Back to Florida 2000
They say it's no use crying over spilt milk -- but sometimes the stench is so bad, it's still worth paying attention to, and maybe even trying to clean up.
In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman takes us back to that odious moment in U.S. electoral politics, the Florida 2000 presidential contest. The hook is a new book by a U.S.-based journalist from Britain:
In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."Krugman does note that the case isn't as clear for 2004 and the shenanigans in Ohio:
Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.
But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy ... Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.
Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.Given the history of election fraud and voting rights violations in this country, that sounds about right. But wouldn't one hope for more from the country that declares itself the beacon of freedom and democracy?
He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."
1 Comments:
If you agree with the demands below and you will boycott Wendy's and Outback Steakhouse then send email with your name, state and email address and the subject ELECTION REFORM with the text of this message in the body of your email and I will forward each and every name to both Outback Steak house and Wendy's.
We demand vote by mail throughout the United States of America. This will prevent Republicans from vote suppression by skin color which happened electronicly and in person in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Demand that your state implement vote by mail with paper ballots easy to fill out and difficult to change or invalidate by Republican Party officials.
We demand Civil servants on every state payroll keep track of voter registrations and vote counting of mail in votes in each precinct and not companies such as Choicepoint. We need to take the Republican Party out of the business of keeping track of voter registration and counting votes.
We demand States ban the secretary of state from engaging in politics especially acting as a campaign official for a presidential campaign.
To encourage the Republican congress to pass a federal law we call for a boycott of 2 big Republican contributors Wendy's restaurants of Ohio and Outback Steakhouse of Florida. Ohio and Florida, the scenes of the crimes of the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004. This boycott will entail demanding that the executives get the RNC chairman to hold a press conference acceeding to the first 3 demands listed above and the actual enacting of the items into federal legislation directing the states to implement the first 3 demands. People will continue to boycott these restaurants until we get honest elections by mail with paper ballots and honest voter registration systems run by civil servants. No partisan secretary of state will remove thousands of people from voter rolls or hide voting machines in order to get their presidential candidate elected by vote suppression again.
Post a Comment
Return to Facing South's main page