Posted on 10/22/2004 1:50:43 PM PDT by PCK_IV
In the prosecution of War, even a holy war, a key element is referred to as "preparing the field for battle". In brief, this has, in modern parlance, meant bombing the heck out of the enemy from afar and doing as much to set the physical stage for the coming battle as can be done to your own advantage. This election is contested no less fiercely.
How are the Democrats preparing the field for battle?
The most robust barrage focuses almost all targeting on a single idea: If Kerry loses, the election was stolen, minorities had their votes tossed out, evil rich Republicans "systematically disenfranchised" whole swathes of the country’s electorate who, according to Jimmy Carter’s own version of Natural Law, were endowed by God with a spiritual predisposition to vote for Democrats like John Kerry, ( who by the way, served in Viet Nam, can heal the lame, and has a decidedly Gallic demeanour ), or who were barred from voting at all because of a petty thing like a felony record.
Part and parcel of preparing the field for battle, and an equally key component, is to psychologically destroy the enemy’s will to win. Tell the lie constantly, put forth the myth in mythic proportions, bomb them so viciously that they have no mental will left to enjoin battle.
Consider but two of two several hundred daily examples: An article by Paul Krugman from today’s New York Times, and a flyer provided to voters in Missouri, attached and captioned in today’s commentary in the Wall Street Journal.
Let’s examine the photo in the flyer attached produced by America Coming Together. That photo has been seen hundreds of times in the chronicles of the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960’s.
Who ran the South in the 60’s? Who ran every major town in the South in the 60’s?
Democrats.
Which party lead the fight to provide and enact Civil Right’s legislation, ( over the protests of both John F. and Robert Kennedy )? Republicans.
Dispensing with the risible notion that Democrats in Missouri, living or dead, have a hammer lock on election integrity, it’s clear that ACT is upping the ante in fraud charges before the election to make sure that if enough dead men are unable to vote, even provisionally, it’s evil doing Republicans, nominally wielding fire hoses, who prevent the lately risen from voting.
Meanwhile, today in the NY Times article included below, Paul Krugman writes a homily in no material way different from the ACT smear sheet. The précis version of Krugman is that Republicans will eat your young and steal your votes and what’s more: CNN is in on it! Yes! CNN, bastion of the political right, is helping Republicans by running polling data from yet another member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: Gallup.
Long considered the invisible arm of the VRWC, Gallup is now accused of providing skewed polling data and we are to presume that this sudden discovery is merely coincidental to a Bush gain in percentage points, ( Calling Dan Rather!! ).
The Vast Left Wing Whatchamacallit propaganda barrage of hysteria emanating from the J.F. Goebbels Institute For Truth has begun in earnest. The stage is being set and the lies pre-sown to create the latest treasured socialist Bugaboo: The Only Way Florida Can Go For Bush Is By Theft.
It is now dogma and no less than a sacramental tenet of the DNC that human beings, living or dead, will not of their own volition vote Republican unless they are the delusional, stupid, angry, white, pan-phobic rubes out there in Bushville, ( for a map of Bushville, lookup any land area in the United States outside the New York, Boston, Hollywood, San Francisco gang of four ). John "I’m A Breck Girl" Edwards himself says, without respite, "Real American’s are voting for John Kerry", and who, when he has ascended as president," will rise up out of their wheel chairs and walk again."
Indeed, according to Democrat canon, it will be both legally and spiritually impossible for Florida, or such another swing state, to deliberately, willfully, vote for George W. Bush. That being an immutable noble truth, the only possible scenario That Can Be Conceived "rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters".
The flip side for us is to remember: Dead men don’t wear plaid, but, praised be Saint Daly, they vote Democratic by the millions from sea to shining sea. ~ pck
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REVIEW & OUTLOOK
'Provisional' Democracy Will Democratic lawyers make voter fraud easier?
Friday, October 22, 2004 12:01 a.m.
Here we go again. If you thought the aftermath of the 2000 election was messy, this year's Presidential contest may well make Afghanistan's recent vote look like ancient Athens. A major problem--or opportunity, if you're a lawyer--is something called "provisional balloting," as we'll explain below.
Let's first stipulate that both parties plan to fight over votes, and that both sides have some scoundrels who will cheat. But in the run-up to this Election Day, by far most of the accusations and the lawsuits have come from the Democrats. Even before votes are cast, they're accusing state ballot officials of conspiring to deny voters access to the polls.
Newsweek--hardly a Republican organ--reports that nearly every big battleground state "is being hit with a crush of Democratic Party lawsuits charging that the application [of antifraud laws] is arbitrary and unfair." In Florida, Democrats have filed no fewer than 10 suits against GOP officials. In New Mexico, Democrats managed to overturn a token photo ID requirement.
The race card is a big part of this strategy, as the nearby liberal political mailer shows. John Kerry and John Edwards regularly tell crowds that a million blacks had their votes "stolen" four years ago and that countless others were kept from the polls. Never mind that Janet Reno was the Attorney General in 2000, and that she dispatched platoons of lawyers to search for evidence of disenfranchisement and found nothing worth reporting. Yet on Saturday Mr. Edwards told a group of mostly black supporters, "We know they're going to be up to their old tricks, right, trying to keep you from voting."
Beyond firing up black turnout, this all looks like a setup to fight any close outcome in court. A Kerry/Edwards "Election Day Manual" that surfaced last week gives the game away: "If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged," says the manual, "launch a pre-emptive strike," complete with press releases quoting "party/minority/civil rights leadership as denouncing tactics that discourage people from voting." Finally, a pre-emption doctrine that liberals can support.
