MCM: Yes, in all this talk about voting, it's important to acknowledge that we have fettishized the ballot box and overestimated voting as if it were the only instrument available to us for democratic action. It's not the only instrument-there are all kinds of things we can and should do; however, I do think that voting is a fundamental and necessary instrument, but it's not really a democratic action if there isn't popular control and oversight. We have a long way to go before we have a democratic voting system. What we actually have is a ritual-the same as in Iraq. People voted there too!
Precisely because we have fettishized voting we are often that much less able to face the fact that the whole process has been subverted just as surely as it is subverted in closed societies. It's very hard for Americans to wrap their minds around this because it's a tremendous blow to our self-image and our exceptionalism. I don't think that the general public has as much trouble facing that as the establishment and media do.
CB: Last week CNN reported the story of former GOP operative, Allen Raymond who wrote the book How To Rig An Election. What do you think about CNN's reporting of the story?
MCM: The book is actually about vote suppression in New Hampshire in 2002. The context for this is that Republicans had lost control of the Senate in 2002 as a result of the defection of Tom Jeffords. There's strong evidence that they then stole a number of Congressional elections as in Colorado, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. One of the things they got caught for doing was a phone-jamming scheme in the four cities of Southern New Hampshire which prevented the unions from getting out the Democratic vote. Allen Raymond was a hired gun and became a patsy who went to prison. After doing his time, he wrote the book, but he doesn't really talk about election rigging, and all he ends up saying is that he was part of a culture that would do anything to win and that both parties are guilty of such behavior-perfectly harmless stuff. He doesn't mention, for example, that the phone-jamming operations were paid for by Jack Abramoff with two checks from the Choctaw Indians. That's interesting because it ties the two scandals together.
The reason he gets to go on CNN is that he's a much more palatable witness to wrongdoing than I would be. Raymond's book is worth reading, but it certainly doesn't compare with Richard Phillip Hayes' book.
CB: You've just released Loser Take All: Election Fraud And The Subversion Of Democracy which is a compilation of essays on stolen elections, edited by you. In that book you offer a Twelve-Step Program for taking back the American election process. First, I'm wondering what inspired you to compile and edit this book, and I'd like to hear your twelve steps.
MCM: I was simply tired of hearing people say that there's no evidence of election fraud. There were essays out there that constitute strong evidence as well as studies that could be done to make this case, so I collected a number of pieces and asked the authors to polish them up because I wanted to make available a collection of these writings within six months of the election because I wanted it all to be in one place.
The overall effect of the collection was necessarily kind of harrowing and possibly demoralizing as this kind of analysis is for people who haven't heard of this stuff which is pretty much everybody because the press hasn't reported it. So I wanted something at the end of the book that would give people a sense of constructive possibility-of what they might fight for to fix the problem.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
