preventing their count. And he was reelected the same
way in 2004 when a quarter million votes were nullified
in Ohio.
But why fixate on Florida and Ohio? Here's a nasty
little fact about voting in the Land of the Free not
reported in your newspapers: 3,600,380 ballots were cast
in the November 2004 presidential election that were
never counted. In 2000, the uncounted ballots totaled
just under two million.
And where were the Democrats? In 2004, behind the huge
jump in uncounted votes was a mass challenge campaign
aimed at poor, Black and Hispanic voters by the
Republican Party -- pushing these voters, mostly
Democrats, to "provisional ballots." They could have
been counted, if someone had fought for it. Hundreds
of lawyers were on stand-by but the head of the biggest
legal team told me in confidence -- and in frustration
-- that the Kerry campaign told them to stand down.
Recently, Al Gore was asked if the election of 2000 was
stolen. "There may come a time when I speak on that,
but it's not now," said the beta dog. (I suspect that
if Al Gore were found bleeding in an alley, he'd answer
the question, Who shot you? with "There may come a time
when I speak on that...").
last Saturday in Mexico City, he played video and audio
tapes of the evidence of fraud on a screen eighty feet
tall. Imagine if Gore had projected the "scrub sheets"
of purged Black voters on a ten-story-high screen in
front of the White House.
Lopez Obrador put political force behind his legal
demands by calling on voters from every state in Mexico
to march to the capital. Two million are expected to
arrive this Sunday. The result: the word among the
political classes is that the election may be annulled.
Even the conservative Financial Times has warned
Mexico's elite not to "fool itself" by ignoring the
demand for a full vote count.
North-of-the-Border Democrats just don't get it. The
Republican Party is pushing "provisional" ballots,
pushing voter ID requirements, compiling secret
challenge lists, scrubbing voter registries and selling
us vote-nullifying ballot boxes: they get it completely.
The GOP knows the key to their electoral domination is
not in winning over their opponents' votes, but in not
counting them.
The un-Gore of Mexico City has a lesson for the Blue-
party gringos. Either the Democrats demand that all
votes count, or the Democrats will count for nothing.
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