Read Greg Palast and you'll want to take the gas...unless you're a Republican, in which case massive disenfranchisement of anyone who isn't going to vote for your guy is seen as perfectly OK, in keeping with Old Glory, Mom, apple pie, Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.
Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.
What this means is thatt the Republican Secretary of State in Colorado decided ALL BY HERSELF to change the rules about ex-felons. No due process, no legislative procedure -- just an edict from a politician. Is this the kind of democracy our soldiers in Iraq are supposed to be fighting for?
In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).
Who would have thought that 40 years after the start of the Civil War era, Jim Crow would be practiced with such relish by a major political party?
And of course, there's always our old friend Jeb "Michael Corleone" Bush in Florida:
It is well-reported that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.
But let's not stop there, let's go to New Mexico!
"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.
Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.
Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.
As I write this, it's 8:28 PM Eastern Time on Monday, November 1. In nine hours and thirty-two minutes, the polls in NJ will open. Presumably most other states in this time zone will open within an hour of that time. Election Day will begin, but mass disenfranchise of potential Kerry voters has already begun.
THIS is the democracy Bush wants to institute in Iraq? THIS is the democracy that generations of American boys have died for? THIS is what we boast about when we talk about how we're a beacon to the rest of the world?
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