January 16, 2008 at 09:23:54

New Hampshire: U.S. Elections Still in SNAFU Mode

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

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By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

There are reasonable explanations for why Clinton was declared the winner in New Hampshire in the face of all the late polls saying Obama would take it big: undecideds swinging to Hillary on the final day, women heading to the voting precincts in larger-than-expected numbers, some Independents deciding to vote for McCain rather than the ostensible big-winner Obama, Clinton's more personal appeal in her "tearing-up" incident, hidden racism, Clinton supporters messing with Obama's get-out-the-vote system, a late Clinton e-mail campaign to female voters questioning Obama's record on a woman's right to choose an abortion, etc. etc.

But, on the basis of what happened last week in New Hampshire and from other accounts around the country, we would be remiss as citizens if we didn't admit that eight years after the disaster that was the 2000 election process, we still don't have a reliable, secure voting system:

* Republicans in various key states are still getting away with knocking hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters off the rolls. And they're counting on the Supreme Court, as it probably will do, to OK their strict voter-I.D. bills that might well suppress voter turnout of poor and minority citizens. ( www.thenation.com/doc/20080128/epps )

* And, given the lack of adequate public oversight, it's still possible for the corporations that tabulate the ballots to alter the numbers in secret to fit any result they wish, with nobody able to prove the manipulation.

Did vote-tampering happen in New Hampshire? Maybe not. Could it have? Yes. The "irregularities" in the announced election results cry out for further investigation and perhaps even a full recount.

I'll get to the New Hampshire anomalies in a moment. What's important is that the U.S. is heading toward another presidential election in November with registration, voting and vote-tabulation protocols not all that different from those used during the disputed elections of 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006.

A LUDICROUS VOTING SYSTEM

When I'm abroad and describe America's current voting system to citizens of other countries -- including the fact that one party's supporters manufacture the voting machines and tabulate the ballots, with little knowledgable state supervision -- they think I'm joking. It's so "third-world," they say, so inefficient, corruptible, unpoliced and disorganized. Actually, many third-world elections are far more transparent, using paper ballots counted by hand.

Some election officials around the U.S. have attempted to correct some of these problems, but, by and large, not much has been done and potential massive fraud is still built into the system. For the most part, Republicans don't seem particularly exercised by these distortions of the voting process; after all, in many instances they have benefitted from the slipshod security associated with our elections.

The Republicans are not interested in "election fraud," but they certainly are riding for all it's worth the hyped fear of "voter fraud" (illegal voting and registering). It doesn't matter that there are few, if any, examples of widespread "voter fraud." However, the "voter-fraud" boogeyman is probably what led Alberto Gonzales to fire nearly a dozen or so U.S. Attorneys around the country. One of them, David Iglesias in New Mexico, was let go, on orders emanating from the White House, when he would not waste his office's time and money going after a few supposed Democratic "vote-frauders" just before an election. He said the evidence just wasn't there, and he refused to proceed with the obvious partisan harrassment. Bye bye, David.

DEMOCRATS TAKE A PASS

What is more maddening is that the Democratic Party, whose candidates most often have been the losers because of GOP-related "voting irregularities," has never really engaged on this issue and demanded a whole new, transparent way of holding elections so that citizens can have full confidence that their votes are being accurately recorded and honestly counted.

There is statistical and anecdotal evidence aplenty that some recent U.S. elections have been rigged, but about the only time the issue makes it to the nightly news is when those elections happens somewhere else in the world, when hundreds of thousands of angry citizens take to the streets in Ukraine and Kenya or elsewhere demanding a recount of a clearly manipulated balloting process. Then American politicians, editorialists and cable pundits urge on the opposition in the name of honest democratic elections. But those who raise similar concerns inside the U.S. about our corruptible voting processes are often smeared with the labels "conspiracy theorist" or a "sore loser."

NOW, THE NEW HAMPSHIRE "ANOMALIES"

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Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (more...)

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