-------------------------- eGroups Sponsor -------------------------~-~> <FONT COLOR="#000099">eGroups eLerts It's Easy. It's Fun. Best of All, it's Free! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/9698/2/_/1406/_/974971892/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ---------------------------------------------------------------------_-> Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : US Elections The US election: Democrats bow to bullying from the Republican right By Patrick Martin 23 November 2000 Use this version to print Capitulating to the threat of violence from right-wing elements backing Republican candidate George W. Bush, the election board of Miami-Dade County voted Wednesday to call off its recount of the presidential vote and submit an admittedly inaccurate machine count as its official tally. The action means that the votes of more than 10,000 Miami residents will be excluded. The Democratic-controlled board took the unanimous action only two hours after it had decided to halt the full recount of 654,000 ballots cast in Miami and concentrate on the 10,000 so-called undervotes—ballots for which the punch-card machines failed to register a presidential selection—in order to meet the Sunday 5 p.m. deadline set by the Florida State Supreme Court. The initial decision was met with a calculated outburst of violence by a band of pro-Bush demonstrators who had been assembled in Miami by Republican Party officials. The two dozen demonstrators began shouting, "Cheaters," and "Vote fraud." They screamed at election officials when they attempted to remove the 10,000 disputed ballots to a smaller counting room where party observers could monitor the process, but the larger crowd would be excluded. The incident escalated to fascist-style thuggery when a Democratic Party attorney was mobbed as he walked through the building, with Bush supporters screaming that he had removed a ballot from the counting room and demanding his arrest. The attorney, who was holding only a sample ballot used to explain the vote-counting process, had to be rescued by police and escorted out of the building. It was in this atmosphere of intimidation that the election board decided to call off the recount entirely. Board member David Leahy admitted that the pro-Bush protests had played a role in the decision. Without the disruption, he said, "Speaking for myself, we'd be up there counting." After the election board's announcement, Republican officials gloated over the success of their strong-arm tactics. Florida Republican Party Chairman Al Cardenas declared, with a straight face, "We're happy that there's finality coming with respect to this election. Finally, we're getting some semblance of the rule of law here." The decision cuts off the hand recount in the most populous county in Florida, which Gore carried by a substantial margin. It also invalidates a 157-vote swing to Gore that was uncovered in the first stages of the hand recount, on Monday and Tuesday, when 23 percent of the county's precincts were re-counted. If uncounted Gore votes had continued to be restored at that rate in the rest of Miami-Dade, the Democratic candidate would have nearly eliminated Bush's nominal 930- vote lead in the statewide tally. The calling off of the Miami-Dade recount shows the political cowardice, not only of the local Democratic Party officials, but of the national Democratic Party and the media as well. Not one public official or media commentator has dared to speak the truth: that a right-wing mob has succeeded through force and intimidation in depriving thousands of Florida voters of their rights. All accept the pretense that the board made its decision because it lacked sufficient time to complete a full recount. Gore campaign officials immediately filed a lawsuit seeking a reversal of the Miami-Dade decision, which refers only cryptically to the intimidation of the board: "The Miami-Dade canvassing board decision today to halt its recount-for whatever reason-flies in the face of an unambiguous, unanimous Supreme Court decision of less than 24 hours ago." A Miami-Dade circuit judge denied the suit, and his decision will now be appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. As the New York Times noted Wednesday, there is a distinct difference in the intensity of the Democratic and Republican responses to the presidential election crisis. "Mr. Bush can take heart in that Republicans are more unified and more willing than Democrats to wage total war, at all levels legal and political, to reach the White House," the Times said. Kowtowing and passivity towards the fascist elements that infest the Republican Party has been a characteristic of both the Democratic Party and the media ever since the impeachment and trial of Bill Clinton, the result of a conspiracy of right-wing lawyers, judges, Republican congressional leaders and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr. Congressional Democrats voted against the impeachment and removal of the Democratic president, but they joined Clinton in covering up the political significance of this attempt by the extreme right to mount a pseudo-constitutional coup d'etat. The same social and political types that engineered the impeachment conspiracy are at work in Florida in the Bush campaign and the state government run by the presidential candidate's brother, Governor Jeb Bush. Earlier this year they were whipped into a frenzy over the Elian Gonzalez case, at one point declaring that federal laws and decisions would not be enforced in Miami-Dade because the right-wing Cuban exiles who had kidnapped the young Cuban were opposed to returning him to the custody of his father. ***** Florida follies Where every vote counts -- if it belongs to the right candidate. