-Caveat Lector-
RadTimes # 115 November, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.
"We're living in rad times!"
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QUOTE:
"A man is none the less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new
master once in a term of years. Neither are a people any the less slaves
because they are permitted periodically to choose new masters. What makes
them slaves is the fact that they now, and are always hereafter to be, in
the hands of men whose power over them is, and always is to be, absolute
and irresponsible."
--Lysander Spooner, 'No Treason'
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Contents:
---------------
--How Gore Lost the Green Vote
--U.S. Elections: Racist Then, Racist Now
--Hack the Vote!
--I Can Tell You Who Lost
--Republicans ready with 'doomsday scenario'
--Stolen Florida Voting Machine Turns Up on eBay
Linked stories:
*Voter Fraud Ad In USA Today
*A fluke? A crisis? No, the future
*Let the spin cycle begin
*James Baker: Accept the recount, Al..
*The disappearing ballots of Duval County
*The woman under fire [Katherine Harris]
*The fallacy of Nixon's graceful exit
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Begin stories:
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How Gore Lost the Green Vote
by Charlene Spretnak
November 19, 2000
San Francisco Chronicle
IN THE CURRENT railing by liberal journalists and pundits against Ralph
Nader's presidential candidacy on the Green Party ticket, I have yet to see
anyone concede a basic fact of democracy: minority parties do not run
candidates merely as a symbolic gesture or to be "spoilers." On the local
level, they run to win. On the state and national levels, they run to
demonstrate enough clout in the voting booths -- or in the ubiquitous pre-
election opinion polls -- that one or both of the majority parties have to
make concessions on various issues. With an enormous amount of grass-roots
effort, the status quo can thus be moved via the democratic electoral process.
As the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush became almost even in the
final two weeks of the campaign, I expected the Democrats to do what
majority parties all over the world do when they realize they cannot
prevail at the polls without appealing to a particular minority party. In
Europe, for instance, liberal parties have often formed reluctant but
effective coalitions with the Green Party for the past decade. On local
levels, Greens and conservatives have sometimes joined forces when the
liberals have tried to impose overdevelopment. In our own country's
history, minority parties have pressured majority parties sufficiently to
effect changes in policy.
This scenario for the Greens seemed so obvious that I included it in a
story I wrote in 1996 as the closing chapter in "The Resurgence of the
Real," a nonfiction book published by Addison-Wesley in March 1997.
In the story, set in 2024 in an American heartland city, a character
explains what transpired in the presidential election of 2000: Al Gore,
running against unspecified Republican and Green candidates, realized
around the third week of October that he would probably lose without the
support of a large number of Green voters. He finally made some concessions
in various areas and won handily.
This fall, I watched with surprise as the actual Campaign 2000 began to
match my story. When the Gore camp finally began worrying aloud about the
Greens, I thought, "If you want to pick up some Green votes, Al, now's the
time to publicly promise those voters you'll make concessions." Although
Nader declined to meet with Gore, in late October, the Gore camp never
revealed publicly whether they sought the meeting in order to ask him to
withdraw from the election or to propose concessions. If the latter, Gore
surely would have gone public with those proposed concessions in a direct
appeal to Green voters.
If the Gore camp never considered concessions, was it because the
Democratic Party is now so thoroughly pro-corporate that no movement
whatsoever in the Green direction is possible?
I am not suggesting that the Green Party leadership (the national
Coordinating Council) would have entered into negotiations with Gore, as
Greens everywhere were working hard to win at least 5 percent of the vote.
However, in the final week of the campaign in the closely contested states,
many Green voters were becoming ambivalent, as the polls showed. Many were
hoping for a way to help Gore without abandoning the Green platform, which
was the product of years of grass-roots effort. Gore could have
demonstrated that he had read the Green Party platform
<<3d.htm>www.gp.<3d.htm>org> and had identified several issues on which he
could publicly promise action, far more action than the Democratic Party
was otherwise likely to take. In that way, he surely would have gained some
badly needed votes.
When Gore finally began to address those crucial Green voters in the
closely contested states, however, it was clear that he and his advisers
had made a colossally self-defeating decision: Gore's response was to
lecture, hector and threaten the Greens. In Minnesota, this strategy
reportedly caused Nader's support to increase by 10 percent almost
immediately. Yet Gore maintained and intensified the attack. The Gore
campaign did not even bother to find out what the 16-year-old Green Party
movement in the United States stands for, assuming instead that we are
simply disaffected Democrats with some ecology tacked on. His failure to
make concessions as he canvassed those crucial states in the eleventh hour
reflects the Democratic Party's bankruptcy regarding issue-based politics.
