[Peace-discuss] Was the election stolen?

[Phil Stinard]

At tonight's AWARE meeting, David (at least I think it was David), suggested 
that time be set aside to discuss the US election, and whether the vote was 
stolen.  For various reasons, there was no time for this, so since I'm all 
primed and ready to go, I'll continue the conversion on the Peace-Discuss 
List.

To discuss whether the election was stolen, one must first answer the 
question, "Stolen from whom?"  Since I didn't vote for Kerry, and since I'm 
confident that my write-in vote for Ralph Nader was duly counted (there were 
three Nader votes in Urbana 2, and I know one of the other two Nader 
voters), I don't feel that my vote was stolen.  However, I understand that 
there are some embittered Kerry voters who feel that their vote WAS stolen 
because Kerry didn't win.  I put in that last clause intentionally, because 
had Kerry won, I doubt that few Kerry supporters would be complaining about 
fraud or stolen votes.  My view is that there is a certain amount of fraud, 
discarded votes, and disenfranchisement in every election, and that this 
election was no worse than any other, and yet, it is only the loser in a 
close race who cries fraud, or more precisely, the supporters of the loser 
who cry fraud, because Kerry himself is rather silent on the subject.  At 
the November 3 post-election meeting held at the IMC, I was one of the few 
people in the room who said that their major concern after the election is 
making sure that everyone's vote is counted.  For those interested in fair 
elections, the top priority MUST be election reform.  I don't see that 
coming from either of the two major parties.  Gosh, I wonder why?  Maybe 
it's because that's how they get elected.  If you want to see an example of 
how to run a fair and honest election that meets even ex-President Carter's 
standards, look no further than Venezuela's August 15 referendum on Hugo 
Chavez's presidency.  It was run using state-of-the-art electronic voting 
machines with something like seven levels of security, and the machines 
printed paper receipts that the voter inspected, and then placed into a 
secure ballot box to be used should a manual recount be required.  There was 
almost nothing about this in the English language press--I translated and/or 
wrote some of the few articles that are available in English about those 
machines.  That election took only a few months to set up.  We have four 
years.  The clock is ticking.

If I remember my death-and-dying correctly, Elisabeth Kubler Ross said that 
the first stage of grief is denial.  That explains Greg Palast's claim of a 
stolen election, ending with his illogical but dramatic conclusion that he 
didn't leave his country, his country left him (which if taken out of 
context would seem to be the last stage of grieving, acceptance that maybe 
more people did vote for Bush than for Kerry, although that was not his 
intent).

The Democrats who didn't follow Kerry's lead and support Bush after the 
election have been doing a lot of agonizing over how they "lost" the 
election.  Sharon Smith provides an excellent analysis of what went wrong 
for Democrats and progressives in her article "The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy 
of Lesser Evilism" (http://www.counterpunch.org/smith11042004.html).  I 
wanted to point out Alexander Cockburn's analysis from Counterpunch, though, 
as an example of how far people will go to make excuses for the Democrats:

"The Democrats spent the year wasting money and passion attacking Ralph 
Nader whose early predictions of his ultimate drawing power at the polls 
turned out to be on the money. If the Democrats had wanted to identify a 
serious saboteur of their chances they should have homed in on Mayor Gavin 
Newsom of San Francisco whose okay to gay marriage saw all those same sex 
couples on the steps of City Hall embracing, on every front page and nightly 
news in America. Ohio had its proposition banning gay marriage and the drive 
to put it on the ballot and push it to victory brought the Christians out in 
their hundreds of thousands, marching to the polls across the rubble of 
their state's economy."

It was Ralph Nader last time, and now that they have elimated him as a 
threat, their next target is gays, and you have people like Alexander 
Cockburn cheering the effort with hyperbolic excess.  It reminds me of 
Martin Niemoeller's poem on victims of the Nazi regime:

?First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist so I did not 
speak out. Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists, but I 
was neither, so I did not speak out. Then they came for the Jews, but I was 
not a Jew so I did not speak out. And when they came for me, there was no 
one left to speak out for me.?

Well, I'm going to speak out, and this is only the beginning.  I urge 
everyone to keep a close eye on both parties the next time around, and don't 
blindly support the Democrats just because they're not Republicans.  The 
enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

--Phil