[Mb-civic] Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown + call for Kerry

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Portrait of a Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

With only eight days to go and the polls showing Bush and
Kerry still neck and neck, the result is once again likely to
turn on the minutiae of the voting system. But this time the
whole country seems poised to descend into post-election
chaos. Andrew Gumbel reports on the traumatizing effects of
this bitter campaign and how, as the world's most powerful
democracy talks of exporting freedom to Iraq, it is at risk
of becoming an object of international ridicule

By Andrew Gumbel

October 24, 2004, lndependent/UK

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=575453

No need to wonder if this year's US presidential election is
headed for another meltdown: the meltdown has already
started. The voting machines have already begun to break
down, accusations of systematic voter suppression and fraud
are rampant, and lawyers fully armed and ready with an
intimate knowledge of the nation's byzantine election laws
have flocked to court to cry foul in half a dozen states.

Nine days out from election day, we don't yet know whether
the state-by-state arithmetic will lead to a post-election
stalemate similar to the 36-day battle for Florida in 2000.
It is, of course, possible that the margins of victory in the
50 states will be wide enough to avert the worst - even if
overall conditions are likely to fall short of the usual
definition of a free and fair election.

Given the nail-bitingly close numbers in the opinion polls,
however, Election 2004 could just as easily produce a
concatenation of knockdown, drag-out fights in several states
at once, making the débâcle in Florida four years ago look,
in retrospect, like the constitutional equivalent of a
vicarage tea party.

Last week saw the start of early voting in Florida and a
clutch of other states, and with it came a plethora of
problems. In three heavily populated counties - around Tampa,
Orlando and Fort Lauderdale - the network connection used to
verify voter identifications broke down on the first day,
creating hours of delay. In Jacksonville, where poor ballot
design in 2000 knocked out the votes of 27,000 poor,
predominantly black, predominantly Democratic voters, the
county elections supervisor chose the first day of polling to
resign, citing ill health. He had come under fire for failing
to make early voting available in the city's African-American
neighborhoods - something his interim successor is now going
some way to remedy.

Elsewhere, there were computer breakdowns during early voting
in Memphis. Pre-election testing of electronic machines in
Riverside County, California, and in Palm Beach County,
Florida, led to multiple computer crashes. Elsewhere,
machines have manifested problems handling basic addition -
especially when asked to display instructions in a language
other than English. Several county administrators have chosen
simply to skip the non-English language part of the test.

In Nebraska, dead people were found to have applied for
absentee ballots. In Ohio, a representative of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People was found
to have offered crack cocaine to a known drug addict in
exchange for completed voter registration forms, which he
duly submitted in the names of Mary Poppins, Janet Jackson
and Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious cannibal serial killer.

This is just the beginning. The Kerry campaign alone has
signed up 10,000 lawyers around the country to oversee
registration and absentee ballot procedures, keep tabs on
computer voting companies, collect stories of alleged
disenfranchisement or irregularities at the polls, and watch
state elections officials with hawk-eyed attention for every
ruling that might be construed as having a partisan, rather
than a public interest intent.

"The lawyering won't start the day after the election," said
Kendall Coffey, a Democratic Party lawyer in Miami who was
deeply involved in the 2000 fiasco. "It's already under way."
Florida Congressman Robert Wexler, who is deep in litigation
with his state government over the failure of Florida's
electronic voting machines to produce an independent paper
trail, concurred. "The dangers are limitless," he said. "They
are limited only by the inventiveness of those who would
tamper with the system and create havoc."

It beggars belief that the world's most powerful democracy
should find itself in this hole for the second time in a row
- becoming an object of international ridicule, scorn and not
a little alarm, even as the country's leaders talk
idealistically about exporting American freedom and democracy
to Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

After the last fiasco everyone from President Bush down vowed
to fix the system and ensure another Florida could never
happen. But three big things went wrong. First, the new
generation of computer touchscreen machines - brought in at
dizzying speed and at even more dizzying cost to replace the
discredited old punch-cards - turned out to be poorly
programmed, unverifiable, prone to all manner of failure and
susceptible to undetectable foul play.