During the final week of the campaign, the Democrats addressed Green voters
as naughty children who needed to be whipped into shape. That metaphor is
now commonly used by the anti-Nader liberal media: the pro-corporate people
are the grown-ups, while grass-roots groups calling for sound alternatives
are mere children. Yet, Nader noted, after the election the Green Party now
has a national mandate of several million voters and supporters to be the
watchdog party that pressures the corporate parties.
Although the Democrats do not admit it publicly, there is no denying that
one of Gore's crucial errors in the late stages of the campaign was his
decision not to treat the Greens as a legitimate political force in our
democracy.
----
Charlene Spretnak is a co-founder of the Green Party movement in the United
States and is co-author of "Green Politics: The Global Promise" (Dutton,
1984). She lives in Half Moon Bay.
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U.S. Elections: Racist Then, Racist Now
November 14, 2000
by Juliet Ucelli
Freedom Road Socialist Organization <www.freedomroad.org>
What the Media Aren't Telling You About the Electoral College
The papers are full of the controversy over Florida's 25 votes in the
Electoral College. Al Gore has a 200,000 vote lead over George Bush
nationwide, a larger margin than is likely to disappear in any recount.
How come he hasn't been elected President? Answer: Because we don't elect
Presidents directly. If Gore doesn't get 270 votes in the Electoral College,
he could be ten million votes ahead and Bush still would be elected. The
Electoral College has a nasty history, dating to the very formation of the
United States. After the 13 colonies won independence from Britain, the
Electoral College was developed as a mechanism to keep the slave system in the
Southern states intact. The Northern states had more free citizens and had
begun to ban slavery within their borders. The Southern slaveocracy feared
that their brutal system might be outlawed under the new Constitution. A
compromise was arrived at to get the Southern states on board for the new
country.
Remember that old business about a slave being 3/5 of a man? It is directly
related to this deal cut between the rulers of the Northern states and those
in the South. The result was that the US Constitution said each slave - man,
woman or child, actually - would count as 3/5 of a person for purposes of
determining a state's population and thus how many votes it got in the House
of Representatives - and in the Electoral College! Of course, these "other
Persons," as the Constitution delicately called them, were not to be
permitted to cast their own 3/5 of a vote. Only white male property owners
could vote, selecting electors who would vote for the president.
Thus, the turmoil and political infighting that fills the news these days has
its roots directly in the racist and undemocratic history of this country.
What the Media Aren't Telling You About:
How Racism Determined the Vote in Florida
White supremacy in US elections isn't just history. It's alive and well, and
the Florida vote proves it. There have been plenty of news stories about how
racist officials prevented people of color from voting in various counties.
Naturalized Haitian and Mexican citizens were harassed and pushed out of
polling places. Students at traditionally Black Bethune-Cookman College in
Daytona Beach were told that they weren't registered or that they would have
to go to their hometowns to vote. Ballots in Black precincts were thrown out
as flawed at twice the rate of those in mainly white areas.
Such attacks on democracy are an outrage, but they pale before one cold fact:
31.2 percent of all adult Black men in the state of Florida are banned from
voting - for life. That's right, more than 200,000 Black men in Florida can't
vote because they have been convicted of felonies - and there are 200,000
Latino and poor white men and some women in the same boat. It doesn't matter
if their crime is 30 years in the past, if they have served their time, if
they are model citizens today, Florida is one of ten states, mostly in the
South, with laws which strip the right to vote from felons. And Florida is
noted for bringing felony charges against African Americans at a much higher
rate than whites accused of identical crimes.
As with the Electoral College, this law has its roots deep in the racism that
pervades US history. Only a few states permit men and women in prison on
felony charges to vote, but most restore folks who have done their time to
full citizenship. Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and the other states with
these laws had put them into effect after the Civil War and Reconstruction as
one ploy to try and deprive freed slaves of the right to citizenship they had
so recently won. Eventually the white supremacist system prevailed and once
again African Americans were counted to determine how many electoral votes a
state got, but couldn't vote themselves. It took until the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960s for Black people in the South to win back the right to
vote.
These laws about felons stayed on the books and are now being used as a
stealth program to bring back the Jim Crow days of second-class citizenship
and powerlessness for African Americans.
If even a fraction of those 200,000 Black men had voted, does anyone
seriously believe we would be sitting around these days watching talking
heads debate endlessly on television about how close the Florida vote is,
about butterfly ballots, chads, hand recounts and foreign mail deadlines?
Don't hold your breath waiting for the politicians and the media to bring it
up, though. Like the battle against slavery and like the Civil Rights
Movement, it will take a movement from the bottom up to beat back this racist
attack.
