemes. One in five punch card
votes were discarded in Broward county in Florida. They permit both overvoting
and undervoting without warning. They have the problems of hanging, pregnant and
dimpled chad. Tallying machines can't register
anything but a completely clean hole. Holes may not be clean because of
inexperienced voters, blunt styluses, old equipment, full chad hoppers, improper
insertion of the voting card in the machine, etc. In addition, the prepunched
chad can sometimes fall out with rough handling, turning a valid vote into an
invalid overvote. This scheme disenfranchises a sizeable chunk of the voters who
are forced to use it. Hand counting only partly corrects the problem. Hand
counts are rarely done, or even when ordered can be stalled both legally, and by
partisan counters, so they are never completed. To give an idea of the magnitude
of the problem, on average, country wide, 2% of voters fail to select a
presidential candidate, mostly because they have no preference or because they
consider no candidate acceptable. With punch card balloting, this ranges from 5
to 20%. The difference is presumably caused by the problems with using the punch
card balloting equipment.
To make matters worse, this obsolete equipment does not toss ballots equitably.
It is used mainly in the poorer districts. This means use of this equipment is
biased against the poor. Since the poor tend to vote Democratic, the use of this
equipment is biased against the Democratic party. In the rich districts, using
modern voting equipment, 0% of the deliberate vote is thrown away. In the
districts using the punch card voting scheme, 3 to 18% of it is, routinely,
without comment or objection.
Some claim the problem lies with the voter. Unintelligent voters who cannot
negotiate a successful punch card vote don't deserve to vote. This is improper
on two counts. First, the franchise is not based on intelligence. The interests
of every man count equally whether he is a genius or an illiterate idiot.
Secondly, this hurdle of punch card balloting is placed only before the poor. To
be fair, it should apply equally before the wealthy.
The use of obsolete punch card equipment should not be blamed on any political
party. The problem is that new voting machinery is a low priority in a cash-starved
county, and it gets put off. In other countries, voting law and voting equipment
is a federal responsibility to ensure uniformity. In the USA, it is, according
to the constitution, a state and county responsibility.
Literacy and Language Bias
In an upper class household, every child learns to read English and how to vote.
They know you can't vote for more than one candidate. They know you must use an
X. In some parts of the USA 20%+ of people cannot read. Yet their interests are
still important. Similarly many new citizens have shaky English. They won't
easily understand the written instructions they are given. They may come from
countries without voting, or with quite different voting rules. Nobody teaches
them to vote.
How do you fix this? First you must teach children to vote in schools. They must
have mock votes that are as close to the real thing as possible. They need to
understand overvotes, undervotes, and that there are rules for what constitutes
a valid ballot. Second you must provide instruction to adult voters prior to
voting day in a variety of languages. People should be able to view a video, and
practice vote. Third, modern voting machines should prompt with a wide choice of
languages, both visually and with the spoken word to guide. Photos of the
candidates should appear on the ballots, along with party logos. You should not
need to be able to read English or even be able to read to vote accurately.
People who do something as mindless as sort mail are given a day's training. Why
do we expect every citizen to be able to use voting equipment correctly the
first time, without instructional materials, without training, without practice,
without supervision? We would never dream of demanding such performance of
casual labourers in the workplace.
Safe Harbour
Safe harbour is a cut off date. If the vote counting from a state is complete by
then, it is guaranteed to count federally. It cannot be challenged. Results as
late as January 6 still count, but in theory, they could be challenged. This
sounds like a great idea. You can't have the contest going on right up
inauguration day. The catch is in any contest, the status quo will favour one
side. That side can simply stall and run out the clock until the safe harbour
date. They can win without really needing to actually win the most votes. All
they have to do is keep the election tied up in legal red tape. This was the
basic strategy by which Bush won the election. In a future election, the status
quo could just as easily favour the Democrats, and they would be the ones
running out the clock.
How do you make the contest more fair? You have to make recounts automatic. You
have to specify the clear conditions under which they are held or not held. You
can't have politicians making arbitrary partisan decisions on whether recounts
or hand counts are justified. Once started they have to be completed.
