Clean elections make legitimate governments

As dismal news from Iraq reports on more of the country spiraling into chaos and violence (truthout.org, 11/13/04), the promise of January national elections seems to be at risk. Though even if elections are held, there are serious doubts in Iraq and abroad that the elections will be credible.

In her commentaryDon't Rig the Iraqi Election, by Marina Ottaway (truthout.org, repost from washingtonpost.com, 11/09/04), Ottaway points out that the U.S. would prefer:

less-risky, noncompetitive elections, in which the outcome would be predetermined. Their preference is to push for a "monster coalition" of major political parties, which would agree among themselves ahead of time how to apportion parliamentary seats and cabinet posts.

She also points out that Shiites are unlikely to accept the legitimacy of an election in which "security concerns" prevented them from voting.

Elections Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq, by Patrick Cockburn (truthout.org repost from Independent U.K., 10/05/04) points out that the proposed election system, which favors exile-run political parties which are unpopular within Iraq, is unlikely to result in a system that Iraqis will embrace.

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It's amazing to me that the U.S. is trying to guarantee a fair election in a war-torn land, while it can't guarantee one at home. Worst Voter Error Is Apathy toward Irregularities by Donna Britt, (truthout.org repost from washingtonpost.com, 11/12/04), contains some comments about the disenfranchisement of poor and minority voters here in the land of the free that ring true among people I've spoken to:

Why aren't more Americans exercised about this issue? Maybe the problem is who's being disenfranchised -- usually poor and minority voters. In a recent poll of black and white adults by Harvard University professor Michael Dawson, 37 percent of white respondents said that widely publicized reports of attempts to prevent blacks from voting in the 2000 election were a Democratic 'fabrication.' More disturbingly, nearly one-quarter of whites surveyed said that if such attempts were made, they either were 'not a problem' (9 percent) or 'not so big a problem' (13 percent).

We all need to be sure our democracy really is democratic: if citizens in thee comfortable U.S. can't be guaranteed their constitutionally mandated voting rights, how can other nations moving toward democracy feel confident in democracy overall? If the U.S. government constantly holds itself out as a model to the world, it should actually be a positive model. And that's not happening right now.

Here's a message I shared with a few friends recently:

You folks are great! Several of you have forwarded fabulous clippings to me about the even uglier side of this election: organized efforts to prevent people, especially people of color in swing states, from exercising their rights to vote. By the time the Supreme Court affirmed the right of the Republican Party to stand in Ohio polling places and legally challenge any brown person of their choosing, you know our nation had sunk to a new low.

There are some great materials on attempts to block voters, and attempts to prevent votes from being counted ranging from legal spoilage to outright fraud. I've compiled some excerpts and links here.

(For a longer article from the NAACP and People for the American Way, read 'The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today.' (naacp.org. It's 27 pages long.))

[My partner] observed yesterday that many Democrats have absorbed the Republican message after the Supreme Court intervened in 2000: 'Accept your loss and close your eyes.' 'Get over it.' 'Recounts HURT us.' 'Legitimacy is less important than the stability that comes from a quick-if-inaccurate decision.' None of this supports democracy. To me, our democracy is in jeopardy if any of us are denied our fundamental rights. It's inexcusable that the problems found in 2000 weren't fixed, and that new problems have been introduced.

There are a couple of organizations attempting to act on the problems. One is blackboxvoting.org, which is attempting to raise money to audit the election results wherever paper ballots are available. They've already issued FOIA requests. Another is thepen.us, which has a campaign demanding an investigation of fraud from the Democrats, for what that is worth. [I think the best research could be performed by a press consortium like the one that investigated Florida, but whose results were suppressed after 9-11. They have the funds, credibility, and means to publicize the results that ordinary citizens lack, but I don't know if they are interested in investigating. The founder of BlackBoxVoting says her media contacts have been forbidden from reporting on irregularities, however, so it's unclear that any media company will go this route.]

I've read the arguments against examining this election from both of the corporate parties, and they are framed incorrectly. To them, the question is whether or not the Democrats won the philosophical & cultural war of "values," and the conclusion both sides have reached is no. But that is not the actual question. The question is whether or not we had a fair election in which all American citizens, regardless of their skin color or place of residence, freely exercised their rights to vote and could confidently believe their votes were counted. The answer to that question appears to be no, and it is much more important than which rich guy won.