And like the struggle for civil rights in the 60s, the voting booth is only
one battlefield. While we fight every attempt to take away the right to vote,
we have to fight e very other move to turn back the clock. This means
building the movements to resist the prison-industrial complex and police
violence, to demand jobs and education, not incarceration for young people in
communities of color. As the old song goes, "They say that Freedom is a
constant struggle." We have to keep our eyes on the prize.
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Hack the Vote!
By Kevin Poulsen
November 14, 2000
<http://www.securityfocus.com/templates/article.html?id=114>
Internet voting may eliminate hanging chad and butterfly ballots, but what
about the vote-bots?
In the wake of the Florida vote-counting controversy, simple
point-and-click Internet elections may seem an attractive 21st Century
alternative to traditional cardboard and paper voting systems. But before
choosing a President becomes as simple as ordering a paperback from
Amazon.com, experts have to surmount an obstacle that makes butterfly
ballots look like a cake walk: the potential that hackers could create
custom programs that target voters' PCs en masse, and steal Internet elections.
"That's the big problem that everybody's working on," says Deborah
Phillips, president of the non-partisan Voting Integrity Project. "It's
that scenario that's keeping people up nights."
Several state governments are already exploring Internet voting, and a
handful of fiercely competitive companies have made tentative steps into
the field. In January, Alaska voters were given the opportunity to
participate in a Republican Party straw poll online, through the Bellevue,
Washington-based company VoteHere. Last March, thousands of U.S citizens
voted in Arizona's Democratic primary from home through Election.com.
Most of the security problems with Internet voting are, at least in theory,
solvable: Encryption can protect voter's privacy; digital signatures can
guard against vote tampering. And the servers that process votes can be
shored up against intrusion.
But in an era where home and office computer users continue to fall prey to
viruses and worms, it's harder to ensure that a vote hasn't been changed by
a program that has secret control of the voter's machine.
Such a malicious program could spread like a virus, by mailing itself
around as an attachment, or in the
way of Back Orifice or Sub Seven: as a Trojan horse hidden within another,
seemingly benign, program. Once installed, it would lie dormant until the
first Tuesday in November.
On Election Day, when the victim fills out his or her electronic ballot,
the vote-bot would quietly intervene
-- changing the vote before it's encrypted and transmitted over the net.
"The election center is not going to know that the ballot is corrupted,"
says Phillips.
"A good hack of those kinds of systems wouldn't even be visible," says
Lauren Weinstein, cofounder of People For Internet Responsibility and a
vocal critic of web elections. "Basically, what you have is a situation
where people's PCs are voting." Multiplied by tens of thousands of infected
PCs, "you could actually manipulate elections that way," says Weinstein.
Hacker Challenge
So troubling is the vote-bot problem that some early supporters of
web-based voting are backing away from the idea of turning home PCs into
voting booths. "The most important thing is that the voting machine is
trusted," says Jim Adler, founder and CEO of VoteHere. "And you if you
think about today's home PCs, it's hard to trust it for anything, as
promiscuous as they are."
In this year's election, VoteHere ran a kiosk-based "shadow election" trial
at three polling places in Arizona and California , on Internet connected
PCs shorn of harddrives and dedicated exclusively to the vote. Adler
believes the future of home voting is with Internet appliances that are
easier to secure than PCs, such as PDAs, interactive television devices, or
web-enabled cell phones. "When Internet voting does come to the home, it
probably won't be on the PC," says Adler.
Ed Gerck, CEO of California-based SafeVote, disagrees. The company showed
its faith in home Internet voting by issuing a public challenge for hackers
to attack SafeVote's patented voting system during a non-binding trial at a
California polling place. No one, says Gerck, succeeded. "We used vanilla
PCs," Gerck says. "We were on the Internet 24 hours a day for five days...
and no attacker was successful."
Critics of web elections argue that so-called "hacker challenges" have more
PR value than technical merit, and remain unconvinced that home Internet
voting will be secure in the foreseeable future, on any platform.
"The people pushing these systems say you can vote in your pajamas," says
Weinstein. "But do we really want to go down that road and have it end with
something that makes Florida look like a walk in the park?"
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I Can Tell You Who Lost
by Husayn Al-Kurdi
Editor of the Portland Free Press
November 21, 2000
Halloween came one week late this year. A corporate-fascist Democrat, an
Oily Nazi born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a consumer advocate
pretending to "revive" a "democracy" that never existed joined in
conducting an electoral charade whose formal outcome is remains uncertain
as we go to press. Although we do not have a declared winner, I can tell
you who lost. We, the American people, and the people of the world, lost.
