Remember the last election, when Florida played such a crucial role in assuring victory to George W. Bush? Back then, the Bushies hadn't quite worked out all the bugs of electioneering, but thanks to new legislation they pushed through Congress, the next election will be a lot easier to walk away with.
In October of 2002, President Bush signed the "Help America Vote Act," known as HAVA. If you're in on the joke, you know that George likes program names to describe their exact opposite effect. Hence, "The Clean Air Act" and "No Child Left Behind."
If you guessed that the "Help America Vote Act" will do everything but help Americans vote, you are correct. HAVA will reek havoc on our election system, which is, by the way, the cornerstone of our democracy, the very one we're exporting with so little success. Maybe if the Bushies renamed it a monarchy they'd have more success.
HAVA, according to Gregory Palast in The Nation, is a "nasty civil rights time bomb."
First, the purges. In the months leading up to the November 2000 presidential election, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, in coordination with Governor Jeb Bush, ordered local election supervisors to purge 57,700 voters from the registries, supposedly ex-cons not allowed to vote in Florida. At least 90.2 percent of those on this "scrub" list, targeted to lose their civil rights, are innocent. Notably, more than half--about 54 percent--are black or Hispanic. You can argue all night about the number ultimately purged, but there's no argument that this electoral racial pogrom ordered by Jeb Bush's operatives gave the White House to his older brother. HAVA not only blesses such purges, it requires all fifty states to implement a similar search-and-destroy mission against vulnerable voters. Specifically, every state must, by the 2004 election, imitate Florida's system of computerizing voter files. The law then empowers fifty secretaries of state--fifty Katherine Harrises--to purge these lists of "suspect" voters.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 guarantees your rignt to vote but says nothing about your right to have it counted. If you're black, or even if you're suspected of having a criminal record, your ballot can be deliberately "spoiled." In the last election, you were one of seven whose vote was thrown out. In the next, the Bushies want to improve that number.
Oh, the things you can do when there's a war going on. Such a grand diversion, such lush, thick cover it offers the tinkerers of law.
If Bush "wins" again, don't blame it on African-Americans.
The time to overturn this law is now, rather than after the election. Outrage? Let's see some.
Article comments
1 - RJ Elliott
I remember how in 2000 the Democrats were buying votes from the homeless in Wisconsin in exchange for cigarettes. And how they illegally kept the polls open for an extended period of time in East St. Louis, Missouri.
But hey, if the GOP tries to prevent convicted felons from voting, I guess they're the real bad guys...
2 - RJ Elliott
Oh yeah, and the Dems tried to get the votes of our military thrown out in Florida back in 2000 as well. Such nice fellows they are, and so interested in a fair democracy...
3 - Al Barger
CW- Do you really WANT to win an election where the balance of winning came from the felon vote? Do you want to win elections that bad?
It is also a particularly cheap ad hominem mud sling to play the race card in all this. That a disproportionate share of felons relative to the overall population is black says NOTHING about the Republicans.
Or are you wanting to argue that the evil Republicans MAKE those black guys go banging and looting?
4 - Dirtgrain
I don't think that CW's message was that felons should vote. Even so, I have a feeling that felons would vote more for the interests of the people of this country than "compassionate" conservatives would. Surely the majority of felons would want to improve the conditions of the neighborhoods in which they grew up--the conditions that played a part in the transformation to criminal. There is a correlation between crime and poverty, is there not? In a way, when you say that felons shouldn't vote, you say that poor people (at least a big chunk of them) who are shafted by the system shouldn't vote. Or maybe voting is a privilege that should only belong to the rich. We can't have poor people voting in their own interests. They will probably vote not to be so poor. What will we do then?
Why do you feel that felons should not vote? Just because? Okay, so maybe it's because they are immoral people who cheat and steal, who commit acts of violence and get people killed, who selfishly put the needs of the few (themselves) over the needs of the many (society), who lie every day, who support their criminal buddies from Enron, who veto bills. . . I'm sorry, I got confused and thought that I was describing George W. Bush and his money-grubbing, corporate-whoring, Neocon, apocalypse-envisioning friends.
That said, I think it is the funny business that is being questioned about our electoral process. When power is given to these secretaries of state to eliminate votes from any portion of our society, corruption and fraud and manipulation will surely ensue.
I'm sick of hearing, "The Democrats did it too." They are all rascals. That does not mean that we shouldn't do anything about it now. By your line of reasoning, in Germany, people could say, "Well Hitler created a program for mass genocide, so why are you all complaining when Politician X starts such a program." This is pathetic side taking--just like when we were little kids. It has nothing to do with whether the issue at hand is right or wrong. Isn't that what we are supposed to be concerned with? Don't get so caught up with which party wins, and start focusing on determining what is good for our country and what is bad for our country.
Lastly, from Doug the Dynamic Driveler's blog:
While suturing a laceration on the hand of a 70-year-old Texas rancher, the doctor and the old man were talking about George W. Bush being in the White House. The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a 'post turtle."
Not knowing what the old man meant, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.
The old man said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle."
The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain, "You know he didn't get up there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the poor stupid bastard step down."
Let's create and electoral system in which no post turtles come into power.