Fraud & War

It’s entirely possible that massive voter fraud and voter suppression will mar the Election of 2008. What should be a landslide for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party may become a squeaker, ala the Election of 2000. Lawyers from both campaigns are already converging on battleground states, making charges, filing briefs, preparing the soil for the legal wrangling that might begin on November 5.

As long as there have been elections in America there has been fraud – ballot stuffing, ballot stealing, crude or sophisticated efforts aimed at getting some voters to the polls (the same voter more than once in some cases) while keeping others away (often by violence, more commonly by intimidation). In recent years the GOP machine has become adept at the mechanics of stealing elections.

It’s always amusing to hear our political leaders demand “free and fair” elections in countries where Democracy is trying to take root, when our own elections are so prone to manipulation. The hypocrisy never seems to register with American politicians.

Considering the mess the country is in, and the clear path that can be traced from the policies of George W. Bush and the Republican Party to that mess, the ineptitude of the McCain campaign and the jittery way McCain has veered to and fro on the issues, first a die-hard free-marketeer then a neo-regulator, and McCain’s cynical and disastrous choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, Barack Obama should ride an electoral tidal wave to the steps of the White House.

And yet because of the potential for voter fraud, the outcome seems far less secure than it should.

We know fraud is going to happen in battleground states, we know who’s behind it; we just don’t know if there will be enough fraud to change the outcome.

Meanwhile, real families are still losing their homes, going broke, suffering from inadequate medical care, and driving on roads and bridges that have been neglected for decades.

If the Reagan Era was Morning in America, these anxious times, at the tail end of the Bush Reign of Error, might be called Twilight in America. The colossal failures of the past eight years are something to behold. Bush and his cronies failed on every front, in every arena, foreign and domestic, and when they slink from Washington, discredited, disgraced and despised, they will have left the country weaker than they found it.

Sometime during this long, strange campaign season the U.S. media made what appears like a collective decision not to report on the failed Iraq Occupation. To find out what is happening in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Americans must look to foreign media, like the BBC, which has not abrogated its responsibility to report on the Iraq conflict.

In the final presidential debate, John McCain made a sunny assertion that the Iraqi people are coming together and putting the chaos and mayhem of the past five years behind them. McCain’s blindness can be written off to the fact that he resides in an alternative universe where whatever gibberish he spews is accepted as irrefutable truth.

This is how BBC reporting went just last week: “There is much less violence now, but Baghdad is nowhere near returning to normal: the streets are full of potholes and the traffic is clogged and backed up by check-points.” Blast walls erected by U.S. forces (or perhaps this was done by Halliburton?) are another reason for the reduction in violence. The BBC: “Concrete anti-blast walls still surround almost every significant building here, and stretch along streets where there are markets, bringing relative safety, but turning the pavements - where the vendors' stalls are - into narrow, claustrophobic canyons.”

This sounds to me like a people being kept apart by physical obstacles rather than a people coming together in peace, harmony and a spirit of reconciliation. Call me crazy, un-American even, but I don’t think the “Surge” is working well anywhere expect in the minds of U.S. politicians, who in turn feed tales of “success” to a complacent news media.

For further proof of this consider the thousands of Iraqis who turned out to protest their government’s ongoing negotiations with the United States over a Status of Forces Agreement that would legitimize the stationing of U.S. troops in Iraq for years to come. One point the Americans want in the agreement is immunity from prosecution; in other words, the Americans want to be able to act freely, move freely, and if a GI happens to kill an innocent civilian, the Iraqis must have no recourse.

If this situation were reversed and Iraqi troops occupied New York City, would New Yorkers vote to give their occupiers unlimited powers? Why we expect others to act in ways we never would is a by-product of our arrogance.