Forwarded with Compliments of Free Voice of America (FVOA): Accurate News and Interesting Commentary for Amerika's Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free. -- NOTE: Thanks to Sue Supriano for this. -- kl, pp
From the Guardian/UK via <www.commondreams.org>
Monday, October 18, 2004
Any Means Necessary
In the 60s, Police Dogs and Billy Clubs Kept Black Americans from the Polls.
Today's Methods Are More Refined.
By Gary Younge
> There is nothing George Bush likes more than extolling the virtues of democracy
> in faraway places. On October 8, during the second presidential debate, he
> promised: "Freedom is on the march. Tomorrow, Afghanistan will be voting for a
> president."
Apparently some Afghans enjoyed their new freedoms so much, they
> voted for the US surrogate, Hamid Karzai, several times over, after the ink used
> to mark voters' thumbs wore off. By the middle of the day, all 15 of Karzai's
> challengers had withdrawn. Freedom was not even limping let alone marching.
> "Today's election is not a legitimate election," said Abdul Satar Sirat, after he
> and the other disgruntled candidates had met in his house. Bush's national
> security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, knew better. "This election is going to be
> judged legitimate," she said. "I'm just certain of it." When it comes to fixing elections, the Bush administration has a way of making the lame walk.
> By Monday an exit poll funded by the US government and conducted by the
> International Republican Institute, which has links to the Republican party,
> revealed Karzai as a comfortable winner. After diplomatic arm-twisting by the US
> ambassador, the 15 challengers withdrew their withdrawals. It was a miracle. A
> few days later, in the final presidential debate, Bush would literally claim
> divine intervention. "In Afghanistan, I believe that the freedom there is a gift
> from the Almighty."
> Back in the US, however, the Almighty seems far less generous. Bush's enthusiasm
> to export democracy is not matched by his desire to defend it at home. With just
> a fortnight to go to the presidential election, efforts to obstruct and deny the
> vote, particularly to black and Latino voters, are intensifying. Forty years
> after the civil rights act enshrined the franchise in the constitution for
> African-Americans, freedom is being crippled.
> The group most likely to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they are ostensibly
> extending democracy and freedom - African-Americans - is most likely to be denied
> those rights in the US. There is nothing new in this contradiction. In the cold
> war, when the US lectured the eastern bloc on the delights of democracy, black
> Americans couldn't vote.
> The issue of disenfranchisement does not affect only minorities. The use of
> electronic voting in many states, using machines that leave no paper trail, has
> sent confidence that a fair election is likely, or even possible, into freefall.
> Once dismissed as the obsession of conspiracy theorists, fear of fraud is now
> mainstream. "Will your vote be counted?" asks the cover of Newsweek. "Election
> protests already started: Fraud intimidation alleged in key states," says a USA
> Today front page.
> The former employee of a company hired by the Republican party to register voters
> in Nevada says he was told to throw Democrats' registration forms away. And last
> January, the Republican Ellyn Bogdanoff won a seat in Florida's senate by just 12
> votes, out of almost 11,000 cast. According to state law there should have been
> an automatic recount; moreover, 137 votes emerged blank. But because the voting
> had been done by machine there was nothing to recount. Bogdanoff took the seat.
> The machines will be used on November 2.
> Sometimes these efforts bear the official imprimatur of local officials. Given
> the debacle in Florida four years ago, you would think the governor (Bush's
> brother Jeb) would be anxious to ensure that anyone who wants to vote can.
> Instead he has introduced a rule that registration forms should be rejected if a
> citizenship check box is not complete - even when people have signed an oath on
> the same form declaring themselves to be US citizens. Meanwhile Ohio's Republican
> secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, attempted to enforce a rule by which only
> registration cards printed on heavy, 80lb paper stock would be accepted, claiming
> lighter cards might be shredded by postal equipment (meaning that voters who have
> to re-register on the heavier paper might not make it on time). And last summer
> the chief executive of Diebold, which makes many of the voting machines, said he
> was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to Bush.
> African-Americans, however, remain the principal target of the Republican
> campaign to block the vote. Unlike the 60s, when black Americans were barred from
> the polls by police dogs, water cannon and billy clubs, the means today are more
> refined. Occasionally the mask slips. In July, John Pappageorge, Michigan's
> Republican state legislator, told a Republican meeting: "If we do not suppress
> the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election cycle."
> Detroit is more than 80% black. It does not take a genius to work out whose votes
> he was keen to suppress.
> So far it has mainly been a mix of petty harassment and bureaucratic pedantry,
> devised to intimidate newly registered and poor voters, a huge proportion of whom
> are black and Latino. Take Florida. According to the Washington Post,
> African-Americans in Republican-run Duval county were the most likely to have
> their voter registration forms rejected, while rejections for Democrats
> outnumbered Republicans by three to one. In 2000, 42% of ballots rejected by the
> Duval county election board came from mainly black areas.
> In Ohio, Mr Blackwell also told election boards that anyone who turned up at the
> wrong polling station would not be able to cast a provisional ballot (to be
> verified later). The Democrats successfully sued, saying that the ruling would
> disadvantage minority and poor voters, who tend to move more often.
> It is not difficult to fathom what is driving these efforts, which are being
> replicated throughout the country. The best indication of how an American will
> vote is race. More than 80% of African-Americans voted Democrat in the last
> election. Incapable of persuading them to vote Republican, Republicans now seek
> to prevent them voting Democrat.
> This task has become particularly urgent because voter registration recently
> ended in many states, revealing that voter rolls in black and Latino areas have
> swollen in far greater numbers than in Republican precincts. Between the last
> election and August this year, almost 200,000 additional black voters were
> registered in Florida.
> So while these attempts are clearly racial in nature, they are essentially
> partisan in motivation. With apologies to Malcolm X, they are about winning by
> any means necessary. Republicans support democracy when democracy supports
> Republicans. But they are equally happy to do without it when it is inconvenient.
> That was always true abroad, from Venezuela to Nicaragua and Pakistan to Saudi
> Arabia. Now it is true at home, from Detroit to Duval County.
> Freedom is on the retreat. And the man who assumed office four years ago--thanks
> to thousands of disenfranchised black voters--is again leading the charge.
> © 2004 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.
Sue Supriano: Steppin' Out of Babylon - Radio Interviews
http://www.suesupriano.com
------------------------------------------------
"In Germany first they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up." -- Pastor Martin Niemoller
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om 2">
