Along the way there's the collapse of our electoral system. From Jimmy Carter to Harvard to the UN and so many others who've studied it, it's patently obvious the mechanisms by which we conduct elections in this country are ridiculously decrepit and corrupt.
As a partial solution, we've concocted the "Ohio Plan," which demands: universal automatic voter registration at age 18; a four-day national holiday for voting; voter ID based on a signature that matches the registration form with stiff felony penalties for cheating; universal hand-counted paper ballots.
We also want money out of politics, public-funded campaigns, an end to gerrymandering, and abolition of the Electoral College.
In 2016, the first thing to face is the massive disenfranchisement of millions of voters, mostly citizens of color and youth. We are heartened to see Bernie and Hillary joined together in an Arizona lawsuit.
But the long lines and urban registration stripping that we saw in Phoenix, Madison, and elsewhere this spring will spell doom for the Democrats if they cannot guarantee their constituencies' the right to vote in November.
At this point, we're not optimistic. The efforts at re-enfranchisement are little and late. Among those doing superb work on this stripping of our voter rolls are the great Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com), Ari Berman of The Nation, and others.
But the electronic flipping of the alleged vote count remains a demon black box. The 2000 election was turned from Gore to Bush by electronic manipulations in Volusia County, Florida. The 2004 election was turned from Kerry to Bush in a Chattanooga basement which transformed a 4.2% Democratic lead into a 2.5% GOP victory in 90 dark minutes.
All that could happen again in 2016.
Over the years we've respected the work of The Nation's Josh Holland, who's expressed concern about our reporting on indications of irregularities that seem to favor Hillary over Bernie.
But our stated conclusions on them remain far from conclusive. If we thought we had definitive evidence that the Clinton campaign was stealing the nomination from the Sanders campaign, we'd say so in direct, explicit and unmistakable phrases.
Simply put: we do NOT at this point believe they rise to the level of provable theft, as we are certain was the case in 2000 and 2004.
We understand concerns and welcome the dialogue. But we'd like to avoid the usual circular firing squad.
Writing in The Nation, Josh has deemed it important to mention disagreements with our former collaborator Steve Rosenfeld, and our good friend Mark Hertsgaard.
Mark's writing on global warming has been legend. In 2004 he criticized some of our reporting on the Ohio vote count. We disagreed with him then and still do. Nothing in the past 12 years of our research and writing while based in central Ohio has surfaced that would make us change our reporting on how the 2004 election was stolen. Quite the opposite.
But other comments on the nature of electronic election theft throw up a HUGE red flag. And here we worry about a dangerous gap in the work from The Nation and the left as a whole.
If international election standards were applied to the 2016 primaries, eight states -- Georgia, Massachusetts, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York, Tennessee -- would be investigated for suspected fraudulent election results, because the actual vote deviates so greatly from the exit polls. Also, the exit polls indicated that Sanders won in Illinois, Massachusetts and Missouri.
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