Since there is no motive to stall them, they will thus complete with dispatch.
Canada managed to count, by hand, 17 million votes in four hours. Surely the USA
could do as well when one side has no motive to stall the process.
You have to make clear objective rules for manual ballot counting. Wherever
possible you should use fool-proof machine voting that cannot create an
invalid ballot or produce an incorrect count. You ban punch card balloting. This
allows counts to be completed quickly without compromising the safe harbour date.
The "Coup" Provision
There is an obscure provision in the constitution that was originally intended
to handle the case of a tie or some hopelessly mired election when it was
impossible to determine a clear winner. In that case the state legislature could
break the tie and decide the winner. However, some have claimed this provision
could be used much more broadly. If any legal contest, no matter how
minor were not very quickly resolved after the election, then the state
legislature would have the right to select the electors, totally
independently of the election results. They have the legal right to completely
reverse the election.
This has not been done for over a hundred years, but the option is still there,
and Jeb Bush threatened to use this provision had Al Gore prevailed in the
courts and the counts. After it became clear the Federal Supreme Court would
rule for Bush, the speaker for the Florida legislature withdrew the threat, and
tried to pretend they had never made it, or ever intented to carry it through.
Whether or not Feeney was truthful, this loophole should be closed.
Unfortunately, that would require a constitutional amendment, and such a change
would require states giving up the power to steal the presidential election if
they ever wanted to. They are not about to give up any power, no matter how
corrupt, or how unlikely they think they would be to use it. I was rather
astonished to find out that opinions on the validity of this "coup"
fell perfectly down party lines. All Democrats disapproved. All Republicans
approved. I strongly suspect, had the Florida legislature been Democratic, we
would have seen the reverse pattern. The next time this coup option happens it
could equally likely tempt Democrats. Using the "coup" provision may
be constitutionally permissible, but so is shooting your dog or pooing on your
lawn, but that does not necessarily make it a great idea.
Third Party Candidates
The presence of third parties complicates the election. Sometimes when a right
wing candidate runs such as Jesse Ventura, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan or George
Wallace, it splits the right wing vote and incidentally helps the Democratic
party. Sometimes when a left wing candidate runs, such as Dr. Spock or Ralph
Nader, it splits the left wing vote and incidentally helps the Republicans. This
can lead to the anomaly of a candidate being elected that the majority of the
population detest.
There are three main proposals to deal with this problem:
Run off elections: If the election is close, you
have a run off election between the top two contenders. The main problem with
this is it takes extra voter time and money.
Approval voting: You can vote for as many
candidates as you like. You vote for all the candidates you approve of. The
candidate with the most votes wins. This lets you vote for both for Pat Buchanan
and George Bush, without diluting your vote for Bush should Buchanan be out of
contending. Your voting power is the same whether you use one, two or three
votes. You can use it to vote for all but the candidate you detest. Or you can
use it to vote for just the best candidate. You can vote for all candidates to
let it be known you approve of all of them equally. You can vote for no
candidate to let it be know you think they are all turkeys. One advantage of
this scheme is "overvotes" and undervotes are just as meaningful as a
vote for a single candidate. Even if a voter does not understand the rules, his
vote still counts.
Rank voting: You rank the candidates in order. The
counting process gives more points for a first rank than a second rank. The
candidate with the most points wins. Rank voting: You rank the candidates in
order. The counting process gives more points for a first rank than a second
rank. The candidate with the most points wins. It is more complicated to vote
and count. It pretty well requires automated equipment to count quickly. Vote
theorists claim this scheme, officially called Borda voting, makes the most
people happiest with the result.
Australia uses a type of rank voting that works like this: You rank the
candidates in order. The candidate with fewest votes is knocked out, and any
votes against that candidate are redistributed to those votes' next most
preferred candidate, until there is a clear winner ( >50% of the total vote).
Australia became a nation in 1900, after the American civil war. A great concern
was to constitute the commonwealth so as not to repeat some of the problems
experienced by the US republic. Presumably, the new South African constitution
is better still.
