Is this what democracy looks like?

Whew, I haven't written a blog post in quite some time but I really need to get back on the ball and write more frequently. The issue that has gotten me so riled up, which has forced me to emerge from my multi-week blog slumber, is that of the legitimacy of our electoral process. Several issues have recently come to my attention, thanks to the investigations and reporting of many patriotic men and women, which raise the real possibility that the Republican party has systematically stolen numerous elections in recent years, including the 2004 presidential election, and plan to do the same this year.

To be frank, I think any truly informed, honest observer of American politics would agree with me when I say that there are many aspects of American elections which are fundamentally undemocratic. For one, in the year 2008 we still elect our president through an electoral college, rather than a straight popular vote. As a result, candidates for president can and have received a majority of the popular vote and still lose! I explained this to my Costa Rican host mother and my French host sister the other day and they were simply baffled, as they should have been. Additionally, there are essentially no real controls or limits on the role of money in our elections, which is inevitably, in my humble opinion, corrosive. The role of money and the influence of the wealthy over our elections has reached dizzying new heights this year, I might add. Further, the mainstream television media, which remains the principle means by which Americans get news (although its role is certainly shrinking) is a corporate-controlled institution that is basically in the hands of three companies, Time Warner, General Electric, and NewsCorp. The print media features a similarly concentrated, corporate ownership structure as well. As such, the information presented to us by the media regarding our political system is inherently biased. For more on the bias of the media, read Noam Chomsky. In fact, for your own sake, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of the world, read anything by Noam Chomsky.

All of these issues aside, up until a couple weeks ago I was under the impression that the people, albeit under the influence of the biased corporate media, at least got to push D or R every few years. I believed that their decision mattered. How could it not? Why else would so many people dedicate so much time and effort to explaining how Bush and the most crazy, far right batch of Republicans in history won, against all odds, in 2004? Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case. On the contrary, it turns out that the Republican party has for years been using a series of tactics, each more vicious than the next, which seem designed to systematically suppress the voting of core Democratic constituencies, namely ethnic minorities and low income persons. There have been several terrific pieces on this issue which have come out recently, including an article by Robert Kennedy Jr. which appeared in Rolling Stone, a column by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, a short film by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, and an interview by Amy Goodman of NYU's Mark Crispin Miller on today's Democracy Now!.

RFK Jr. informs us that, under the pretext of preventing voter fraud, which for all intents and purposes never happens, the GOP have: "creat[ed] new barriers to registration, purg[ed] legitimate names from voter rolls, challeng[ed] voters at the polls and discard[ed] valid ballots." As a result:

Since 2003, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, at least 2.7 million new voters have had their applications to register rejected. In addition, at least 1.6 million votes were never counted in the 2004 election - and the commission's own data suggests that the real number could be twice as high.

Here are some examples of some of the means they've used to do this:

Obstruction of voter registration drives, including fines as high as $1000 per violation in the state of Florida for tiny administrative errors like failing to turn in application forms on time. As such, the League of Women Voters was forced to abandon its efforts to register new voters in Florida.

Purging eligible voters from the polls. The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) stipulated that "[voting] records be centralized, computerized and maintained by secretaries of state - partisan officials - who are empowered to purge the rolls of any voter they deem ineligible". In numerous states, Republican officials have used this legislation with reckless abandon. The consequence?

All told, states reported scrubbing at least 10 million voters from their rolls on questionable grounds between 2004 and 2006. Colorado holds the record: Donetta Davidson, the Republican secretary of state, and her GOP successor oversaw the elimination of nearly one of every six of their state's voters. Bush has since appointed Davidson to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created by HAVA, which provides guidance to the states on "list maintenance" methods.

Requiring unnecessary voter ID's: Also as a result of HAVA, voters must now present a government-issued ID at the polls in order to vote. The problem is, there are many low income Americans who don't travel abroad and don't drive and thus have no passport or driver's license. In total, 10% of white voters and 20% of black voters lack government ID's, effectively barring them from participating in politics.

If these efforts at voter suppression shock you, then you'll be utterly dismayed by the charges of even more heinous crimes made by Mark Crispin Miller, a communications professor from New York University. He contends that, on top of the myriad efforts to suppress voting, the GOP has engaged in systematic computer fraud to straight up steal elections throughout the country. In his interview with Amy Goodman, Crispin Miller (or just Miller?) claims that the GOP used a common computer hacker technique, the Middle Man Setup, to steal the election from John Kerry. On top of that, the guy in charge of the theft operation apparently now works for none other than John McCain:

AMY GOODMAN: When you talk about the computer setup for 2004, explain further.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, what happened was, with the election results that were coming into Ken Blackwell’s website, right, in real time—

AMY GOODMAN: The former Secretary of State of Ohio.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: The former Secretary of State.

AMY GOODMAN: The former chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign there.

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: And co-chair of Bush-Cheney and a big-time election thief and an ardent theocrat, by the way. The election returns went basically from his website to another computer that was in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, under the control of Spoonamore and a guy with another private company, another evangelical. The data was shunted through that computer and then back to the Secretary of State’s website.

Spoonamore says that this Man in the Middle setup has only one purpose, and that is fraud. There’s no other reason to do it. And he believes that such a system is still in place in Ohio, it’s in place in a number of other states. And the crucial fact to bear in mind here, since we’re talking about John McCain attacking ACORN and so on, is that Mike Connell is now working for John McCain.

Now, on the strength of Spoonamore’s testimony, right, it’s driving a RICO lawsuit in Ohio. On the strength of his testimony, Connell has been subpoenaed. He was subpoenaed last week for a deposition, so that he can answer questions on the record, under oath, about what he’s been up to. He and a bevy of Republican lawyers have been very, very vigorously fighting this subpoena, because, of course, they don’t want him to testify ’til after Election Day

If Barack Obama somehow loses this election in two weeks, Crispin Miller points out that many people will contend that the Bradley Effect theory has been validated. The Bradley effect theory claims that Black candidates perform better in pre-election polls than they do in actual elections because in the privacy of their voting booths, Americans are more likely to illustrate racist voting behavior than when speaking with pollsters, when they wish to appear politically correct. I, for one, have claimed this as a possible explanation for an Obama loss in my conversations with many people. However, he contends that evidence for this theory is rather lacking, which I'd never heard before. Regardless of the validity of the theory, we would all be quite naive to immediately rule out the possibility that if Obama loses, it is because the election was stolen from him. Crispin Miller claims it happened in Ohio in 2004 and many Americans are already convinced the election was stolen in Florida in 2000. As I said above, the political system of the United States, the so-called beacon of democracy, exhibits many anti-democratic and authoritarian characteristics but I have never seriously questioned whether the U.S. was at least a formal democracy, where votes did matter. If Obama loses, given his enormous lead in the polls, even that must be called into question.