Politics: How To Steal An Election
Here and Nationwide, One Party’s Scheme Has Already Hatched
Media of all sorts – print, broadcast, internet, you name it – are all abuzz about the apparent attempt by Vladimir Putin’s backers to steal the recent Russian parliamentary elections. And of the resulting mass protests that such blatant vote-rigging and ballot box stuffing – some of it allegedly caught on video and since uploaded for all the world to see – has spawned.
What audacity. What brazenness. How dare they think they can rig an election.
Oh, yes, it would be quite easy to condemn certain Russians, if only it didn’t make us seem like Pecksniffian hypocrites.
Because it’s not exclusively Putin and the recent Russian elections to whom and to which I refer when I say, how dare they.
I’m also referring to certain Americans in our own country who are as much as plotting, scheming, conspiring – yet in the most legit-appearing of ways – to do the same thing on our own turf:
Steal the next election and others thereafter.
I’m talking about the Republican Party.
Whichever of these Seven Dwarfs wins the top prize and becomes the 2012 GOP presidential nominee will reap the benefits of a nefarious scheme that has been unfolding this year all across the nation, including here.
You might not have noticed it, for they’ve cleverly and slyly plied their burglar tools as stealthily as a midnight bandit inside a bank, one end of a stethoscope in his ear, the other on the combination dial of the bank vault’s door, careful not to make too much noise.
GOP lawmakers in 38 states introduced legislation this year crafted to impede voters at every step of the electoral process. It’s a systematic effort that has been engineered by the American Legislative Exchange Council, bankrolled in part by those infamous billionaire Koch boys (David and Charles) whose checkbook has helped underwrite the Tea Party and other American crap.
Having seen the handwriting on the wall with the Obama victory in ’08, and ruthlessly determined not to let there be a repeat of that, Republicans across the nation have orchestrated an effort to drive Democratic voters away from the polls and stifle the growing numbers of those intending to register. A dozen states have already okayed new roadblocks to voting:
- Florida and Texas have made it more difficult for organizations like the League of Women Voters to sign up new voters.
- Maine did away with Election Day voter registration.
- Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee, and West Virginia all cut short their early voting periods.
- Florida and Iowa banned ex-felons from the polls, disenfranchising thousands of previously eligible voters.
- Kansas and Alabama now require proof of citizenship of all new voter registrants.
- Alabama, Kansas, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin will now require voters to show a government-issued ID before being allowed to cast ballots. More than 10% of Americans lack such identification; 18% of young voters and 25% of African-Americans do, two traditionally Democratic-leaning constituencies.
“One of the most pervasive political movements going on outside Washington today,” Bill Clinton told a group of students this summer, “is the disciplined, passionate, determined effort of Republican governors and legislators to keep most of you from voting next time.
“Why is this going on?” Clinton asked. “This is not rocket science. They are trying to make the 2012 electorate look more like the 2010 electorate than the 2008 electorate. There has never been in my lifetime, since we got rid of the poll tax and all the Jim Crow burdens on voting, the determined effort to limit the franchise that we see today.”
It’s not hard to see why the GOP perceives their future chances at winning the White House as threatened. The demographics don’t favor the Republicans one bit.
They don’t have the youth vote. They don’t have the African-American vote. They don’t have the gay vote. They’re treading water with the Hispanic vote. About the only ones they can count on anymore are white, non-college educated males and the elderly.
That last segment is being gradually attritioned out of the electoral system thanks to a phenomenon called, uh, death. But they’re not being replaced by young voters, who, by large margins, registered and voted Democratic in the last two major election cycles, ’04 and ’08.
Such dwindling, dismal demographics does not a winning party make. Republicans – the smarter ones anyway – know it, sense it, smell it, and recognize that they are in deep shit.
Trotting out from their closet the same dusty, musty antiquated agenda every four years that features tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans, the abolition of a woman’s pro-choice reproductive rights, a homophobia about gays in the military or in a wedding ceremony, and a resistance to financial regulatory reform, climate change science, and government’s role in environmental protection endears them to ever fewer mainstream American voters.
