There can be no doubt that the Democrats will emerge from free and fair elections this November as the majority party in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate. The question is:
Will the elections be free and fair?The Republicans have found ways to rig elections in recent years never dreamed of by the likes of Boss Tweed or Mayor Daley. To prevent this election from being stolen, the Democrats must be vigilant.
First, let’s make clear what we mean by a
free and fair election. This is an election in which:
- everybody who is eligible to vote has the opportunity to register and vote; and
- every vote counts as the voter cast it.
Let’s enumerate some of the things for which we must be vigilant:
- Purges of voter rolls. This, not Ms. Harris' awkward failure to count votes, was how Florida was stolen in 2000. Had everybody in Florida who was eligible to vote cast his ballot, Gore would have won in that state by a margin that would have precluded a recount.
- Outright intimidation. This may take the form of phony voter challenges. This is how Florida was stolen in 2004. There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that some voters were threatened with prosecution if they registered to vote. Some of this also took place in Ohio, but there vigilance saved the situation from getting out of hand.
- Unequal supplying and staffing of polling places. This is how Ohio was stolen in 2004. Precincts which were expected to vote for Bush were adequately staffed and supplied; others were not. People in Bush friendly precincts had no trouble voting; people in Bush hostile precincts often had to wait in line for hours.
- Electronic voting machines. These machines can make voting easier, but they can also make election fraud easier. As one who wrote computer programs for 25 years, I can tell you that anybody who has ever received a passing grade in a lower-division programming class should be expected to have the skills to rig an election. That is especially true in an environment where the software is considered the legal property of the manufacturer and cannot be inspected by the consumer (i.e., citizens of the state). Exit polling should be used as a check against voting machines. At Democratic Underground, TruthIsAll did a lot of excellent work in this matter, but I urged him to dig deeper. We need to know if there is a correlation between the discrepancies in polling results vs. tabulated results and the use of voting technology at the precinct level; that assumes that the polling is reasonably accurate, so we need to know that, too. If the polling is accurate and such a correlation exists, we will have good reason to smell a rat.
The best thing to do about election fraud is to prevent it by vigilance. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It will be easier to claim victory after having prevented election fraud than it will be to prove that certified winners of elections were the beneficiaries of irregularities and the true result was that another candidate won.
Nevertheless, if a pound of cure is needed after the fact, vigilance also works as a system of gathering documentation of voter intimidation and illegal purging of voter rolls as it happens. If we must charge election fraud after the votes are counted, we had better have our ducks in line.
We need to start now in a proactive effort to prevent election fraud. This effort should be coordinated nationally, but most of the work should be done at the state and local level. There is, after all, really no such thing as a federal election. Elections are handled at a state and local level. The devils incarnate of 2000 and 2004, Katherine Harris in Florida and Ken Blackwell in Ohio, were both chief state elections officers. This is where elections are held and this is where the focus of our vigilance must be.
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