If you are curious to further explore the problem of voting schemes to deal with
more than two candidates, see Discover Magazine November 2000 page 75 May
the Best Man Lose where they discuss the mathematics and paradoxes of
various voting schemes. Two terms you need to understand when studying voting
are plurality and majority. A candidate wins the plurality
of votes when he gets more than any other candidate. A candidate wins the majority
of the votes when he gets more than 50% of the votes. When there are only two
candidates, they amount to the same thing.
What Do You Need to Recount?
If you add up a column of numbers, and you want to be sure you are right, you
add them up again. If you get the same answer you quit. You repeat until you get
the same answer at least twice, though not necessarily twice in a row. Even
better, you talk somebody else into doing the checking addition for you.
In doing recounts, the same principle should apply, except that you don't insist
on perfectly matching totals, just close enough so the error would not make any
difference. If the difference between candidates is large, you can stop before
doing even one recount.
The punch card vote (or any vote for that matter) is made of three parts, the valid
vote, the undervote and the overvote. It turns out you have to
look at all three to get a perfectly accurate total. Electronic voting machines
ensure it is impossible to create any overvotes, though they do permit undervote
blank ballots.
Valid Vote
A machine counts the valid vote. What the machine can't deal with, it spits out
as the undervote (machine saw zero votes), and overvote (machine saw two or more
votes). The buck stops there normally.
If you run the ballots through the machine twice and you get the same total,
nobody disputes that number, so long as different operators did the work, under
scrutiny. In any recount, there is never a need to literally count any
ballots with your hands, even invalid ones. Contrary to common Republican belief,
you only need separate them into piles and let the machine count them.
Undervote
If it turns out that the undervote might matter, the undervote then has
to be examined manually and categorised into piles:
blank ballot.
valid ballot (by whatever rules are in play for dealing with dimples and hanging chad).
invalid ballot.
disputed ballot. Judges did not unanimously agree on how to handle it. Somebody
else will have to decide what to do with it.
Of course, only the valid ballots count. Blank ballots are considered invalid,
contrary to a rumour put out by some wily Republicans. Arguing over which pile a
ballot belongs in: valid or invalid need be done only once, though the counting
should be done twice, with possible extra review of the disputed ballots.
Overvote
You then may have to examine the overvote, which sometimes might matter.
How could this be? The voter has marked his ballot for more than one person,
clearly an invalid ballot? n'est-ce que pas? However ballots have a write-in
slot at the bottom. If the person votes for his candidate and also writes
him in, that may or may not be considered a valid ballot. Rules could
conceivably work either way. Machines can separate out the potential write-in
duplicates, and allow for hand adjudication. A machine can then count the pile
of ballots that were manually decided to be valid. By Florida's "clear
intent of the voter" rule, the overvote did matter in that election,
though it was never counted officially. Let us hope the unofficial Miami
Herald counts take the overvote into consideration.
Media Reporting
News media report election results and exit polls even before the polls close in
the western half of the country. This may discourage westerners from voting, or
may unduly influence the way people vote. Both supporters of the front runner
and runner up may be discouraged. In the last election we even saw this effect
within the two time zones of Florida. Happily, experiments have shown voter
rarely change their votes based on such reports. However, they are often
discouraged from voting.
Canada tries to solve this problem by making reporting before all the polls
close illegal. But with the Internet and long distance telephone calls, it is
impossible to keep poll results secret. I suspect the only fair way to handle
this is to have a uniform poll closing time across the country. This of course
would delay the counting and force people to stay up into the wee hours to learn
the winner. Equivalent would be to close the polls early in the east, but delay
vote counting or delay announcing any results until the polls close in the west.
There is nothing much you can do about exit polls, but these are not that much
different from polls reported on the day before the election.
Another problem with the media is the trivialising of the election and politics.
For example, after one of the televised debates between Gore and Bush, an MSNBC
reporter asked the audience, "Who do you think came across as nicer?"
He did not ask, "Who would you vote for?" or "Who do you think
would make the best leader?", or "Who best demonstrated his competence
to lead the country?" The question he asked was almost as irrelevant as
asking who had the nicer hair. Perhaps you can forgive the twit for asking about
the only question he could that would put Bush, his boss's (Bill Gates')
favourite, in a good light.
