Wednesday, September 28, 2005
A quick thought
Who can honestly say that they are satisfied that in the next national election there will be no vote tampering (of sufficient scale to effect the outcome)? Florida 2000 was a debacle, and we got a President that not only didn't win the popular election, he didn't win the electoral votes either. Unless you're a zealot who can't possibly believe the Republocrats cheated, it's generally known to be true now. That being the case, will we be in a better position the next time? Right now, I don't think so. You guys tell me what you think.
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5 comments:
I think right now we're up shit creek without a paddle. I read an article in a recent Harper's Magazine that made a fairly convincing case for vote tampering in Ohio on the order of tens of thousands of votes. The author didn't know if eliminating that tampering would have been enough to overturn the result for Bush, but he did know that the mainstream media(I hate that term, but it appplies here)generally ignored every report of voting irregularities in Ohio, and anybody who dares to bring it up at this point is ridiculed or mocked as a "sore loser." Republicans and their allies who do this of course do not care about the results being overturned; everyone knows that even if we went back and found out Kerry actually won Ohio, it doesn't mean he'd be in office tomorrow. No, what they care about is preventing issues of voting integrity coming up, because then it might prevent them from exercising their dirty tricks the next time around. And yes Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of such things in the past, but that's the past. The fact is it greatly benefitted Republicans to cheat on votes in the last election, and it would again in the next, and the next after that, and every single allegation of voting irregularity I heard about that was of any significance(effecting anymore then a few hundred votes)was perpetrated by a Republican or one of their allies. I thorough investigation of all of this would be nice of course, but it's not going to happen. The only thing we can do is to keep the story of voting irregularities going, to battle the perception that only conspiracy theorists think anything happened, so as to hopefully make the public more wary in the next election.
Yow, that's bleak, but true. No substantial improvements have been made since the last election. If I showed up to vote and saw electronic voting machines, I might very well just leave, to avoid having my vote turned into a vote for someone else (a Republican). The truth is people should be scared about this, but you know, people should have been scared of a Katrina before that happened too.
I hate to say it but the vast right-wing conspiracy has the upper-hand on this one. I guess there's some motivation on the part of news sources not to discuss the issue because it seems like hammering a partisan point...but it's not. On the one hand the NY Times will editorialize about isolated incidents in which electronic voting machines were tampered with, but on the other won't discuss any incidents of voter fraud that don't involve the questionable use of voting machines, which comprise a significant portion of the alleged fraud that took place in Ohio on that day. I guess the problem is the theory is too closely associated with those who'd rather Kerry in office, but the motivation of those telling the stories shouldn't be the only criteria by which to judge the validity of the stories.
Well, I just don't know that as polarized as we still are, anyone can really make a dent in the opinions of opposition members. It's stupid, to be sure, but people have gotten used to turning on either Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern and tuning out what they don't want to hear.
If we go on this way much longer, we're headed for disaster.
We're not there already? ; )
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