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Jake Tapper Nov. 21, 2000 | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- George Meros objected. Vigorously. And in his objection, and perhaps as well in his subsequent bout with laryngitis, there lies a symbol of the bipartisan nonsense playing out in Florida as the final few votes are disputed. Meros' role in this charade came Nov. 14, shortly after 1 p.m. EST, in courtroom 3-D at the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee. Election supervisor Ion Sancho, a 49-year-old Democrat, had called a special meeting of the county canvassing board. Since Election Day, 12 absentee ballots had turned up, and Sancho wanted them included in the county tally before the 5 p.m. deadline Secretary of State Katherine Harris had insisted would be the final cutoff for counties to submit their vote totals. Since Leon County had gone for Vice President Al Gore over Gov. George W. Bush 60 percent to 40 percent, Meros, a Tallahassee attorney representing Bush, clearly thought the 12 absentee ballots would favor Gore by a similar ratio. So he tried to have them scrapped. "They had no proof of receipt by 7 o'clock on the night of the election, as the statute requires," Meros says. "They had no proof that the ballots were in the safekeeping of the board, which is also what the statute requires." But where Meros argued the rule of law, Sancho saw overzealousness. "He treated the proceeding as if it were a criminal proceeding," Sancho recalls. "He said that I couldn't present these ballots to the canvassing board since I hadn't personally received them at the warehouse." Sancho had in fact investigated how the ballots ended up at the polling warehouse where the ballots are taken, and he ascertained that the ballots were legit. Meros didn't buy this. He called Sancho's investigation "hearsay." Sancho explained that seven of the ballots had been filled out by county employees who had been running the polling precincts on Election Day, and therefore didn't have time to show up to their precincts and vote. The county employee who collected these seven just happened to forget to turn them in to the county's "AB," or absentee ballot, department. There were two ballots that had been sent to Sancho's office through interdepartmental mail, which -- in the mail crush leading up to Nov. 7 -- no one had opened until after the election. Then there were three absentee ballots from voters who had recently changed addresses; the ballots were then hung up in the bureaucracy of the addressing office. Meros did everything he could to block the admissibility of the ballots. Led by County Judge Jim Harley, the canvassing board overruled him, pointing out that Sancho had the authority to accept them. Meros was not happy. Then they opened the ballots, right there, before Meros and the judge and about a dozen others. Ten votes for Bush; two for Gore. Meros and the other Republicans in the room "started smiling," Sancho recalls. "When it turned out to be a net gain of eight votes for George Bush, they thanked us for our great wisdom in overriding their objection. They left and we haven't heard from them since." Meros remembers it slightly differently. "We didn't 'thank them for their wisdom,' that's foolishness," he says. "When those votes were tallied, Judge Harley looked out and looked at me and said, 'Are there any more objections, George?' And everyone laughed. And I said, 'I'm not saying another word,' and thanked them for their time. I walked out of the room." Meros says his objection was principled, and denies he would have behaved any differently subsequent to the vote tally if it had favored Gore. But Democrats in Leon County snipe that had the vote gone the other way, the GOP would have cried, "Mischief," and held press conferences up and down Adams Street. And clearly this is a near-sightedness that cuts across party lines. "I see it all across the state," Sancho says. "Each side is simply trying to achieve its ends, uncover votes it believes will be favorable and suppress votes it believes will be unfavorable." It ain't pretty down here, in the nation's most phallic state, where Republican and Democratic operatives are doing everything they can to make sure their guy wins. Both sides are doing it, and in the process neither is doing much to elevate this process much above your average Panama City wet T-shirt contest. On the other side of the aisle, in Seminole County, a Democratic effort is underway to throw out all of the county's absentee ballots, which Bush won over Gore, 10,006 to 5,209. Before Nov. 7, the Seminole supervisor of elections, Republican Sandy Goard, allowed Republican operative Michael Leach and GOP volunteer Ryan Mitchell to spend 10 days camped out in her office, filling in missing voter identification numbers on about 4,700 absentee ballot requests that would have been otherwise rejected -- ballot requests that were part of a form letter campaign by the state GOP. Attorney Harry Jacobs -- a member of the county's Democratic Executive Board -- has taken Goard to court; Circuit Judge Debra Nelson will hear arguments Monday as to whether Goard's actions were illegal, constituting voter fraud. And while it all does seem a tad sleazy, experts say that it falls waaaay short of qualifying as a plot to disenfranchise 15,000 Floridians. Jacob's attorney, Richard Siwica, of Orlando, says he would prefer to only strike the 4,700 absentee ballots that were sent to voters under the questionable circumstances -- but it has yet to be determined whether those 4,700 have or can be segregated from the others. After massive absentee ballot fraud during the 1998 Miami mayor's race -- a scandal in which Gore attorney Kendall Coffey got his client installed as mayor by having every single absentee ballot thrown out - - Florida passed a statute that makes it illegal to request an absentee ballot for someone unless you're a member of that person's immediate family or their legal