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Florida, electoral tourism
destination
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma
International—
WHILST Jeb Bush
affirms, without a snigger, that iVotronic’s
electronic voting equipment is absolutely
trustworthy, Republican Party strategists are
circulating flyers amongst their members in
Miami-Dade county urging them to use postal votes
because the machines lack printers and thus
electors’ votes cannot be verified.
Revealing the news,
The Petersburg Times commented that the
tactics of Republican officials are completely
contrary to what Jeb Bush and state experts said
when they repeatedly rejected requests from
Democrats, in the legislative house and before the
courts, to ensure that the machines give out
confirmation slips.
The Republican’s
nonsense is just one sign that allows us to
predict that in early November there will be a
political hurricane in Florida whose “center”
could shift very rapidly towards
Washington.
Miami-Dade is one of
the 15 counties that abandoned the system of
perforated voting slips after the 2000 elections
and subsequently elected to use iVotronic’s voting
equipment whose trustworthiness is now under
attack.
The propaganda
leaflet – printed in color and carrying a photo of
George W. Bush – is entitled "Make sure your vote
counts. Order your absentee ballot today” in
reference to the postal ballots.
The cards for
“absentees” are made of paper and are checked
using optical scanners after they arrive by
post.
For leaders of civil
rights defense groups, this maneuver is simply
outrageous. Sharon Lettman-Pacheco from the People
for the American Way Foundation described it as an
incredible level of hypocrisy and is filing a
lawsuit obliging the state to provide voting
confirmation slips. "Which one is it: Do the
machines work, or do they know something that we
don't?"
Florida is the
preferred destination for “electoral tourism” next
November 2. It is already known that the
ingredients are right for the farce of 2000 to
happen again. Michael Moore, director of
Fahrenheit 9/11, has already said that he
will have his cameras in the area; European
observers have announced that they will be there
and several groups of activists have stated that
they will be omnipresent in the most controversial
counties of South Florida. There is not one
analyst, political analyst or sociologist in or
outside the Union who doesn’t dream of adding
themselves to the troupe.
As the top official
of the electoral system in this state, who
guarantees that “every vote counts” is Governor
Jeb Bush, brother of the current president and
Republican candidate for the November elections,
George W. Bush – a situation that would be
laughable in any other country – nothing can
really surprise us.
The very same Jeb
Bush who some weeks ago suddenly withdrew a list
of more than 40,000 former felons whom he wanted
to exclude, and on which only 61 Hispanics
appeared (Florida Hispanics tend to vote
Republican) has just committed another racist
error. Now, following a judicial decision against
him, he has eliminated the form that would allow
those same excluded people to apply for the return
of their right to vote.
Some days ago, an
appeal court ruled in favor of the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU) and ordered that Governor
Bush’s prison services department must provide
prisoners with the assistance they need in order
to present the forms applying for the restoration
of their civic rights at the end of their
sentence. A procedure that would produce positive
results in only a negligible number of
cases.
The governor’s
decision was immediate. He abolished the
form.
Bush now has 600,000
former felons, the vast majority of them black and
therefore Democrats, excluded from the electoral
roll.
Three organizations
in Florida – the ACLU, Common Cause Florida, and
the League of Women Voters – with some 35,000
activists – are now trying to pressure Bush into
carrying out an audit of iVotronic’s computerized
voting machines during the August 31
primary.
The surprising
resignation of Division of Elections Chief Ed Kast
some weeks ago brought to light the tragic
situation reigning in that strategic area of the
country which wants to give lessons in democracy
to Cuba.
The
“DRE” syndrome
In fact, not a single
day passes without some item of bad news for those
who continue to dream of a decent election.
On July 28, the front
pages of the newspapers announced a new disaster:
a computer “crash” had erased the results of the
election for the 2002 governorship, which Jeb Bush
himself won.
Panic within the
enormous machinery of Bush and his angel of fraud,
State Secretary Glenda Hood (a personal friend of
the godfather of the Cuban-American mafia, senate
candidate Mel Martínez). In real terms, this
“crash” was something ugly that wasn’t
needed.
A couple of days
later – miraculously – the results that had
vanished reappeared, in the midst of a storm of
crooked explanations.
But the computer
syndrome, now omnipresent, was catapulted into the
skies, not just in Florida – the heart of the 2000
scandal- but throughout the whole
country.
Some 98 million US
citizens; in other words one in every six of the
115 million voters, will cast their votes thanks
to these famous ballot-less computers – known as
DRE for Direct Recording Election – that belong to
just four massive corporations whose owners, in
more than one case, have expressed a definite
sympathy for the Republicans.
In perhaps the most
credible and best documented article on the
subject of the electronic voting equipment
published in The Nation and entitled How
They Could Steal The Election This Time (www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml/i=20040816&s=dugger), journalist and expert
Ronnie Dugger writes:“The
United States therefore faces the likelihood that
about three out of 10 votes in the national
election this November will be unverifiable,
unauditable and unrecountable. The private
election companies and local and state election
officials, when required to carry out recounts of
elections conducted inside the DREs, will order
the computers to spit out second printouts of the
vote totals and the computers' wholly electronic,
fakable "audit trail." The companies and most of
the election officials will then tell the voters
that the second printouts are "recounts" that
prove the vote-counting was "100 percent
accurate," even though a second printout is not a
recount.”
And
Dugger is not afraid to predict:“The
result could be the failure of an American
presidential election and its collapse into
suspicions, accusations and a civic fury that will
make Florida 2000 seem like a family spat in the
kitchen.”
Now
comes the hurricane.
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