I do sincerely believe that we can never have a fully legitimate government while people are being denied their right to vote. The attempt to deny people their voting rights through means both legal and illegal damages the very idea of legitimate government. That is why the elections in Iraq need to be fair and transparent, just as they should be here and everywhere else in the world.

The effects of the disenfranchisement here in the U.S. have already led to doubts about the accuracy of national elections. Rumors abound, but so do analyses: The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy, by Professor Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D. (truthout.org, 111404) lays out an excellent context for what exit polls are used for around the world, and raises questions about why a time-honored process used as a check against corruption around the world conflicts so dramatically with the results the U.S. is reporting. It's a good piece, and worth reading. Even if you don't like to rely on statistics, the fact that the U.S. experiences wildly different results than the rest of the world from using the same methodology raises many new questions.

A must read for the well-informed American: The Nation: November 15, 2004 issue. On domestic issues, the editorial entitled Fix the Electoral System concisely lists the steps which need to be taken to end the routine, systemic disenfranchisement of minorities and poor people. Something I didn't know: the Carter Center couldn't perform election monitoring, because our messy, states-make-up-their-own-procedures system wasn't consistent enough to observe, unlike so-called "Third World" countries which can manage to have a standard system. Oh, and the two main parties didn't agree to cooperate. That didn't help...

Jeff Morley (of the Washington Post) has an item noting that the Iraqi Health Ministry has stopped releasing civilian casualty figures to journalists on orders from the interim government. Morley also has some interesting things to say about the counting methodology of NGOs.

Jonathan Schell's Looking Tough discusses the outcome of all the detention and torture schemes the US has enacted during this period, and the fact that of the thousands of people detained, "not one has been successfully convicted of terrorism - the only conviction obtained having been thrown out by a federal judge in Detroit."

Find it and read it!

Free Press News : Iraq tells media to toe the line (freepress.net). Iraq has a media regulation agency which is supposed to be independent from both the interim government and occupation authority. But...

It said news organizations should "guide correspondents in Fallouja … not to promote unrealistic positions or project nationalist tags on terrorist gangs of criminals and killers....[to] set aside space in your news coverage to make the position of the Iraqi government, which expresses the aspirations of most Iraqis, clear."

"We hope you comply … otherwise we regret we will be forced to take all the legal measures to guarantee higher national interests," the statement said. It did not elaborate.

Sunni clerics call for boycott of January elections because of Fallujah attack (sfgate.com, 11/09/04).

Another source of information from within Iraq: Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches (dahrjamailiraq.com). He's a reporter who has spent 5 months in occupied Iraq, and is now functioning as a correspondent for several news outlets. Read The Fire is Spreading… as a sample of his reporting.

It's grim but educational stuff.

A multimedia web exhibit: Iraq Uncensored: "seven independent photographers and filmmakers have worked exclusively in Iraq documenting US troops and Iraqi civilians, resistance fighters and child laborers, imprisoned women and incarcerated youths." It's a good exhibit, though not a happy one. But if you're reading this, you're probably not surprised by that.

Voices in the Wilderness : What We Call Peace is Little Better Than Capitulation To a Corporate Coup: excerpts from a speech by Arundhati Roy (vitw.org, 11/04/04):

It is becoming more than clear that violating human rights is an inherent and necessary part of the process of implementing a coercive and unjust political and economic structure on the world. Increasingly, human rights violations are being portrayed as the unfortunate, almost accidental, fallout of an otherwise acceptable political and economic system.

The link doesn't appear to provide the entire text of her speech, but it's worth reading the entire thing.

On The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart joked that the Iraqis have been observing our election, and remarked: 'You invaded us... to give us THIS?!?' :-)

Perhaps, before we force our brand of "democracy" on the Iraqi people, they should be allowed to shop around a bit. In projectcensored.org:
Democracy Fails: Corporations Win, Peter Phillips comments on the state of things here:

November 2 gave us a choice between war and more war, corporate globalization and more corporate globalization, the continuation of gifting billions of dollars to Israel, the Patriot Act and an expanded Patriot Act, a police state and an seriously growing police state, media monopoly and even bigger media monopolies, and wealth inequality or an even greater wealth divide. With the only alternative to these issues being minor candidates without a snowball's chance, for many voting seemed meaningless.

Isn't it great that WE get to be the model for other democracies? He has other points: go ahead and read 'em.

