Pot? This is Kettle...You're Black

I don't know if the recent presidential election was defrauded or not. I haven't a clue as to whether or not Ohio and Florida voters were robbed of their vote for John Kerry due to electronic voting machines not registering their vote. According to Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org) both the governments of Ohio and Florida are stonewalling any investigations or recounts of the November 2nd presidential election. This from said website:

"BREAKING -- TUESDAY NOV 23 2004: Citizens take action to clean up elections: (Summary of irregularities in Volusia) -- Volusia County resident Susan Pynchon, with the help of Volusia County attorney Daniel R. Vaughen, P.A., filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, Nov. 23, seeking to set aside the Nov. 2, 2004 Volusia County election due to irregularities. Full text of lawsuit

BREAKING -- MONDAY NOV 22 2004: Florida counties stonewall records requests. While some Florida counties have been attentive to the public interest and have promptly complied with our public records requests (scroll down for the Nov. 2 records request, for critical audit diagnostics), other counties have stalled, stonewalled, failed to comply in a timely manner, or outright refused to provide the records. UPDATE: Several Florida counties refused to comply with the law, by failing to provide the 8 items in the Black Box Voting Nov. 2 public records request in a timely manner."

MMM could be...however it certainly wouldn't be the first time this country has experienced massive voter fraud. Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson explain in their 1996 book "Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics", that voter fraud in the U.S. is as American as apple pie. They conclude that voter fraud has been with us for as long as we've had elections. Sabato is a well-respected political science professor from the University of Virginia and a Fox News Contributor whom has consulted for both Democrats and Republicans. This from said book:

"For much of the last century and a good part of this century, elections in many states and localities became contests of the voting fraud capacities of various factions and parties. The chief question on Election Day sometimes was: who could manufacture the requisite number of votes most easily and shrewdly, giving the other side insufficient time to make adjustments to its tallies and insufficient evidence to cry foul consistently.

In the 1844 election, New York City's 41,000 voters managed to cast 55,000 votes, a 135% turnout.

In 1876, Democratic Presidential candidate Samuel B. Tilden had 184 electoral votes (185 were needed then to win) with four states and 20 electoral votes still in question. Tilden had a substantial lead in Florida, but a Republican-controlled election board there began disqualifying hundreds of Democratic votes for dubious reasons, giving the state instead to Rutherford B. Hayes, his Republican opponent. Congress then set up a Republican-led commission to decide the election, and they gave all the remaining electoral votes to Hayes, denying Tilden the one vote he needed to win.

Vote selling first became popular in the late 1800's. It became so prevalent in some places that in 1910 a judge in Adams County, Ohio convicted 1,679 people, more than 25% of the voters there, of selling their votes. Inquiries showed that 85% of the county’s voters had bought or sold votes at some time in their lives.

In 1941 a young Congressman named Lyndon Johnson was elected in a tight election that came down to the vote count for Voting Box 13 in Alice, Texas. A few days after the election the official in charge of Box 13 "found" 203 additional votes, 202 of them for Johnson. Strangely all 203 of these citizens voted in alphabetical order and used the same pen. Johnson won the election by 87 votes statewide.

In a special election in Philadelphia's Senatorial District 2 in 1993, Republican Bruce Marks received 564 more in-person votes than his opponent William Stinson. However a vast majority of the absentee ballots went for Stinson, giving him a victory by 351 votes. A subsequent inquiry found that Stinson campaign staffers and local election board officials conspired to systematically collect, distribute and in some cases help voters fill out absentee ballots that favored Stinson. A judge overturned the election, Stinson was indicted (but not convicted), and some of his staffers went to jail.

In California in 1996 it was estimated that up to 24% of all voter registrations were phony or obsolete. One cause is the practice of paying third-party firms per registration to sign up new voters. Many times these firms sign up already registered voters with new addresses, duplicating these voters in the rolls. Paid solicitors added over 4,000 fraudulent voter registrations in L. A. County in 1992 alone. California also does not have a good procedure for removing dead voters or voters who leave the state from their lists. It's unclear how many people try to commit fraud by capitalizing on these registration problems. In one case in 1994 a woman entered a polling place in Kern County and asked for a ballot under the name of a woman who happened to be in a voting booth at that moment. When the legitimate voter stepped out and objected the impersonator fled.

In 1992 in Harris County, Texas 6,707 ineligible voters cast ballots, exploiting a law there that allows voters to sign a sworn statement of eligibility if they are not on the rolls. It took seven months for elections officials to completely evaluate these ineligible ballots; long after the election results had been certified.

Texas allows early voting using mail-in ballots. There is a space for a signature on the ballot and on the envelope that the ballot is mailed in. Texas law allows you to mark anything in this signature space, even an "X". Even so in a 1994 election in Galveston County a watchdog group found over 200 instances where the full signature on the envelope was very different from the full signature on the ballot inside. In that election a number of races had been decided by less than 200 votes."

So now you understand the phrase, "vote early, vote often." The Air America radio hosts whom have been barking about voter fraud in Ohio and Florida swear that unless something is done, our democracy is, "finished!" If that's the case we've "finished" for a little over 200 years now.

However, while the US can't seem to have an honest election, I find this article by Andrew Tully remarkably funny:

"U.S. Refuses To Accept Ukrainian Election Result

Washington, 24 November 2004 (RFE/RL) -- U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has rejected the official results of Ukraine's runoff presidential election, in which Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych -- backed by the Kremlin as well as incumbent President Leonid Kuchma -- was formally declared the winner over opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko.

Shortly after Viktor Yanukovych was formally declared the winner of the disputed 21 November elections, Secretary of State Powell said in Washington that the United States cannot accept Yanukovych as Ukraine's president-elect.

"We cannot accept this result [of the presidential election in Ukraine] as legitimate because it does not meet international standards and because there has not been an investigation of the numerous and credible reports of fraud and abuse," he said.

Powell said it is time for Ukraine's leaders to decide whether or not they are on the side of democracy. The secretary said he had spoken with Kuchma, urging him to conduct a thorough investigation into suspected election fraud. He said he also advised Kuchma not to resort to force in dealing with the tens of thousands of pro-Yushchenko demonstrators who have gathered in Kyiv for the past three days.

If an election-fraud investigation is not mounted, Powell said, there would be "consequences." He refused to say what they might be.

"It is time for Ukrainian leaders to decide whether they are on the side of democracy or not, whether they respect the will of the people or not," he said. "If the Ukrainian government does not act immediately and responsibly, there will be consequences for our relationship, for Ukraine's hopes for Euro-Atlantic integration and for individuals responsible for perpetrating fraud."

If this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle black then I don't know what is. The only saving grace here is that we are the self-professed, leaders of the free world, and as such we have a responsibility to see democracy flourish throughout the world. I guess in this case it's of the "do as I say, not as I do" variety.

What a precedent this sets for global affairs. The US' foreign policy will now resemble something like bad parenting.

France: You should be seen and not heard!
Russia: Democratize as I say, not as I do!
Iraq: Stop crying before I really give you something to cry about!