Secondly, the Bush administration dragged its feet about
enacting funding its own new election laws. As a result, most
states won't have their electoral procedures fully updated
and coordinated until the next presidential election in 2008.
That, in turn, is opening up furious arguments about the ill-
defined rules for provisional ballots, absentee ballots, ID
card requirements at polling stations and other seemingly
esoteric bureaucratic niceties that could have a huge impact
on turnout - especially among the poorer, less educated
classes who have traditionally been ignored, if not excluded,
by the two major parties.

Thirdly, the political leadership allowed itself to be
deluded into thinking that the dysfunctions of the US
electoral system were purely a matter of technology. Fix the
machines, the thinking went, and everything else will be
fine. What should have been glaringly obvious in 2000, and is
even more glaringly obvious now, is that the failures of the
electoral process were a direct result of the ferocity of
broader political battles. The blithe incompetence of local
election officials and their wonky machinery were side-
effects of these battles, not the cause.

In 2000, much of the agony of Florida could in fact have been
avoided if the parties had agreed to a state-wide manual
recount - as happened in an equally close, but amicably
resolved, Senate race in Washington state that year. It was
the high stakes of the White House, not the messy
accumulation of hanging, dimpled and pregnant chads, that
sparked the crisis. And we know the stakes are infinitely
higher this time, in what has been called the most important
US election in memory.

There has been nothing to match the current passions in
American politics since the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam
War. Campaigns have never been dirtier, or more intensely
fought or more expensive. Both major parties have vowed to do
whatever it takes to win, and each has accused the other of
engaging in out-and-out cheating.

The whole country - never mind the woefully inadequate
electoral system - is now living on the edge of a nervous
breakdown. Little wonder, then, if many are predicting some
sort of collapse on 2 November. "Only a miracle, it strikes
me, can prevent this election from descending into post-
election chaos," John Dean, the Watergate-era White House
counsel who knows a thing or two about electoral dirty
tricks, wrote last week.

What has been striking is the sheer nastiness of the fight.
In Oregon, Pennsylvania and Nevada - all swing states - a
Republican political consulting group called Sproul &
Associates has been accused of passing itself off as a non-
partisan or even a Democratic civic organization to collect
voter registration applications outside libraries and
supermarkets. In at least two instances now under criminal
investigation, company employees have been accused of
processing the applications of declared Republican voters
while throwing the forms marked Democrat into the nearest
rubbish bin. Sproul, which has received more than $600,000
(£330,000) from the Republican National Committee, has denied
ever endorsing such practices. Still, the discarded voter
registration forms have been paraded on television for all to
see.

In Ohio and Florida, it is the Republican secretaries of
state - who oversee elections - who have been accused of
putting partisan preference above their solemn civic duties.
Ohio's Ken Blackwell won points from voting rights activists
earlier in the year when he chose not to go ahead with a
massive state-wide buy of electronic voting machines. Since
then, however, he has tried to insist that all voter
registration forms be submitted on 80lb stock paper - a
ruling struck down by the courts after he was accused of
blatantly attempting to suppress the votes of likely
Democrats.

He has also tried to make life harder for provisional voters,
saying their ballots will be recognized only if they show up
at exactly the right precinct. This too was struck down in
court because it was deemed likely to suppress votes -
especially among transient students and low-income workers.
But Secretary Blackwell has continued to implement the policy
in defiance of the court order, prompting a harsh rebuke from
the judge.

In Florida, Secretary of State Glenda Hood has been
repeatedly accused of doing the political bidding of the man
who appointed her - Governor Jeb Bush, the President's
brother. Her more recent exploits include directing county
supervisors to throw out registration forms where applicants
have signed a statement declaring they are US citizens but
have forgotten to check a citizenry box elsewhere on the
form. This, too, is seen as a vote-suppressing mechanism. It,
too, is now in the courts.

Secretary Hood has also been waging a months-long campaign to
ban what limited manual recounts the electronic voting
machines permit. Her initial ruling was struck down by the
courts, but now she has come up with a staggeringly devious
rewrite. The state will now permit analysis of the
computerized machines' internal audit logs in the event of a
close race, she said, but if there is any discrepancy the
county supervisors are to go with the original count. In
other words: we will do recounts, but if the recounts change
the outcome we will disregard them.