In particular, Democrats have been promoting the use of "provisional" votes. Under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, anyone who shows up at the polls on Election Day is entitled to cast a ballot even if he isn't registered. Such a provisional ballot is then supposed to be set aside and investigated to make sure it is legitimate. The rules for verifying these ballots are up to the states, and in Colorado in 2002 some 3,000 provisional ballots decided the outcome in the Seventh Congressional District. It took the district's three counties, each of which had different rules for counting the ballots, 35 days to finish.
So in addition to delaying the election outcome for days, provisional voting has the potential to create all sorts of legal mayhem. Liberal groups have been suing around the country to overturn laws requiring that a provisional vote at least be cast in the precinct in which the person resides. In Ohio, Jesse Jackson mentioned Bull Connor this month in denouncing GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell for defending provisional ballot rules that were unanimously (and bipartisanly) adopted last year. And sure enough, a federal judge recently obliged and overturned the law.
Someone could now presumably cast provisional votes in several Ohio precincts on Election Day, in the hope that they aren't compared across district lines and more than one would be counted. In a close race, partisans will surely demand that all such votes be counted--and will accuse anyone who objects of denying voter access, or of racism if the provisional voters are minorities.
You don't have to be a cynic to imagine that some polling places will be rushed with dozens, even hundreds, of unregistered voters, perhaps just as the polls are scheduled to close. The right to cast a provisional ballot will then become an excuse to sue to keep polls open later, which is precisely what happened in 2000 in St. Louis and might have cost then-Senator John Ashcroft his seat. Any refusal would be cause for another equal-protection lawsuit that could take weeks to settle.
Don't take our word for it. Listen to John Kerry, who laid out the strategy at a rally in April: "We are going to bring legal challenges in those districts that make it difficult for people to register," and his aides are telling reporters they'll insist that "every vote is counted," implying every provisional vote.
Not that the partisans care, but there's a larger principle that is in danger of being trampled here. A fair election requires two things: The ability to cast a ballot but also the confidence that any vote is honestly cast. The count-'em-all-legal-or-not-and-sue strategy stomps on the second principle in order to serve the first. Denying the right to vote was common in many areas before the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s, but there is no evidence that it was a problem at all in 2000.
What we are seeing now isn't an attempt to prevent injustice but looks to be a calculated political strategy to create enough confusion at the polls to justify legal challenges that will cloud any close Presidential outcome. Let's hope we have a clear winner on Election Night, or we may all wish we were in Afghanistan.
Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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October 22, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Voting and Counting
By PAUL KRUGMAN
If the election were held today and the votes were counted fairly, Senator John Kerry would probably win. But the votes won't be counted fairly, and the disenfranchisement of minority voters may determine the outcome.
Recent national poll results range from a three-percentage-point Kerry lead in the A.P.-Ipsos poll released yesterday to an eight-point Bush lead in the Gallup poll. But if you line up the polls released this week from the most to the least favorable to President Bush, the polls in the middle show a tie at about 47 percent.
This is bad news for Mr. Bush because undecided voters usually break against the incumbent - not always, but we're talking about probabilities. Those middle-of-the-road polls also show Mr. Bush with job approval around 47 percent, putting him very much in the danger zone.
Electoral College projections based on state polls also show a dead heat. Projections assuming that undecided voters will break for the challenger in typical proportions give Mr. Kerry more than 300 electoral votes.
But if you get your political news from cable TV, you probably have a very different sense of where things stand. CNN, which co-sponsored that Gallup poll, rarely informs its viewers that other polls tell a very different story. The same is true of Fox News, which has its own very Bush-friendly poll. As a result, there is a widespread public impression that Mr. Bush holds a commanding lead.
By the way, why does the Gallup poll, which is influential because of its illustrious history, report a large Bush lead when many other polls show a dead heat? It's mostly because of how Gallup determines "likely voters": the poll shows only a three-point Bush lead among registered voters. And as the Democratic poll expert Ruy Teixeira points out (using data obtained by Steve Soto, a liberal blogger), Gallup's sample of supposedly likely voters contains a much smaller proportion of both minority and young voters than the actual proportions of these voters in the 2000 election.
A broad view of the polls, then, suggests that Mr. Bush is in trouble. But he is likely to benefit from a distorted vote count.
Florida is the prime, but not the only, example. Recent Florida polls suggest a tight race, which could be tipped by a failure to count all the votes. And votes for Mr. Kerry will be systematically undercounted.
Last week I described Greg Palast's work on the 2000 election, reported recently in Harper's, which conclusively shows that Florida was thrown to Mr. Bush by a combination of factors that disenfranchised black voters. These included a defective felon list, which wrongly struck thousands of people from the voter rolls, and defective voting machines, which disproportionately failed to record votes in poor, black districts.
One might have expected Florida's government to fix these problems during the intervening four years. But most of those wrongly denied voting rights in 2000 still haven't had those rights restored - and the replacement of punch-card machines has created new problems.
After the 2000 debacle, a task force appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush recommended that the state adopt a robust voting technology that would greatly reduce the number of spoiled ballots and provide a paper trail for recounts: paper ballots read by optical scanners that alert voters to problems. This system is in use in some affluent, mainly white Florida counties.
But Governor Bush ignored this recommendation, just as he ignored state officials who urged him to "pull the plug" on a new felon list - which was quickly discredited once a judge forced the state to make it public - just days before he ordered the list put into effect. Instead, much of the state will vote using touch-screen machines that are unreliable and subject to hacking, and leave no paper trail. Mr. Palast estimates that this will disenfranchise 27,000 voters - disproportionately poor and black.
A lot can change in 11 days, and Mr. Bush may yet win convincingly. But we must not repeat the mistake of 2000 by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that a narrow Bush win, especially if it depends on Florida, rests on the systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters. And the media must not treat such a suspect win as a validation of skewed reporting that has consistently overstated Mr. Bush's popular support.
bump
from your pen?
good work.
Hopefully it will be their party's grave.
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