Re: THE DEMOCRAT WAY!!!

From: AbsolutelyCertain (easily_at_entertained.net)
Date: 10/24/04 

Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 12:11:27 -0700

<mmeron@cars3.uchicago.edu> wrote in message
news:3ASed.1$45.431@news.uchicago.edu...
> In article <20041024073916.H94321@agora.rdrop.com>, William Elliot
<marsh@privacy.net> writes:
> >On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, johann von Tebbes wrote:
> >
> >> How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
> >> George Will (archive)
> >>
> >Republican organizations registering people to vote have been
> >caught tossing democratic registrations out. Story at Las Vagus.
> >
> >UN electoral inspectors want to watch US elections. They are sorely
> >needed. None of the electoral commission's recommendations have been
> >implemented. Instead electoral fraud in Florida still persists as it did
> >in 2000.
> >
> And what electoral fraud was present in Florida in 2000? Facts
> please, not histerics?

It depends on who you ask. Procedural constraints that look reasonable to
one side look like hanky panky to the other. It all depends, to coin a
phrase, on whose ox is being gored. Consistent fairness and application of
rules is difficult to achieve in a big, populous state. Florida doesn't
exactly have a tradition of sound, dispositive law and even handed
application. It has huge variances in economic demographics, cultural
demographics and political dmographics, lending itself to issues of trust
and issues of interpretation. It's a state with a lot of electoral votes,
and therefore, high stakes. It's a state with a governor who is the brother
of GW Bush. And that Kathleen woman, who looks, sounds and acts for all the
world like something out of the Wizard of Oz (think bad witch) doesn't
exactly convey a feeling of warm fuzzies to people who don't share her
views. Objectivity, fairness and integrity are matters of perception as
much as matters of performance. It's not "okay" to give the appearance of
corruption and basically flip off anyone who challenges it. That's why WF
Buckley makes such a point of this: Democracy depends entirely on the
submission of the minority. When those in power look and act like they are
taking unfair advantage, then they risk giving up the goodwill of the
minority, and eventually they will lose the ability to govern. Florida has
flirted with this situation and shows no signs of getting better, that I can
see. Florida doesn't own a monopoly on crummy voting mechanisms and
procedures, though. Right here in my state, election officials basically
shrugged at very large "discard rates" when clunky voting methods created
lots of unusable ballots. I mean, I'm talking about shrugging at 5%-plus
rates of uncountable votes in some precincts. When elections can be decided
by literally handfuls of votes, a shrug or wink that tosses a few hundred or
a few thousand votes into the trashbin is not exactly a minor detail. To my
way of thinking, the bizarre Supreme Court ruling which awarded Bush his
presidency as much as validated that Florida can't conduct an election and a
recount without fucking it up. Whether you agree with the Court's coin-toss
finding or not, the backstory is one of a state that can't do a large scale
election without looking like a bunch of rubes. It was Florida's fuckups
that put the 2000 election into a month of circuslike gyrations. From a
distance, it looked for all the world like a state that couldn't get out of
its own way. It's four years later ... what's changed there, for the
better? And Florida is not the only state or jurisdiction with voting
problems. Suddenly exposed in 2000 were serious problems that fell directly
from election authorities who gliby traded away integrity of their systems
for efficiency and rapid vote counting -- that's where punchcards came from.
Suddenly voters found out that rapid, cheap vote counting was more important
to the authorities than diligent protection of every citizen's
enfranchisement. Some voters were rightly pissed, and still are. It's an
embarassing and unnecessary situation, government service to public
interests at its worst. Whether Florida likes it or not, it's the poster
child for this problem.

Your question speaks to "electoral fraud." The answer that counts is going
to sound something like this: Florida not only has to protect and preserve
the franchise of every voter, it has to *look like* it is doing so. It
didn't in 2000, and we'll see whether it does so this time around. I
wouldn't bet any of my own money on it.