The Importance of Election Reform AND Exposing the 2004 Election

[Time for change]

Why election reform is so important

Many DUers and thousands, or perhaps millions of others in this country believe that we are fast moving in the direction of tyranny, as evidenced by what we believe happened in the 2004 presidential election. If I and people like me are correct in our belief that a massive electoral fraud was perpetrated upon us in 2004, it is likely that this fraud will re-occur repeatedly in future elections unless aggressive action is taken against it. And with every election cycle that this happens our task becomes that much more difficult, since we are then faced with a Congress that is even more steadfastly against meaningful election reform than the one we previously had.


In defense of “conspiracy theory”

For this belief we are often referred to as "conspiracy mongers" or “conspiracy theorists”. We get this especially from the main stream news media, but even some progressive publications and a minority of DUers join in this dismissal of our concerns. Well, I have some news for these people. Conspiracy is a fact of life in this world. It exists whenever people come together to commit a crime. The seeds of tyranny are sown whenever a people become so naive as to believe that "it couldn't happen here."

Most people agree that our current privatized election system, with its secret vote counting, is very vulnerable to fraud. So why is it so difficult to believe that the 2004 election was stolen? Faith in the integrity of the corporations who own and program our voting machines, perhaps?


And why do we need to investigate and expose what happened in 2004?

In order for meaningful election reform to stand a good chance of success in our country, given the current Congressional antagonism towards it, we need a great deal of grass roots support for it. But as long as election fraud remains only a theoretical possibility to most Americans, rather than a demonstrated reality, the amount of support for meaningful election reform is not likely to be great. Most people simply are not greatly motivated to act on the basis of what they perceive as theoretical future possibilities (and yes, that applies to me as well). And, in addition to that, most people have a great deal of trouble admitting that there is something gravely wrong – psychologists call that “denial”, and that denial is a pervasive feature of human nature. Let me give you an example:

In the late summer of 2004 I attended a meeting of Montgomery County, Maryland Democrats for Kerry. There was great enthusiasm at this meeting, much optimism, and much talk of all the different ways in which we could ensure that John Kerry would win the November election.

As the meeting wore on, I began to feel uncomfortable with the fact that there was no talk of how to combat potential election fraud. Having experienced, following the 2000 Presidential election fiasco, the loss of two Senate seats in 2002 (Minnesota and Georgia), where our candidates (Mondale and Cleland) had large leads on the eve of the election and yet lost, and having read a fair amount about how our election system, with its privatized secret vote counting, was becoming very susceptible to fraud, I had expected some discussion of this issue. So I asked one of the primary speakers for the evening what was being done to address this problem. His response was to look like a deer caught in head lights – he seemed to have no idea what I was talking about. I thought at the time that either I must be all wrong about the potential for election fraud, or else we were in bad trouble with regard to the 2004 elections.

Well, you know the rest of the story. I am afraid that if I were to attend a similar type of meeting in 2006 or 2008 and ask the same question, I would get the same response as I did in 2004.

That is why the story of what happened in 2004 needs all the investigation and all the exposure that it can get.