I don't know how I missed this.TheStar.com - Crude dudes by Linda McQuiag of the Toronto Star (www.thestar.com, 09/20/04). It's an article with comments from Fadel Gheit, a Wall Street oil analyst.

"Think of Iraq as virgin territory .... This is bigger than anything Exxon is involved in currently .... It is the superstar of the future," says Gheit, "That's why Iraq becomes the most sought-after real estate on the face of the earth."

Gheit just smiles at the notion that oil wasn't a factor in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He compares Iraq to Russia, which also has large undeveloped oil reserves. But Russia has nuclear weapons. "We can't just go over and ... occupy (Russian) oil fields," says Gheit. "It's a different ballgame." Iraq, however, was defenceless, utterly lacking, ironically, in weapons of mass destruction. And its location, nestled in between Saudi Arabia and Iran, made it an ideal place for an ongoing military presence, from which the U.S. would be able to control the entire Gulf region. Gheit smiles again: "Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath .... You can't ask for better than that."

There's something almost obscene about a map that was studied by senior Bush administration officials and a select group of oil company executives meeting in secret in the spring of 2001. It doesn't show the kind of detail normally shown on maps ? cities, towns, regions. Rather its detail is all about Iraq's oil.....

Follow the link and read the whole thing. It's adopted from a book, which looks like a fascinating read. (It's especially interesting when you read about how trade deals force Canada to export to the U.S. regardless of its own demand situation. How any government could have signed such an agreement is a great mystery.)

Electile Dysfunction?

Yes, Virginia, there were some odd things about the 2004 Presidential election.

I'd already written elsewhere about the very unpleasant attempts to disenfranchise new voters who were registering to vote. (Compilation in the previously cited/linked audio file special report on voter fraud at thisamericanlife.org. (Real audio file) Combined with the overt attempts of elected officials in places like Florida to de-register tens of thousands of ethnic minority voters in Democrat-heavy regions, attempts by officials in some states to refuse to accept voter registrations due to paper weight regulations, and other antics, it is cause for alarm and investigation. Word of these things occurred in advance of the election, far ahead enough for it to be announced (and in some cases, for arrests to be made), but late enough for those harmed to be unable to register.

But come election day, there was some more weirdness. For example, the exit polls. I watched them "live" on cnn.com for Ohio and a few other key states. Kerry was ahead, Kerry was ahead, Kerry was ahead... and then when everything was declared for Bush they retroactively changed the results. Which was weird, but I'm completely open to believing that exit polls aren't accurate. The problem is that they should be inaccurate in more than one direction -- they shouldn't always favor Kerry inaccurately, they shouldn't always be inaccurate by about the same percentage. See Odds of Bush gaining by 4 percent in all exit polling states 1 in 50,000; Evoting/paper variance not found to be significant (bluelemur.com, 11/08/04).

Then, there were the "glitches" that resulted in more votes than voters. In Should America Trust the Results of the Election? Commentary (washingtondispatch.com, 11/05/04), Shane Cory points out a few fun (not) facts:

In one voting precinct in Gahanna, Ohio, 4,258 voters supposedly cast an electronic ballot for George Bush while only 260 voted for John Kerry. While it is vaguely possible that over 94% of voters in the precinct supported George W. Bush, it is a hard number to believe considering that only 638 voters were counted at the polling center.

Ooops. What was it that Barbie doll used to say? "Math is hard?"

There are also some odd results out of Florida: the average Republican gain was 29%, which isn't too far ahead of the Dems, but doesn't really explain a 700% gain in Republican votes in one particular county.

Seven hundred percent? Congrats to whoever organized that voter drive, but because it's so far out of the norm for the state, it really ought to be checked for accuracy. Unless they also have a town called Gahanna, in which case everything is explained. :-)

Infamous Broward County had a problem to put it back into the news. Software Flaw Found in Florida Vote Machines (michaelmoore.com repost from the Palm Beach Post, 11/05/04) provides this:

Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone ... down.

It turns out the software used in Broward County can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would ever be designed to vote backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman.

Here's a nationwide compilation of computer voting glitches and other problems compiled from the media at votersunite.org. This list shouldn't be interpreted to mean that each and every problem resulted in people being denied votes, I should emphasize: it just belies the "everything went perfectly" stories you've likely heard.

Greg Palast argues in 'Kerry Won' (tompaine.com, 11/04/04) that racist "spoilage" practices which results in minority voters having their ballots or identity rejected are responsible for Bush's margin of "victory."