Platforms and issues are forgotten. Trivia, personality, mannerisms and sound
bites take over. You could go through an entire day of CNN coverage without
learning a single fact about what sort of legislation either candidate favours.
In reporting Clinton, the media were ten thousand times more interested in his
penis than his pen. Not that the travels of the presidential penis were
uninteresting, but they totally eclipsed what the president was doing, both good
and bad, that actually affected the welfare of the country.
Supreme Court Decisions
Because the laws were fuzzy, both the Florida and Federal Supreme courts became
involved. In the USA, supreme court judges are political appointees, and tend to
be party hard liners. Justices Souter and Stevens were notable exceptions.
In a fight like this everyone is hopelessly partisan. Almost no one can
think clearly about what is fair or proper. Partisan bias clouds all judgement,
even that of supreme court judges. I am a Canadian, theoretically disinterested,
but with a pro Gore bias. I was impressed by the fairness of the lower level
courts and shocked at the naked partisanship of the higher courts, particularly
the Federal Supreme court. Most outrageous was Justice Scalia's addendum to the
stay to stop the counts which said in effect, "It does not matter if this
stay is fair to Gore, I have already decided Bush is going to win before I have
heard the evidence."
Attorney Mark Levine has explained the embarrassing lack of logic in the Supreme
Court Decision in this layman's guide to it.
Harvard professor Larry Tribe put it charitably, "This
decision will be hard to teach.".
What can you do about this? There is no appealing the Supreme Court's actions.
You legally have to accept what they did, no matter how partisan. You could
insist that new supreme court justices be confirmed with a two thirds
majority vote. That would encourage centrist judges who would not be wildly
partisan. You could permit recall of a supreme court judge with 60% vote, so
that disgracefully partisan judges could be more easily removed. You also want
to pre-decide these issues clearly in law so you don't need the Supreme Court to
make up law on the fly during elections.
Lack of Recusing
It is customary for a judge who has a conflict of interest to recuse himself, so
as to avoid any possibility he might allow self-interest to sway him.
What actually happened in this case?
Justice Clarence Thomas (a white conservative judge with black spray painted
skin by Ron Popeil), had a wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas who worked at the Heritage
foundation , a leading conservative think tank in Washington D.C. she had just
been hired by George Bush Jr. to help recruit people in the impending
administration.
Eugene Scalia, the son of Justice Antonin Scalia, was a lawyer with the firm of
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher -- the very law firm representing Bush before the
supreme court.
This conduct would be nothing of note in ordinary politics, but in the lofty
realm of supreme court, this is unprecedented foul play.
A Call To Action
Napoleon observed that God always seems to favour the biggest army. Were he
alive today he might similarly note that the electors seem to favour the
candidate who spends the most money on TV ads.
The unfairness of lies perpetuated in TV ads vastly overshadow the inequities in
the voting mechanism. The key to fairness is to take the debate out of the hands
of the spin doctors and media moguls, and put it back into the hands of the
people. Fortunately, the technology for doing that now exists: the Internet
which includes email, the website, the webring
and the newsgroup.
It is important that voters learn where the candidates stand on all manner of
issues. You can research that and let it be known. What you find out may be
something only of interest to a small segment of the population, e.g. their
position on whale hunting or salmon conservation. However, that can be a key
issue, or an indicative issue that actually persuades a voter. There is not much
point in rabidly cheerleading your candidate or booing the opposition. You won't
change anyone's mind. The more neutrally you can present the information that
you have researched the more credibility you will have.
Here in Canada we have an institution called the all candidates' meeting. It is
something like the American Town Meeting, but much more fun. All
candidates are invited to attend. Audience members line up at microphones to
lambaste the politicians and ask them questions. The questions are not
prescreened. The politicians poke holes in each others' replies. Groups of
lesser candidates gang up on the front runners. They don't hypocritically play
kissy face the way they do in America, The audience cheers and boos the
responses, making a Jerry Springer audience look tame. It is revealing to see a
politician without the protective film created by his handlers and spin doctors.
