Reply #21: Democracy’s End

[dzika]

January 20, 2005

Democracy’s End

By Steven F. Freeman


But today’s inauguration offers cause for neither consolation nor celebration. The defeated have little reason to accept the outcome as legitimate. Votes were denied and votes were lost. We lack assurance even those ballots that were counted, were counted as cast.

Those who supported the president may well find their victory hollow. Doubts about the integrity of the election undermine efforts to govern a democracy. A degradation of democratic processes presents a worse danger—the creation of a political class of unremovable incumbents, and the dreadful possibility of dictatorship. Over the course of history, democracies have fallen and that is how the end begins.



An investigation limited to Ohio by members of the House Judiciary Committee has substantiated:

• The vote was suppressed. Absentee ballots were unmailed or lost. Citizens registering to vote faced obstacles such as rejection of forms not “printed on white, uncoated paper of not less than 80 lb. text weight.” A scarcity of voting machines in Democratic strongholds resulted in waits of more than eight hours while Republican areas had surplus machines. Misinformation was circulated about polling place locations. Provisional ballots were wrongly disqualified.
  
• There was apparent vote fraud. In some Democratic precincts 25 percent of voters reportedly did not vote for president. In Cleveland votes were switched. In three contiguous counties Kerry mysteriously ran far behind both Gore in 2000 and unfunded Democratic candidates for lower offices. Appalachian Ohio experienced extraordinarily high voter registration and turnout that was inconsistent with precinct records.
  The vote was counted and recounted in secret. Warren County locked out count observers because the FBI allegedly said there was a terrorist threat, a fact that the FBI has denied. Recounts violated state law in that in pre-selected precincts they were conducted in the absence of observers. Representatives of a voting system manufacturers improperly manipulated the recount.
  
• Beyond these conventional transgressions, which also have been widely documented in other states across the country, the United States has introduced in recent elections a system of potentially undetectable mass-vote manipulation: electronic voting machines that produce no confirmation that votes are recorded as cast. Stanford University computer scientist David Dill draws the analogy of telling a man behind a curtain whom you want to vote for and trusting that he has recorded it faithfully. Voters using electronic voting machines likewise blindly trust that the programmer has written code that can and will record their votes as cast.
  

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http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1894/