Joseph Stalin: “Those Who Count the Votes Decide Everything”

Will Rogers once said that a bottle of whiskey in the counting-house put more men into office than ballots ever did. Joe Stalin always won “elections” by 99.9 percent. We have never heard who the 1/10th of one percent voted for. I suppose those Russians with a death wish ended up somewhere in Joe’s gulag archipelago.
But old Joe did have a sense of humor. He employed about a half a dozen look-a-likes as doubles so he wouldn’t have to attend all those boring public appearances.
One night Joe was taking one of his doubles home after an event when he spotted a drunk who evidently had drunk a lot of doubles earlier bobbing and weaving down a Moscow sidewalk. He told the driver to pull over and yelled at the drunk.
“You’re so drunk you’re probably seeing double! You’d better quit drinking!” The drunk, seeing two Joe Stalins in the limo—at least one of whom was responsible for at least 27 million deaths—fainted on the spot. What a story to tell your vodka-loving friends.

There is no doubt in my mind that we have thousands of political operatives, elected and none-elected, preparing to steal the 2008 presidential election from the opposition.
We have one party that concentrates on keeping people from voting—and another party that seems to want all “eligible” voters—living and dead—to vote twice.

This country has a long history of ballot thievery along with a reputation for restrictive laws to prevent people from registering and voting.

Morris Udall, a senator from Arizona, was only half kidding when he said he wanted to be buried in Chicago upon his death “so he could remain politically active.”
‘Twas rumored that Lyndon Baines Johnson won his first House election by having an entire cemetery in his district vote for him. Citizens swear they saw flashlights bouncing on the tombstones and people writing names down. That’s why LBJ had the nickname of “Landslide.”

Richard Nixon always claimed that he had lost Illinois and the 1960 election because Chicago cemeteries erupted with the day of the living dead, marching in droves to the nearest precinct, comparable to the scenes in the movie “The Night Of The Living Dead.”

Ballot Tricks and Cheap Equipment

I have been keeping a file on voting rights and voting wrongs for years, and it is jammed with stories from the 2004 presidential election.

I was going to write about the subject in a few weeks, but I decided to move the date up because of two stories in today’s newspapers.

Haley Barbour, the irrespressible Republican governor of Mississippi and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, has decided to pull a fast one on the positioning of names on the MIssissippi ballot.
According to election law, federal elections must go at the top of the ballot. Polls show that Republican Senator Thad Cochran is way ahead of his Democratic challenger so their names will be at the top of the ballot where they are supposed to be.

But in the other Senate race Republican Senator Roger Wicker, appointed by Barbour to replace Trent Lott, is in a tough race with his Democratic challenger. So Barbour is trying to put those names at the very bottom of the ballot where many people probably won’t even notice the senatorial contest after voting for county judges, dogcatchers, sheriffs, and other assorted commissioners and coroners. It is a clear violation of election law—but the case is going before a Republican-dominated State Supreme Court. Anyone want to bet against Barbour?

The other case involved faulty equipment in a Washington, D.C. election. Although a definitive reason has not been discovered yet, it seems that a defective computer memory cartridge may have kept insisting that thousands of write-in votes were counted—where election officials said none existed. Although there was a very low turnout in this election, the election board lobby was jammed with angry politicians after the initial count, trying to find out how thousands of mystical ballots were counted.

Should We All Have a Government-Issued ID—Like Stalin’s Russia?

Those who are trying to keep voters from going to the polls have been very successful in this country. This great democracy of ours ranks 139th in percentage of voter turnout.
We have a crazy-quilt maze of election laws because there is virtually nothing about elections in the U.S. Constitution.
The 50 states containing 3,141 counties—with 7,800 different local election jurisdictions—have countless ways to keep people from registering and voting.

If an Oregon soldier in Iraq mails in his ballot and is killed before election day his vote is still counted. But if he happens to be from South Dakota his vote is trashed and is not counted. So much for voting consistency.