My Mom told me that when the newspaper gets a letter to the editor, or a
politician gets a personal letter, they assume there were at least twenty other
people with the same idea, but too lazy to write. You have the strength of
twenty men when you get off your butt and write. With a website, your writing
can reach the entire country, nay the entire planet, inspiring a select audience
everywhere.
Hall Of Shame
most
shameful
Democrat
Republican
act
Canvassing board changing the chad counting rules
on the fly more than once.
Attempting to count dimples, even though historically dimples had never been
included as valid ballots.
Florida Legislature threatening to appoint Bush electors even if the courts
determined Gore was the true winner.
Extreme efforts to block full and accurate vote counts.
K. Harris' "discretion" in stopping the counts in progress that that
had been deliberately stalled by Republicans. Though she had the legal right to
do this, that was not the precedent.
Republican Sandra Goard, canvassing officer, allowing Republican friends in to "fix"
the absentee ballots, knowing it was contrary to law, then lying about it under
oath.
Justice Scalia saying the stay order to stop the vote count need not be fair to
Gore because he had already decided to give the election to Bush, before he had
heard the arguments. By stopping the count, he guaranteed the Republicans would
successfully run out the clock to the optional safe harbour deadline of December
12.
spin
Blaming the Republicans for the unfair punch card balloting when it was
primarily purchased by Democratic canvassing boards.
Blaming the Republicans for racism and bias against blacks when it was
Democratic canvassing boards responsible for the ancient punch card equipment
that tossed their votes.
Blaming Democrats for throwing out military absentee ballots when it was K.
Harris's office who send out the memo telling canvassing boards to do that.
Dissembling word play on the word counted, claiming all votes had been "counted"
even though the ballots had not been examined or included in any vote totals.
Blaming Gore for cherrypicking the recount counties when Bush had equal
opportunity to request recounts where it would be favourable to Bush. Bush
blamed Gore for Bush's own failure to act.
Claiming that blocking the recounts was a "matter of principle".
Repeatedly accusing the Democrats of tampering with the ballots without evidence.
Karnak the Magnificent. Claiming that totally blank ballots were being counted
for Gore, that the process was done with ESP without examining the ballot,
claiming the process was done by looking at the other votes on the card to see
if the voter tended to vote Democrat or Republican and claiming that it was a
totally arbitrary process that was completely subjective. This was all shown to
be bullshit when the Republican judge who was involved in the details of
counting described in great detail how the counts were done and testified that
in counting nearly always the adjudications were unanimous.
Claiming that by law all ballots rejected by a punch card tabulating machine are
invalid ballots.
hypocrisy
Attempting to block absentee ballots from counting after saying the principle
that every vote should count should be paramount.
Complaining that it was unfair to count only the counties where Gore had
requested recounts, then rejecting the Florida Supreme court ruling to count all
counties.
Blaming the Democrats for the lack of a clear definition of a valid punch card
ballot, when the fuzzy legislation was written by the Republican state
legislature.
The Federal Supreme Court put the Florida Supreme Court in a Catch 22 position.
If the Florida court formulated clear uniform rules on what constitutes a valid
ballot, that would count as writing new law. If they did not formulate such
rules, that would violate equal protection. Heads I win, tails you lose.
blunder
Designing the Palm Beach butterfly ballot.
Media reporting a Gore win for Florida before the polls closed.
K. Harris's office sent out a memo saying military absentee ballots without
postmarks should not be counted. This was erroneous. By both Federal and Florida
law military ballots don't need a postmark.
cunning
The affable speech conceding the election. Gore shot to 10 points higher than
Bush in public opinion with it.
Scalia's second ruling. It was an absolutely masterful piece of legal
legerdemain. It was convoluted, but it successfully managed to pull off many
goals, i.e.
It made sure the Florida legislature did not appoint electors, rather than
taking the ones from the winner of the count. That thorny constitutional issue
had to be sidestepped at all costs, even if it meant flagrantly giving the
election to Bush.
It gave the election to Bush, no matter what the Florida Supreme court did.
