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As featured on p. 218 of "Bloggers on the Bus," under the name "a MyDD blogger."

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Fraud

I haven't written a post about the 2004 voting irregularities in a long time. A real long time. But seeing that, not only in 2004, but in 2002 and 2000 unexpected election results, all which benefited Republicans, occurred, I don't know how you can ignore it much longer. In the newest Rolling Stone, a magazine which has a far more solid history of political journalism than its pop-culture status belies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a compelling case that the 2004 election was indeed stolen, and that the Republican Party systematically provided the electoral college margin of victory for George W. Bush.

I believe that Bush's 3 million-vote margin of victory in the popular probably means that more people recorded votes for him. I also believe it's plausible that making sure Bush's vote margin looked unassailable may have been a central component to the strategy. This paragraph lends creedence to that:

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)


The (39) there is but one of the 208 footnotes in this highly sourced article. And the mountain of evidence in the article required that much sourcing. I've excerpted merely one of the paragraphs; the rest demands reading.

Even to the most rabidly partisan Republican, there are some undeniable things that went very wrong in 2004. For one, people shouldn't have to wait 8 to 10 hours in line to get their vote cast. That must never happen again, and Democrats should be pushing early and absentee voting with a vengeance. You don't have to wait in line anymore in a lot of states, and this will only improve over time. In the meantime, the federal government must mandate a ratio of voting machines to people in every municipality, and should level the playing field by allocating funds to cash-strapped precincts to make sure they get the equipment they need.

Next, if a Secretary of State, the man or woman charged with control over voting for an entire state, is also the co-chair of one of the Presidential campaigns, he or she must recuse themselves from the balloting process. You cannot have such an appearance of impropriety, especially if that impropriety looks to have occurred (read the section on Ohio SoS Ken Blackwell).

Third, this should underline the importance of Electoral College reform. When only one or two states are competitive, when the campaign for President of the United States looks like a campaign for President of Ohio, then you know that the system is completely broken. The popular vote should decide the Presidential election, and it should not be administered by 1,300 separate localities but by one federal governing body. There is a movement afoot to make an end run around the electoral college by passing legislation in several states to have them pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote. This wouldn't take effect until states totaling over 270 electoral votes signed on to it, effectively making the winner of the national vote the winner of the election. A bill along those lines passed the California State Assembly two days ago. The framers had minority rights in mind when they adopted the electoral college system but now there are a lot more small states and they are having a disproportionate effect. Forcing candidates to run national campaigns for President makes it that much harder to steal elections, and denudes activist Secretaries of State of undue influence.

Fourth, the Federal Election Commission should hold a veto over state voter rolls and the attempts to purge them. If the NSA can database every phone call in the country, a centralized database at the nonpartisan FEC ought to be able to database voter registration.

Fifth, it goes without saying that we need a voter-verified paper trail in those states with electronic voting machines. This should frankly be a Constitutional Amendment.

We went through hell in 2000 and nothing really changed, if this article is to be believed. This cannot happen again. There's a whole lot to this article that requires explanation. I wish we had a public discourse where that were possible.

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