guardian. These Republican operatives are guilty of violating this law, Siwica says, which is a third- degree felony. But so what? I ask Siwica. I mean, didn't these voters end up voting the way they wanted to? "People voted and we don't know that they didn't vote any way other than the way that they wanted," he allows. "But the reality is that third-degree felonies occurred, and this is the remedy that the courts have recognized. There's no requirement that this altered what the will of the people is." Local Democrats weren't given the same opportunity to correct their voters' ballot request screw-ups, he points out. It's questionable that Siwica's request will be seriously considered. What is clear, however, is that the Gore team -- while not yet involved in the case -- is on top of the matter and monitoring it closely. Democrats are at least tacitly supporting this effort to throw out the more than 15,000 absentee ballots that went for Bush 2- to-1 because of what could be a mere technicality. Then there's the largely Democratic Broward County's Sunday switch. Gore hasn't garnered the votes during the ongoing hand recount in the largely Democratic counties of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. So Democrats have argued that canvassing boards should accept the broadest possible definition of which "chad" is acceptable to count, pushing to have those unpenetrated chads -- the bulging, "dimpled" and "pregnant" chad -- to be considered votes. On Sunday, Broward changed its chad rules, including the dimpled chad as a vote, making them more favorable to the Democrats. Democrats rightly point out that such is deemed acceptable under the Texas law supported by Bush, but Republicans are also correct to slam the counties' ever-evolving interpretation of chad rules as Gore's need for more votes becomes more apparent. Most prominent in the past few days, of course, is the ugly fight over military absentee ballots. Of the 3,733 overseas ballots received in the state since Election Day, 1,527 were rejected, according to a tally by the bean-counters at the Associated Press. This regrettable -- but by no means unusual -- fact was used effectively if perniciously by the Bush team in the latest, most vicious level of overheated rhetoric that has marked this mess. "The vice president's lawyers have gone to war in my judgment against the men and women who serve in our Armed Forces," Bush's designated pit bull, Montana Gov. Marc Racicot said Saturday. "The man who would be their commander in chief is fighting to take away the votes from the people that he would command." Republicans distributed a Nov. 15 memo from Democratic attorney Mark Herron, the subject line of which read: "Overseas Absentee Ballot Review and Protest." The memo included a list of reasons overseas ballots could be challenged, hardly squaring with the Gore team's rhetoric of wanting every vote to be counted. Republicans pointed out that one of the reasons for challenging an overseas military ballot listed on Herron's memo -- a ballot that lacks a postmark -- doesn't match federal law that allows military personnel to mail ballots without a postmark. But even if the Democrats weren't wrong on the law, as seems to be the case, it would be hard to overemphasize what an apocalyptically bad P.R. move this was -- not to mention the appalling hypocrisy. Suddenly, the party arguing that every vote should be counted was engaging in a paper-trail-laden campaign of enforced disenfranchisement -- one specifically targeted at our men and women scattered around the globe. And to put such plans in a widely distributed memo! On Sunday morning talk shows, Gore running mate Sen. Joe Lieberman backed off the Democrats' hard line, and Monday Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, Gore's state campaign chairman, issued a statement urging counties to accept overseas military ballots that were eliminated for not having a postmark. But according to a USA Today survey, only about 11 percent of the military ballots were rejected for that reason; a substantial majority of the rejected overseas military ballots were trashed for other reasons, such as for having a postmark after Election Day. Moreover, during the post-election hour, when rumors swirled of a pro- Gore surge of absentee ballots from Israel, the Florida Republican Party held an emergency press conference, in which former Secretary of State Jim Smith sternly admonished the very same absentee ballot rules that the Florida Democratic Party is now being flogged for circulating. Smith told the press, "Overseas ballots must be postmarked by Nov. 7." As for military ballots, Smith said, "Only those ballots mailed with an APO, Army post office, FPO, fleet post office, or foreign postmark shall considered valid. Ballots that are not mailed with these postmarks are invalid and cannot be counted." Those inconvenient facts seem to have been lost. Tuesday afternoon, Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. -- who spent the Vietnam era heroically serving as a Navy SEAL and losing a leg in the process (while Bush was protecting the Dallas Cowboys from the Viet Cong) -- has attempted to rebut this successful GOP assault, to little effect. The Bush P.R. team has held press conference after press conference, filling the airwaves with the loathsome charge that Gore will be unable to serve as commander in chief since his lawyers are using the same self-serving and nit-picking tactics as Bush's Florida legal team. "They were saying, if it did not have a postmark then it cannot be counted," said Rep. John Sweeney, R-N.Y., in a Miami press conference on Tuesday afternoon. "I propose to you that it would be very difficult to serve as a commander in chief when you try to disenfranchise those very defenders of freedom. It's a sad day for America." Indeed it is. salon.com - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Jake