It ensured future elections would have to be fought with fair, uniform rules.
This ruling, that theoretically only applies to Florida, should eventually
enforce nationwide fairness.
It reaffirmed the powers of the Florida Supreme Court.
It settled the election instantly.
It enhanced the reputation of the Supreme Court. By having two Republican
justices dissent, it gave the impression that the court was less biased than had
the vote been strictly partisan, without compromising the result. The 5-4 split
could have been a lucky fluke, or a deliberate manipulation.
mannerism
sighing
slurring speech
contributors
Teamsters Union, Jane Fonda.
Philip Morris Tobacco, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Bill Gates, air and water
polluters, religious right.
Who Builds the Voting Machines?
It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the
votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.
~ Josef Stalin
Electronic voting machines are being peddled that are fraud-friendly. Even a
first year computer science student could cook an election with the total lack
of audits and open source. There is no excuse for anything proprietary or secret
in a voting machine. That just invites fraud. Further the voting machine
companies are run by Bush supporters and by Christian Reconstructionists, a
peculiar sect that wants to replace the American democracry with a Christian
theocracy -- rather odd people to be in the voting machine business.
For the first time in history, Florida exit polls differed widely from the
official counted vote in the 2000 Presidential election. Exit polls had Gore far
in the lead. No one then thought the Bush family was crooked enough to steal an
election that directly.
Parting Thought
There is a great temptation in formulating fairer rules, to try to weight them
to favour your preferred candidate under the conditions of the last election.
This is short sighted. In the next election, your favoured candidate could
almost as likely be hurt by that bias. Unfair rules you enact now will
eventually come back later to bite you.
Americans are strange. Republicans like to tease the Democrats for being reds
or pinkos, yet Republicans refer to states the Republicans control as red.
States that vote Democratic are known as blue.
Books about George Bush Jr. This includes his kinky
sexual history, his cocaine abuse, his father's pedophilia, his election fraud,
9-11, the Iraq war and many other books on similar topics.
BBC Real
Audio: documentary shown in Britain that explains in detail how Bush stole
the election. Surprise! you did not see any of this on CNN. The BBC is the
British equivalent of PBS in America or CBC in Canada.
Thom Hartmann's essay:
If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines. This is the
essay that is taking the net by storm and getting people riled about this
extremely important issue.
The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth about Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters
0-7453-1846-0
Greg Palast
Palast (a reporter with the BBC and London's Observer) updates the muckraking tradition with some 21st-century targets: the IMF, World Bank and WTO, plus oil treaties, energy concerns and corporate evildoers of all creeds. Palast in the one who did the BBC videos on How Bush stole the election (using computers to remove black Democrats from the rolls), Bush blocked bin Laden family investigation and Enron scandal.
Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!
0-06-039245-2
Michael Moore
This is very angry book with tons of documented, little-known facts about:
How Bush used all manner of fraud to steal the presidential election, not just the stuff you saw on CNN.
How Bush picked for his cabinet and their very dirty connections with big oil, big tobacco, big pharmaceuticals and big crime.
How racist America still is.
How the Republicans steal from the poor to give to rich and lie about it convinciningly.
Diebold
Fraud: Details of how the design of the Diebold voting machines is done to
make fraud deliberately easy. part
II. Wired
Magazine did an piece on Diebold fraud too.
Professor Mercuri:
academic work on the ease of voting fraud with all electronic voting machines
with no audit trail, cross checks or inspection.
Diebold Electronic Voting
Machine Fraud: How Diebold security laxity/fraud allowed the Republicans to
steal an election in Georgia. Diebold lawyers shut down this site, but it appears back up.
Diebold was caught with a set of phony election results called rob-georgia on their
server.
Write your Senator,
Member of the House of Representatives
or
President George Bush Jr.
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500 USA
It is best to hand write your letter. However in a pinch you can email:president@whitehouse.gov,
but don't expect much response from the guy who won the election by cheating.
The
Fairness Of American Presidential Elections
Last updated 2004-06-28 by Roedy
Green ©2000-2004 Canadian Mind Products.
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