The plutocracy selects, the beguiled voters elect and the most powerful and
dangerous entity in known history is "confirmed" and thus certified as the
system of choice. Every four years, we collectively practice falling off
the turnip truck, pleasing our overlords and confirming their uncontested
hegemony. Just as I can tell you who lost, I can identify the usual
winners those who have owned and operated the country for over 200 years.
The distribution of membership in socio-economic classes has been a
constant. In 1953, a study published by the University of Chicago assessed
the class situation in the following terms:
upper-upper 1.4%
lower-upper 1.6%
upper-middle 10%
lower-middle 28%
upper-lower 33%
lower-lower 25%
(source: M. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality, University of
Chicago, 1953)
Note that 86% of the population are in the "lower-middle" down to
"lower-lower" category. The picture hasn't changed much since then, or
since 1776.
As exemplified by the Bush Pit Vipers, the Clintons and Gores, et al., a
Criminal Lawyer Politician (I repeat myself) Managerial Elite runs the
political circus on behalf of itself and its sponsors.
Muckraker Lincoln Steffens summarized the situation over a century ago when
he declared, "Thats the system. Its an organization of social treason, and
the political boss is the chief traitor". Our "society" is run by its worst
elements, as described by poet E.E. Cummings: "A politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man".
Although Nader is a reformist who seeks to make the system more palatable
as opposed to uprooting it, he did accurately describe the two principal
contestants for captain of the Titanic. We had the spectacle of a "Giant
corporation running for president, disguised as a person" vs. a
"Fork-tongued, Pinocchio-nosed certified political coward". Actually, the
terms are interchangeable, with both Gore and Bush filling either description.
Naders explicit goal was to gain 5% of the vote, get federal matching funds
and turn the Greens into a "disciplinary watch-dog" on the Republicrats. He
is undeniably pro-capitalism. His "consumer interest group" approach is
part and parcel of the panoply of pseudo-"Alternatives" paraded by the
Establishment to stultify popular aspirations. As Nader-hanger-on and
erstwhile "progressive" figure Jim Hightower put it, "We better be building
something new or these people are going to be in serious rebellion". Of
course, Hightower hopes that "This ends up in the Democratic Party".
Nader confirmed his system-enhancing thrust in Harpers (September 2000):
"Change invariably begins with people whom the defenders of the status quo
denounce as agitators, communists, hippies, weirdoes. And then, 10 or 20
years later, after the changes have taken place, the Chamber of Commerce
discovers that everybody's profits have improved". The capitalist "bottom
line" herein invoked is the very "principle" to be done away with as the
practical basis for what currently passes itself off as "society".
The Socialist Party Platform of 1912 describes a situation similar to our
own, in which, "Under this system the industrial equipment of the nation
has passed into the absolute control of a plutocracy", with "multitudes of
unemployed" (we have up to 10 million homeless persons and many millions
who are out of work but not "officially" unemployed) and "Republican and
Democrat Parties reminding the faithful servants of the oppressors".
Similar plaints echo through our history, from the "Anti-Federalists" of
the aborted Revolution of 1776 to a variety of populist and popular
insurgencies spanning over over the past century. Whether at the birth of
America, my fathers birth year (1912), the period when I was growing up
(the 1950s) or the present day, the configuration of power and the system
for which it stands has been a constant given. It has given us the world
war, mass murder, brutal exploitation and insufferable oppression.
As stated by Frederick T. Martin in Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons
(1934):
"It matters not one iota which political party is in power, or what
President holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public
thinkers; we are the rich, we own America; we got it God knows how; but we
intend to keep it if we can . . .".
Two metaphors come to mind. One is that conjured up by Ace Hayes ... that
of scorpions in a bottle:
We the people stinging each other on command. The other involves a scenario
in which they rattle our cage once too often, causing enough people to see
the enemy clearly enough to start vanquishing it.
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Republicans ready with 'doomsday scenario'
By Ben Fenton in Washington
21 Nov 2000
Divided America holds its breath
REPUBLICAN leaders in Washington are preparing the ground for a bitter battle
with Al Gore should he be declared the winner of the ballot in Florida and so
win the state's crucial 25 electoral college votes.
Former senator Bob Dole, who lost to Bill Clinton in the 1996 presidential
election, has said he had even heard rumours of a boycott of a Gore
inauguration by Republican members of Congress if the Democrat wins.
Tom DeLay, the chief whip of the party in the House of Representatives, has
sent his colleagues a memo which reminds them that the constitution allows
both houses of Congress to reject Florida's votes if majorities in the two
chambers agree the ballot was tainted.