New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts?Democratic turf... Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter.... Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.

I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president....

Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.

Racism is pretty icky, too.

And there was some odd behavior on the part of Republican election officials. In George, John, and Warren (msnbc.com), Keith Oberman reports on some odd events in Ohio:

[Friday] the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that officials in Warren County, Ohio, had ?locked down? its administration building to prevent anybody from observing the vote count there.

...County Commissioners confirmed that they were acting on the advice of their Emergency Services Director, Frank Young. Mr. Young had explained that he had been advised by the federal government to implement the measures for the sake of Homeland Security.... The State of Ohio confirms that of all of its 88 Counties, Warren alone decided such Homeland Security measures were necessary.

In other counties, reporters were allowed to observe the balloting.

Have I already mentioned that Bush campaign co-chair & Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell was in charge of the election and vote counting there? (michiganimc.org) And after failing to mail absentee ballots out, had to be taken to court to allow those who hadn't received their ballots to vote?

In The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy (commondreams.org, 11/04/04), Thom Hartmann asks:

Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?

Which is an excellent question.


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My e-mail peer group, most of whom I believe to be Democrats, have split into two camps. One camp wants the voting irregularities investigated, so this administration won't hang under the cloud of illegitimacy that the first Bush Administration held. The other camp thinks that we need to absorb a Kerry loss unquestioningly and immediately, and ignore anything dubious because it's unlikely to change the outcome.

I am uncertain as to who actually won the election: it looks like Bush, but enough doubts have been raised that some verification is in order. But that's not what concerns me about the comments I've heard. I'm shocked that anyone I know finds the disenfranchisement of large numbers of Americans -- many of whom happen to be ethnic minorities -- acceptable. Even if we were all satisfied with a Bush win, we cannot say it's fine that "non-white" and/or poor people had their right to vote 'challenged' by partisan monitors and were forced to vote provisionally, that people in swing states had to appear in court to verify their identity in the face of baseless charges from local Republican Party officials, that people were turned away from polling places, and that voting equipment can't do basic math can be tolerated. These issues need to be corrected NOW. I don't see how our nation benefits from "getting over" discrimination and math-impairments without correcting it.

We're a great country with a long tradition of opportunity. Now isn't the time to backslide. Let's get this right. Let's get this fixed now. And let's toss everyone who tried to defraud citizens of their voting rights in jail, regardless of who won, as a deterrent to future anti-democratic activism here.

The U.S. election has ended, and as expected, the impact on Iraq is largely negligible. Both candidates wished to continue and win the war: they only disagreed on how it would be funded and who should be obligated to staff it.

And so the dire misery of the Iraqi people and the soldiers stationed there continues.

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Conveniently just after the U.S. elections are over, Iraq declares state of emergency. Violence is on the upswing, and insurgents are increasingly successful at killing large numbers of police in single attacks.

One aspect of violence which will not be curtailed by the declaration of the state of emergency is the U.S.' planned attack on Falluja.

The BBC's Paul Wood, embedded with the US Marines, says they believe that Falluja will be their biggest engagement since Hue, the Vietnamese city they captured in 1968, losing 142 men and killing thousands of the enemy.

It is reported from inside Falluja that insurgents, tribal chiefs and Sunni Muslim clerics have invited the media to enter the city under their protection to witness any assault, which they described as a crusade against Islam.

This is the success story that U.S. president Bush has been trumpeting. If this is success, I would hate to see what failure looks like.

Concerns mount as the U.S. plans to invade Falluja(h) with a vast military force: Kofi Annan's letter: Falluja warning (news.bbc.co.uk, 11/06/04): "UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has sent a letter to the leaders of the US, UK and Iraq expressing concern that the planned assault on the Iraqi city of Falluja could undermine elections due in January."

Fixing the problem of Falluja (news.bbc.co.uk, 11/07/04):

Some of those who took part in Operation Iraqi Freedom - as last year's invasion is called - wonder what happened to the 'flowers and sweets' that greeted them so promisingly at first.

'Everyone was so friendly when we got to Iraq,' said one 19-year-old, slightly bewildered. 'I just don't know what happened.'"

The inability of US forces to comprehend the impact on people of occupation, even at this date, is stunning. But it gets weirder:

"The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy," said Colonel Brandl.

"But the enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we're going to destroy him."