Around 10 am Wed. I thought we should go down and protest at the Democratic Party with signs like "don't you dare concede" but by noon it was too late. And we thought Gore was a paper tiger, jeez.
We had a demo outside the door of Repub HQ Wed. night as part of nov3.us--had a little speakout, handed out leaflets to shoppers at the supermarket nearby, had a crowd of about 50, including several passersby who were also mad about what happened. (Thanks to our NLG observers, the cops came and watched but didn't remove us).
What we said, in part, was:
Nov. 3, 2004. We will not concede our democracy
John Kerry may concede. Betty Castor may concede. But we will not concede our democracy. We don’t concede this election was fair. This election was marked by fraud, suppression and intimidation of voters from start to finish.
So, why did Kerry concede, when long-suffering voters did manage to cast a ballot in the face of 4, 5, even 9 hour waits, runarounds, intimidation, rejections of registrations—why didn’t these Democratic leaders continue to fight?
To save face? As part of a gentleman’s agreement? For John Kerry this decision to concede may be about keeping divisiveness down, smoothing things over, but for women it’s a matter of life and death, a matter that will affect our lives in every way.
As women, we are NOT willing to let our democracy trickle away, one election at a time, pushing us back in time when women, and African Americans of both sexes, didn’t count at the polls.
Just some of what we experienced in Florida: --1/2 of Florida voters used touch-screen machines with no paper backup ballot. The Associated Press reported on October 25: "Computer scientists, practically as a profession... say the touch screens now in use could alter or delete votes — and that without paper copies, voters will never know if their votes counted." ("E-voting fears add to recount worries.") And we notice that the exit polls projected a Kerry win in Florida, indicating that a majority of voters asked thought they had voted for Kerry when they left the poll.
Indeed, most Floridians are worried about their votes not counting: Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press said only 37% of Floridians polled had confidence their vote will be counted. (Diane Rehm Show, National Public Radio, 11-3-04).
In addition: --Automated calls to the homes of Democrats in Lake and Sumter Counties fraudulently told people that their polling place had moved. (Daily Commercial, Lake County; CNN, West Palm Beach)
--56,000 absentee ballots in heavily Democratic Broward County went missing in the mail. Many ballots were only mailed out again on Saturday, Oct. 30.
--New voter registrations were rejected because they had little errors such as not checking the "I am a citizen box," (although they sign an oath saying the
same thing) blocking thousands of new voters from voting.
--Florida Department of Law Enforcement visited elderly African American voting rights activists in Orlando, clearly meant to intimidate voters and voting rights efforts.
--A company hired by the Republican party ranged on college campuses across Florida for months with impunity, using the ruse of fake petitions to change people's voter registration to Republican, and in many cases changing their addresses so they couldn’t vote.
Then there’s Ohio: --Outrageously, impossibly long lines. One woman interviewed on CNN had waited for 9 hours. How many thousands of voters couldn’t stay, or waited but left before they got a chance to vote?
--Around 135,000 voters were forced to vote on provisional ballots that have not yet been counted. Republican challenges to voters were allowed to go ahead in violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Does this sound like a free and fair election to you?
We will not concede our democracy to election-stealing Republicans, weak-kneed Democrats, or the corporate-owned media. Women were force-fed and beaten to win the right to vote and we concede our elective franchise to nobody.
How can we possibly have confidence that these election results reflect what people want? The results reflect how much Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Glenda Hood were able to block people from registering to vote or voting. They reflect how much the voting machine manufacturers were able to keep their programming out of the public eye and away from any kind of audit. They reflect how much suppression could be gotten away with before judges ordered it stopped.
They reflect all of this—but one thing they don’t reflect is the thing an election is supposed to reflect, the will of the people.
We know that if we can’t even vote, can’t know that our vote will be counted, we have little hope of winning the changes that women want and need. Without democracy, feminism can’t progress.
George W. Bush didn’t win in 2000 and we won’t be silent as he installs himself again in 2004.
[...]
We know that the way women and African Americans won our rights in this country was not just by voting—we had to win the vote without having the vote, after all. And if we have to do it again, we will. This is about organizing a movement to take back our country for all the people that live here, not just the corporate millionaires.
Join NOW so we can fight to protect our rights as women, and join the fight to defend and expand our democracy. Tomorrow night at 7:30 at our downtown office, we will meet to talk about where to go from here. We’ll talk about how to fight for better healthcare, childcare and abortion rights, and about how we can build a movement strong enough that this can never happen again.
Gainesville Women’s Liberation P.O. Box 2625, Gainesville, FL 32602 352 378-5655
Gainesville Area National Organization for Women GA_NOW at juno.com 352 380-9934
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Jenny Brown