Nobody has yet suggested doing this, but it has been discussed at a high
level in the Republican party and is referred to as the "doomsday scenario".
Roy Blunt, Mr DeLay's deputy, said that if Mr Gore won in Florida "it would
be difficult for people to believe that the process wasn't cynically
manipulated at the end".
But Democrats have given warning that any attempt by their Republican rivals
to challenge the Florida vote would badly affect the chances of bipartisan
co-operation in Congress. "If Republicans try to invalidate electoral votes,
that certainly would poison the well," Martin Frost, the chairman of the
Democratic Caucus in the House of Representatives, said.
The emerging picture is that Democrats would be far more willing to work with
a George W Bush as President at the end of the fraught election process than
Republicans would with Al Gore in the White House. "Mr Bush could walk into
meetings with congressional leaders with no history or baggage, but Gore has
a history," Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, said.
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Stolen Florida Voting Machine Turns Up on eBay
<http://www.apbnews.com/newscenter/breakingnews/2000/11/17/vote1117_01.html>
Pair Accused of Trying to Profit From Election Controversy
Nov. 17, 2000
By Rick Sarlat
LAKE WORTH, Fla. (APBnews.com) -- Two men apparently seeking to cash in on
the election controversy in Palm Beach County have been arrested for
allegedly trying to sell a stolen voting machine on the Internet.
Mark B. Richter, 41, and Steven R. Solomon, 43, both of Lake Worth, were
charged Thursday with unlawful possession of a voting machine and dealing
in stolen property, said Special Agent Supervisor Michael D. Washam of the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE).
Solomon, who was carrying a gun at the time of his arrest, was also charged
with possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony, police said.
Offered for $2,000
Washam said the machine was taken from the Winston Trails Clubhouse, a Palm
Beach County polling place, sometime on Nov. 9, two days after the
election. Polling machines were being stored at each precinct throughout
the county until Elections Department officials could pick them up, he said.
Police were tipped off by an elections official who saw an advertisement on
the popular auction site eBay.com.
"They were advertising the sale of a voting machine complete with the
butterfly ballot for $2,000," Washam said.
Washam said state agents immediately began investigating and set up a sting
in which one posed as a potential buyer for the machine and the
controversial ballot, which some claim was confusing and led people to vote
for the wrong presidential candidate.
Agent seeks deal
Special Agent John Marinello of the Palm Beach FDLE office sent an e-mail
to the advertiser and was given a telephone number to call. Police said
Marinello began negotiating with Richter, who then increased the price to
$20,000.
"We told him that we'd be willing to pay more than $2,000 if we could first
see if it's the real thing," Washam said.
Marinello arranged to meet Richter and Solomon at Latana Road and Military
Trail at 5 p.m. Thursday, police said.
During the meeting, Richter and Solomon displayed the small voting machine
and attempted to negotiate a price of $4,000. They were arrested by FDLE
agents, Washam said.
Both men were being held today at the Palm Beach County Jail on $200,000
bail. If convicted, each man could face a maximum of five years in prison.
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Linked stories:
********************
Voter Fraud Ad In USA Today
<http://www.newsmax.com/voter_fraud.shtml>
<http://www.newsmax.com/voterfraud.pdf>
********************
A fluke? A crisis? No, the future
<http://bf.salon.com/XART0709A7F33B5383EF>
The close presidential contest illustrates the triumph of
the test-marketed candidacy.
********************
Let the spin cycle begin
<http://bf.salon.com/XART0709A7FD3B5383EF>
As the recount continues, the pundits on both sides launch
a vigorous public-relations battle.
********************
James Baker: Accept the recount, Al..
<http://bf.salon.com/XART0709A7FB3B5383EF>
A transcript of a statement by the former secretary of state,
who says the vice president lost the Florida vote and should
concede to Bush.
********************
The disappearing ballots of Duval County
<http://bf.salon.com/XART0709A6153B5383EF>
More than 22,000 were tossed out in this Republican stronghold,
but most of them were cast in minority, Democratic neighborhoods,
and the Gore camp is crying foul.
********************
The woman under fire
<http://bf.salon.com/XART0709A6133B5383EF>
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris is suddenly Democrats'
enemy No. 1 -- and they have lots of ammo to use against her.
********************
The fallacy of Nixon's graceful exit
<http://bf.salon.com/XART0709A61B3B5383EF>
In 1960, the GOP candidate fought hard behind the scenes to make
sure the election wasn't stolen from him -- just as Al Gore should do.
********************
======================================================
"Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control."
-Jim Dodge
======================================================
"Communications without intelligence is noise;
intelligence without communications is irrelevant."
-Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
======================================================
"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
-J. Krishnamurti
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