So they’ve turned to the only other option left to them, jimmying with the electoral process, the burglars that they are.
Republicans will claim they’re really waging a war on rampant voter fraud, a problem that morally-bankrupt GOP dirty trickster and mud pie baker Karl Rove called “an enormous and growing” one. He outlandishly told the Republican National Lawyers Association (an oily- and ignoble-sounding contingent if ever there was) that in some parts of the country “we are beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are colonels in mirrored sunglasses.
But a major investigation conducted by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 (during which span of years, please note, “Turd Blossom’s” boss – Dubya – was in charge) failed to prosecute a single American for fraudulently posing as an eligible voter, a crime all these GOP anti-fraud laws are supposedly intended to halt. Indeed, of 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud. And most of those were immigrants and former felons who were merely unaware they were ineligible
Joked Stephen Colbert: “Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere.
The GOP started crying bloody murder about voter fraud only after Obama’s win in ’08. (“Verrry interesting,” as Laugh-In’s Arte Johnson-playing German soldier would say.)
“This latest flood of attacks on voting rights is a direct shot at the [demographic groups] that came out in historic numbers for the first time in 2008 and put Obama over the top,” asserts election reform expert Tova Wang of the progressive think tank Demos.
And one who would surely understand about attacks on voting rights – for he got the daylights beaten out of him during ’60s civil rights protests defending them – is Congressman John Lewis of Georgia. Republicans are complicit, said he in a passionate floor speech in the House earlier this year, in a “deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.”
And right here, in the Sunshine State, the head cheerleader of the GOP effort to roll back Floridians’ voting rights has been our own chrome-domed Governor Train Wreck, who dutifully signed into law a bill passed by the GOP-controlled Legislature in May that makes it more difficult to register new voters and imposes stiff bureaucratic requirements and fines and threatens felony prosecution of anyone who runs afoul.
“Good old-fashioned voter suppression,” the League of Women Voters called it. For the past 70 years, the LWV registered new voters in the state. Not anymore; they’ve gotten out.
Rock the Vote, which registered 2.5 million new voters in ’08, may soon follow suit.
The new Florida registration law took effect the day after it was passed, under an emergency law designed for “an immediate danger to the public health, safety or welfare.” A danger? Let’s examine the evidence for any sign of a threat: In the last three years, the FDLE has gotten only 31 cases of suspected voter fraud, producing just 3 arrests in the entire state.
State senator Mike Fasano (R-New Port Richey) bucked his own party and voted against the bill. “No one could give me an example of all this fraud they speak about,” said he.
But that wasn’t all your state legislators did. Did you notice the abbreviated early voting access in elections this year? Thank Train Wreck and the GOP for that, too. Early voting helped shorten Election Day lines and helped increase voter turnout.
Early voting was “another reform we added that has helped provide access to the polls and provide a convenience. And we’re going to have a high voter turnout here, and I think that’s wonderful.” Those, the words of one Jeb Bush in 2004.
From cutting early voting hours to requiring photo IDs (in Rick Perry’s Texas, a concealed weapon permit is considered acceptable ID but a student ID is not – oops!), the GOP onslaught on voting rights is in contemptible, full swing. Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress last month that laws aimed at voter suppression are “inconsistent with what we say we are as a nation.” And if we say we love democracy, then it’s time that the members of one political party in particular start behaving like they do and less like Putin supporters in Russia.
If these repressive laws aren’t undone, then it’s time for the Obama Administration to man up and order Holder and his Justice Department to get in there and, using tools like the Voting Rights Act, forcibly undo them.
THE ASS-WIPE TROPHY
I find it dumbfoundedly incredible that even after all the billions we fork over annually to the Pentagon to safeguard us from our enemies, the military brass and all their well-fattened defense contractors somehow cannot correctly construct a stealth drone that will reliably self-destruct should it fall into enemy hands.
I trust the next time Leon Panetta is called to testify before a congressional armed services committee, one of our elected legislators will insist upon an explanation from the defense secretary and demand better of his department, this week’s roll of t.p. recipient.