Tapper is the Washington correspondent for Salon News. ***** http://www.consortiumnews.com/112200a.html November 22, 2000 Gore's Florida 'Victory' A new analysis of Florida's presidential vote seems to confirm that Vice President Al Gore was the choice of the state's voters, although various irregularities cost him thousands of votes and could tip the state's 25 electoral votes – and the presidency – to Texas Gov. George W. Bush. The analysis suggests that Gore may have lost about 13,000 votes in Palm Beach County because of voter confusion over an illegally designed ballot. With Bush's current lead at 930 votes – pending recounts in three counties – those lost votes alone could have provided Gore a clear margin of victory. The analysis also supports claims by many elderly voters in Palm Beach County that they were confused by the so-called "butterfly ballot," which listed presidential choices in two side-by-side lists rather than in one vertical column as required by Florida law. These voters said they feared they accidentally cast their votes for Reform Party nominee Patrick Buchanan or negated their ballots by trying to correct their mistake and voting for both Gore and Buchanan. After the election, Buchanan acknowledged that his surprising blip of 3,704 votes in the staunchly Democratic county, with a large Jewish population, almost certainly resulted from confusion. Buchanan said he believed those votes were intended for Gore. Buchanan's total in Palm Beach County exceeded his tally in any other county by about 2,700. It now appears that Gore lost even more votes – possibly in excess of 10,000 ballots – when voters tried to correct their error. After mistakenly punching a hole for Buchanan, these Palm Beach voters punched a second hole for Gore. Since Buchanan's name was positioned diagonally above and to the right of Gore's, the Reform Party candidate would have been the beneficiary of the first punch from voters thinking they were picking Gore, whose name was the second on the left-hand list directly below Bush's. The confused voters, apparently realizing their mistake, then poked a second hole directly next to Gore's name. In Palm Beach County, there were 19,120 ballots disqualified because of double-voting. The Palm Beach County canvassing board analyzed a sample of these disqualified ballots. From that sample of 144 ballots, 80 ballots – or 56 percent – showed punches for both Buchanan and Gore. [NYT, Nov. 21, 2000] If that sample percentage were applied to the entire batch, Gore potentially lost 10,622 votes. If one counts 2,700 of the Buchanan votes as likely confused voters for Gore, that would put Gore's lost vote in Palm Beach County alone at more than 13,000. In a statewide race with Bush leading by fewer than 1,000 votes, the confusion in Palm Beach County could account for far more than the deciding margin. On Monday, a local judge sympathized with the confused voters but rejected a lawsuit seeking a re-vote in Palm Beach County. The judge said such a remedy was beyond his authority. In other counties, allegations of outright misconduct have been raised. The NAACP has complained that Florida authorities intimidated African-Americans who were trying to vote. In Seminole County, a lawsuit is proceeding alleging that election officials gave Republicans special access to absentee-ballot applications so corrections could be made and the votes counted for Bush. Democrats and individual voters with similar deficiencies in their applications were not given an opportunity to make corrections, The New York Times reported on Nov. 21. Bush outpolled Gore among Seminole County's absentee ballots by nearly 5,000 votes, again far more than Bush's current lead. Meanwhile, the Republicans have lodged a complaint of their own. They claim that early network projections of a Gore victory in Florida based on exit polls cost them votes in the Florida panhandle where the polls stayed open an hour later than the rest of the state. But GOP leaders have misstated the chronology of events. They assert that the networks awarded Florida to Gore at 7 p.m., just as the polls in most of Florida closed. The network projections actually occurred at about 7:50 p.m. – only 10 minutes before the panhandle polls closed. Though the networks certainly could have and obviously should have waited, it is unclear that any Bush voter decided not to go to the polls because of a projection that occurred only minutes before the polls closed. It's unlikely that more than a few late-arriving voters were even aware of Gore's projected victory. It also now appears that those exit polls correctly assessed voter preferences in Florida, though not by adequate margins to justify an Election Night call of the race. Based on the still-evolving record in Florida, the evidence indicates that a combination of errors and irregularities ultimately could reverse the voters' preference for Gore. In turn, that reversal of the public's will – by giving Florida's 25 electoral votes to Bush – also would reverse the will of the American people, who favored Gore by a clear though narrow margin. With more than 50 million votes in his column – the second-highest total ever and the largest vote tally by any non-incumbent president – Gore now leads Bush in the national popular vote by about 300,000 ballots. A Bush victory in the Electoral College – with Florida putting him over the top – would make the Texas governor the first popular-vote loser in modern times to claim the White House. The last such case was in 1888. Even with the Florida Supreme Court allowing hand recounts to proceed, Bush seems poised to do just that, winning the presidency although the people of the United States and apparently the voters of Florida wanted someone else. If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) 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