Secretary Hood's actions illuminate the real attraction of
the electronic voting machines in the states where they have
been introduced. They may work no better than the old punch-
card machines - studies suggest they fail to record as many
votes as their predecessors. In the absence of an independent
paper trail, how- ever, all evidence of problems is hidden
away in the binary code of an electronic black box and is, to
all intents and purposes, invisible.

This raises intriguing and troubling questions about what a
post-election contest might look like. One can reasonably
anticipate - based on past experience - an avalanche of
stories about voters turned away from polling stations, told
they are on a felons list even if they have no criminal
record, or kept waiting for hours because of technical
glitches. No doubt people will tell some of those thousands
of lawyers how they pressed the screen for one candidate,
only to have the other's name light up.

The problem is, even if lawyers for the losing candidate are
able to prove that the system failed, they will find it very
difficult to talk specific numbers and demonstrate that
enough votes were lost to alter the outcome.

How the courts will react to this hypothetical state of
affairs is anybody's guess. They could accept the given
election results, however flawed. They could allow the
arguments to rage until December, when the electoral college
is supposed to meet, or even into the new year, when an
undecided election would be thrown into the House of
Representatives.

Or they could be trumped, once again, by the Supreme Court.
The most disconcerting possibility is that the highest court
in the land could remove the electoral process from the
voters altogether and turn it over to the state legislatures.
Technically, they can do this under Article II of the
Constitution, which offers no automatic right to vote. We
know from the deliberations in 2000 that two, possibly five,
of the nine justices have doubts whether the people should be
the ultimate arbiters of presidential elections - a strict,
literal reading of the Constitution that no modern Supreme
Court countenanced before the current crop of ultra-
conservatives. "After granting the franchise in the special
context of Article II," the majority declared in its Bush vs
Gore ruling, "[the state] can take back the power to appoint
electors."

Were this scenario to play out it would leave the fate of
many of the electoral battlegrounds in the hands of
Republican-controlled state legislatures (in Florida and
Ohio, for starters), who would promptly hand the election to
George Bush. Talk about a nightmare scenario - which is why
every elections official and every "small d" democrat in the
land is praying it won't get that close.

© Copyright 2004 lndependent/UK

_______________________________________________________

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***

Your phone skills could be the key to the 2004 election. This weekend is
the last chance to make a big impact on this election. By making phone
calls to Kerry supporters who don't always vote, you can lend a hand to
the tireless MoveOn volunteers in swing states. You can make the biggest
difference by committing to 5 hours of calling between now and the
election.   You can make the biggest difference by becoming a
"precinct partner." If you can commit to 5 hours of calling between now
and the election, we'll match you up with a specific swing state
neighborhood and a MoveOn member who lives there. Together, you'll call
occasional voters and give the Kerry supporters some encouragement to get
to the polls -- then they'll follow up in person to seal the deal. Today
is your last opportunity. Join us as a Precinct Partner at:
http://moveonpac.org/precinctpartners2/signup.html


 If you can't commit to 5 hours, you can still sign up to make phone calls this 
weekend at: http://www.moveonpac.org/lnvb/pp/callsched/callschedule.html You 
won't have another chance to join our efforts in the neighborhoods where this
election will be decided. Now is the time. Take a moment to think about
what's at stake in this election. Imagine defeat, and imagine victory. If
you become a Precinct Partner, you will help the volunteers on the ground
visit more of the right voters. You can even join them by traveling to
your adopted neighborhood on or before November 2nd to talk to voters
yourself and get us a new president. We find people really enjoy working
with another MoveOn member, and our dedicated volunteers in swing states
need your help. Can you step up and serve as a Precinct Partner?
http://moveonpac.org/precinctpartners2/signup.html Even if you can't
commit to being a Precinct Partner, this weekend you can call and motivate
the people who prefer Kerry but don't always get to the polls. These are
the folks who will make or break our effort, and there are a lot of them.

Can you spend two hours this weekend talking with the voters who could
elect John Kerry?
http://www.moveonpac.org/lnvb/pp/callsched/callschedule.html Someday
you'll recount with pride how you helped return our country to an honest
and fair path. 

Thank you, for all that you do. Sincerely, --Adam, Eli,
Hannah, James, Laura, and the whole MoveOn PAC Team
  
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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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