SOCIALIST PARTY CANDIDATE CONDEMNS SUPREME COURT RULING
It is now clear that the right-wing majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is determined there shall not be a fair count of the Florida ballots, thus ensuring the election of George W. Bush as the next President.
The issue for the Socialist Party is not some profound difference between the two candidates, Bush and Gore - on the basic issues they share a great deal of common ground. The real issue at this time is the voting fraud in Florida, that we have watched an election stolen in broad daylight with the support of a narrow majority of a now-politicized United States Supreme Court.
Yes, the election was extremely close. Yes, had Gore won a few more votes in another couple of states, the issues in Florida would not be important. And yes, Gore did win the popular vote and thus gives new impetus to abolishing the electoral college. But the fact is this election came down to the State of Florida and whatever Gore's motives in pursuing this to the bitter end, the nation owes him a debt of thanks for having caused us to focus on the Florida balloting.
Let us dismiss the issue of the butterfly ballot, confusing as it truly was. (It is possible some of the 300 votes I got in Palm Beach might have been intended for Gore, certainly the vast bulk of those polled by Pat Buchanan were meant for Gore - more than enough to have given the state to Gore). That ballot was overseen by a Democratic election worker, it had been available to the public well before the election, it had been used in the past, and while the confusion was deplorable, it was not a plot.
Let us even dismiss the tinkering with the votes in districts where Republicans were permitted special access to absentee ballots to make technical corrections. This was illegal, but not necessarily with intent to violate the spirit of the law.
The two issues which loom most glaringly, are, first, the methodical effort by Governor Jeb Bush's administration in Florida to prevent Florida blacks from voting. Jeb Bush, perhaps realizing that his retreat on affirmative action had lost him any hope for the black vote in the future, wrote it off. Both the New York Times and the Boston Globe reported that the Bush election officials provided special laptops to local officials in pro-Bush precincts. (Only one such laptop was provided to a black area). These laptops were linked to a computer program which allowed election officials to tap in to Tallahassee to find out if voters who did not show up on local election rolls was in fact registered. To quote from the Boston Globe report: "if a voter found his or her name wrongly omitted from the rolls, a harried polling place worker had to try to get through to Tallahassee on the phone, and the lines were invariably busy. In Miami-Dade, black votes were thrown out at four times the rate of white votes."
Archaic punch-card voting machines, so prone to errors that its maker conceded in court testimony that hand counting was necessary to be sure of the outcome, were used in precincts with large minority populations. "White counties had more modern, optical scanners and lower rates of uncounted ballots", the Boston Globe noted.
Further, Republican officials had hired "ChoicePoint", an outside vendor with GOP ties, to "cleanse the rolls of felons" but the Boston Globe reported that at least 8,000 names, disproportionately minority, were improperly deleted".
Even more ironic is that while Bush's secretary of state, Katherine Harris, bought her list of felons from ChoicePoint, and eliminated 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds they had committed felonies in other states, none had! Harris was using a bum list. It was a roster of people who had, like Governor George Bush himself, committed nothing worse than misdemeanors.
The best story that has come to our attention was not from an American paper but from the British Observer which did an in depth study on Sunday, December 10th, detailing the way that the effort to prevent felons from voting was used to purge many legitimate voters from the rolls - largely in Hispanic and black areas which were pro-Gore. More than enough to have carried to state for Gore.
The Miami Herald commissioned its own study which showed that if all the votes cast were fairly counted, Gore would have won the election.
Yes, we know that every argument Bush has used would have been used by Gore if there was a democratic administration in charge of counting the votes. And yes, we realize that every argument Gore has used would have been used by Bush, if the situations were reversed. Both men were determined to win the election. The difference is that in this case one of the men - George W. Bush - stole it.
It is interesting that from the beginning of this painful and prolonged controversy it was Al Gore who suggested that all the votes in Florida be recounted, and that it was Bush who, at every step of the way, opposed manual recounts, knowing that the recounts would show him trailing.
For a nation which lectures other countries on how elections should be conducted, we have just seen an election stolen by George W. Bush and the Republican Party. One does not have to support Al Gore to recognize a "theft in broad daylight".
What a sham for the most powerful nation in the world to watch even the United States Supreme Court make itself a party to a stolen election. If this had happened in Serbia the U.S. might urge NATO intervention. At the very least, may I suggest that the citizens of Florida are entitled to a UN fact-finding commission! Meanwhile we count on the media to use Florida's sunshine laws to obtain a full and final vote.