The Assam Tribune
Guwahati, Wednesday, November 3, 2004 EDITORIAL
MESSAGE FOR TODAY Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan.
---- JOHN F KENNEDY
Bush or Kerry ?
The spectre of 2000 US elections continue to haunt that highly polarised nation. Four years ago, for the maiden time in the history of USA, the margin of error was bigger than the margin of victory. Bush ultimately bagged the battleground state of Florida by 537 votes. And, all its 25 electoral colleges had to back him. It was a typical ‘The winner-take-all’ system at work thereby giving him the presidency. This is despite the fact that Al Gore had won half a million more votes than Bush. Thus, though there is a raging debate on in USA over the very fundamentals of this system, yet the voters know that even a few hundred votes in the ‘swing’ states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Missouri and Ohio could be crucial in this close battle between Republican George W Bush and Democrat John Kerry. This time too, there are apprehensions galore of the voting errors, infamous ‘butterfly ballots’ and ‘hanging chads’ that had disenfranchised thousands of voters in Flor! ida. Convicts in US do not have voting rights. They were felons too and had an unusually high proportion of Blacks. Incidentally, the African Americans form approximately 15 per cent of the American population and view voting as a privilege and not a right in an affirmative way. They normally support the Democrats. What is more, Florida is one of the six states in America where even the ex-felons lose their right to franchise unless they are allowed to vote by the governor. The Republicans knew that to win Florida they had to restrain the Blacks from turning out to vote, and thus played the strategy. Fortunately, after the media exposed the list, this move was dropped this time. But, in the post-poll phase, shadows of legal wrangles loom large.
The poll process in USA is carried out by election supervisors at the county level, and laws as well as procedures differ from county to county. Nonetheless, in spite of electoral reforms being put in place, people are largely sceptical about the entire process: There are queries about electronic voting machines, voter registration, absentee balloting and provisional ballots. These question marks have put the road to the White House in doubt, to say the least. After the 2000 fiasco and the enactment of the ‘Help America Vote Act’ in 2002, there was a move to give the state money to upgrade technology. But very few opted. This time, only 15 of the 67 counties in Florida are using the EVMs following widespread belief that they may have been programmed to steal an election. Many actually chose the old system of punchcards. What made matters worse was the promise of a CEO of one of the companies in Ohio providing the machines. He, in a fundraising letter, promised to ! deliver the state to President Bush. Therefore is the demand in US that these machines should not be used unless there is the safeguard of a ‘paper trail’ that is a parallel paper record to facilitate recount.A key poll plank this time is stem cell research. While on one hand it would enable any Dr Frankenstein to degrade humanity on the other it is portrayed as a remedy for all kinds of diseases. President Bill Clinton had allowed the use of federal funds for its research whereas Bush on August 9, 2001, imposed a ban on it save for some 60 lines already established by then. Support for ‘Proposition 71’ – the initiative under which $3 billion in state funds are to be used to power embryonic stem cell research – forced California governor and now Kennedy kin Arnold Schwarzenegger to break ranks with his Republican party. Notably, in an endorsement recorded about a week before his death, paralysed ‘Superman’ star Christopher Reeve had urged the Californians to back the controversial research when they vote in the November 2 referendum. Kerry has stolen the show here by accusing Bush of sacrificing life-saving science for right-wing dogma and pledges his support to the research b! y overturning the ban. The other defining issue is, of course, terrorism of the Bin Laden mode. Though the issues raised by the US polls were bigger than this one single man, yet he definitely remains the most potent symbol. A poll on Saturday showed that the tape had not tipped the balance at all. In a bid to influence the voters in America, Laden offered a critique of US foreign policy, especially the administrations of President Bush and his father. He suggested to Americans that they have the power to stop the Qaeda attacks by rejecting candidates who attack the organization or who cause harm to the Muslims: “Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. It is in your hands!” While many feel that any change in leadership may affect the crusade against the fundamentalists there are others who say: “Bush has been in office and Osama is still running around. I don’t know if Kerry can do a better job, but maybe it’s worth trying somebody new.”
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