Over 64 million eligible Americans are not even registered to vote, with those between the ages of 18 and 24 leading the pack at 50 percent. Over 30 percent of eligible blacks and 40 percent of eligible Hispanics are not registered. About 80 percent of eligible voters making more than $75,000 are registered, but only 55 percent of those making between $15,000 and $24,999 are.

We are the only democracy in the world which makes some people who have served time in prison forever ineligible to vote.

Fourteen states currently have those laws, with the bald-faced purpose of keeping minorities from voting.Over five million Americans with felony convictions on their records could not vote in 2004.
Florida under the governorship of Jeb Bush was the worst example.

The Republican-packed Supreme Court recently ruled that Indiana could require an “official” government-issued photo ID card at voting precincts.

Many poor people do not have a drivers license or passport so they would have to pay for an official ID. This would be the same as a poll tax which is now illegal—but the Court, in its eagerness to keep Democrats from voting, ignored that little detail.

Almost all of those 138 countries who are ahead of us in voter turnout have laws requiring the government to find possible voters and to furnish them with photo IDs.
The Wall Street Journal, a conservative Republican newspaper, spread the story that eight of the nineteen Trade Center hijackers had registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida, thus enraging politicians, and the story certainly encouraged the passage of photo ID laws.

Two history professors, one from George Washington University and one from Barnard, are still trying to confirm it, but so far election officials cannot come up with the registrations!

If You Think 2004 Was a Voting Disaster, Just Wait Until 2008

After Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his Gang of Five appointed George Bush King of the United States in 2004, many politicians promised to reform and improve our voting systems. Electronic or touch screen voting machines were supposed to solve major problems of voting and counting.

But when high school computer nerds were asked to test the security of these voting machines, they hacked into them and changed vote counts in a matter of minutes.

One would think that the machines used to track trillions of dollars in credit card accounts could actually track votes accurately—and securely.

A few years ago I pulled into a gas station a hundred miles north of Whitehorse in the Yukon wilderness and charged a tank of gas on a credit card.

After “swiping” the card I received a receipt in two seconds from a bank headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, about 4,000 miles away. Why can’t we use that kind of technology to vote?

Most of the touch-screen voting machines are made by Diebold. Diebold’s CEO did not inspire a great deal of confidence in his machines by announcing before the 2004 election that he “would help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to Bush. Computer scientists and high schoolers have amply demonstrated that it is easy to hack Diebold machines.

Corky and I lived in the South when blacks couldn’‘t walk on the sidewalks and toilets and drinking fountains were labeled “Colored” and “White.” That’s when “Separate but Equal” meant that white kids went to new brick schools and the “coloreds” went to tarpaper shacks.

Frankly the South and Mid-America haven’t changed that much. We still have at least six percent of registered voters admitting they will never vote for a black. I think it is much higher than that.

In 2004 Florida blacks with outstanding warrants were warned if they went to the polls they would be arrested. Florida Highway Patrol cars and local police “patrolled” black neighborhoods and black precincts.

White election registrars threatened blacks with voter fraud charges if they voted. In some black neighborhoods voting machines were so scarce some people waited in line for ten hours to vote.
One precinct at a large black college was given only one voting machine to use.

Garrett Epps’ article “The Voter ID Fraud” in The Nation magazine summarized our current problems: “It is mortifying that we are passing this mortal flaw in our system down to the next generation. Voting lies at the heart of our national life, and efforts to restrict it to the “right” people corrode our very commitment to freedom. Perhaps we should consider radical change in our system. Perhaps we should consider democracy.”

In 2000 105.4 million Americans voted in the presidential election. That went to 122.3 million in 2004. Accuracy of the vote-counting, the ability to vote, and voter registration practices were severely challenged in both those elections.
These key elements have not been improved. Can you imagine the mess we are going to have when an estimated 132 million Americans cast their ballots in the 2008 election?