November 26th, 2006
Our democracy at work:
After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.
[...]
Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000.
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Accusations of missing ballots and vote stuffing were not uncommon with mechanical voting machines. But election experts say that with electronic voting machines, the potential consequences of misdeeds or errors are of a greater magnitude. A single software error can affect thousands of votes, especially with machines that keep no paper record.
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In Arkansas, Florida and Pennsylvania, the questions were about the voting machines themselves. In addition to the Sarasota issue, which may have been caused by a software problem, there were similar problems in the Florida counties of Charlotte, Lee and Sumter. In those counties, said Barbara Burt, vice president and director for election reform at Common Cause, more than 40,000 voters who used touch-screen machines seemed not to have chosen a candidate in the attorney general’s race. But since one candidate won by 250,000 votes, the anomaly has been generally overlooked.
On election night in Arkansas, officials discovered that erroneous results had been tallied in Benton County. After retabulating the votes, they announced that the total number of ballots cast had jumped to 79,331 from 47,134, which meant a turnout of more than 100 percent in some precincts. After a third tallying, the total dropped to 48,681.
September 2nd, 2006
Like a lot of Americans, I don’t stay abreast of news from south of the border; however, since the Mexican presidential elections, held earlier this year, I’ve sporadically followed the headlines coming out of that country. And, again and again, I’ve reacted in awe and admiration at how liberal Mexicans have defended their democracy and demanded that their constitutional rights be respected. Since the bitterly divided presidential elections, where the liberal candidate López Obrador was denied the presidency due to alleged fraud, liberals in Mexico have held mass rallies demanding that every vote be counted. And, yesterday, just as Vincente Fox was about to deliver Mexico’s state of the union speech before the legislature, supporters of López Obrador prevented Fox from taking the podium. This is how the NYT reports it (as an aside, I find the NYT’s frequent use of the qualifier "Leftist" curious):
Leftist lawmakers who have charged that fraud marred the presidential election in July staged a protest inside Congress that prevented President Vicente Fox from making his final state of the union speech to lawmakers on Friday, ending a tense day of political brinksmanship here.
Federal riot police officers and soldiers with water cannons had sealed off the Mexican Congress with miles of steel fence to protect Mr. Fox from thousands of leftist protesters camped out in the city’s center.
The president had vowed he would give his last state of the union message, despite threats from the leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his followers to stop him.
At the last minute, however, Mr. López Obrador backed down. In front of at least 5,000 supporters in the capital’s central square, Mr. López Obrador, the former mayor of this sprawling city, told his followers it would be a mistake to confront the barricades and the police surrounding Congress. He said the “fascist” government of Mr. Fox would seize on any clashes between the police and the protesters to justify the brutal repression of his movement.
“We are not going to fall into any trap, we are not going to fall into any provocation,” he told the crowd, which had waited through a rainstorm to hear him speak. “Only those who are not in the right resort to force and violence, and we are in the right.”
Still, lawmakers from Mr. López Obrador’s Democratic Revolution Party protested inside the Chamber of Deputies, taking over the podium just before President Fox was to speak at 7 p.m. Several waved Mexican flags and signs calling Mr. Fox “a traitor to democracy.” The president of the chamber, Deputy Jorge Zermiño, was forced to call a recess.
Mr. Fox arrived 15 minutes later. As he entered the chamber, wearing the traditional red, white and green presidential sash, leaders of his party said it would be impossible for him to speak. He dropped off his yearly report, turned on his heel and left.
After reading the headlines that have come out of Mexico since July of this year, My most immediate reaction has consistently been, Just imagine if back in 2000 the Democratic party and us, American liberals, had been as courageous as our Mexican neighbors?
Of course, back in 2000, the political climate in the US was nothing like the present political climate is in Mexico; and, too, Al Gore was no López Obrador, that is: Gore in 2000 was more or less an establishment candidate, not representing a grassroots movement, unlike López Obrador — who is an unabashed liberal and a challenger to Mexico’s political establishment, with a grassroots movement supporting him.
Since 2000, however, we’ve seen the birth of something resembling an active liberal grassroots movement in this country that is inspiring many across America, and that is challenging the entrenched establishment of the Democratic party. Hopefully liberals in America will never let 2000 happen again, until then I’ll continue to react in awe and admiration at how liberals in Mexico defend democracy and their constitution.
March 23rd, 2005
And more evidence that a certain “vociferous” faction, within the ruling party in Washington, is actively working to breach the protective “Church/State” divide; and, thereby, inject the federal government into similar “personal/private” issues (from the Lawrence Journal, Kansas):
Pastors or other church leaders could use their pulpits to endorse political candidates under a controversial bill backed by U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, R[epublican]-Kan.
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The bill would allow pastors and ministers to endorse candidates, but churches still would be prohibited from spending money on a candidate’s campaign if they want to retain their tax-exempt status.
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Brownback’s efforts are opposed by the Washington-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
“What Brownback is trying to do is politicize the American pulpit. He wants to make it legal for church leaders to hand down lists of endorsements,” said Americans United spokesman Robert Boston.
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Lawrence ministers and pastors are divided on the issue.
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“Anybody who knows history knows our forefathers founded this country to get away from a government-dictated church,” he said. “But that’s not to say the church could not or should not take part in government. We’ve got it backwards. We’ve restrained the church instead of restraining the government.”
The Rev. Peter Luckey, senior pastor at Plymouth Congregational Church, 925 Vt., disagreed. It’s wrong to mix worship services with political campaigns, he said.
“One of the great gifts of democracy is the separation of church and state,” he said. “As a pastor, I want to be supportive of that separation.”
October 18th, 2004
Incredible! I guess our Republican friends belive that the examples cited below have not “occurred” — please note #3, where a Republican party official has admitted guilt in court. The most malignant of these offenses is #1. Given that we live in America — a shinning example of democracy to the rest of the world — all citizens should be OUTRAGED that anyone would tarnish the name of American democracy by preventing our fellow citizens from exercising their RIGHT to vote. I am pissed off about the Oregon and Nevada voter registration card destruction (#1), which I see as the sort of thing I have come to expect from the Republican party. In my eyes, with this example, that party has proven once again how their rhetoric is completely empty of meaning, and how they’ll do anything to win — even if it means subverting the Constitution and trampling on basic human decency (not to mention federal law).
1. Republicans tear Democratic voter registration cards:
“I personally witnessed my supervisor at VOA, together with her personal assistant, destroy completed registration forms that VOA employees had collected,” said Russell. “All of the destroyed registration forms were for registrants who indicated their party preference as ‘Democrat.’” (link)
2. Ohio Secretary of State, a Republican, tried to invalidate voter registration cards because some of those new voter registration cards did not conform to an “archaic” rule requiring that the cards be on 80 lbs paper. Since the initial announcement the Secretary of State backpedaled and is now allowing those new registration cards to be counted. (link)
3. Phone jamming, initiated by Republican campaign operatives to suppress Democrats from voting in 2002 congressional election.
“Chuck McGee, the former executive director of the state Republican Party, pleaded guilty a few months ago to paying $15,600 to a Virginia telemarketing company to make the calls that jammed the get-out-the vote lines of Democrats the morning of the 2002 election.” (link)
