Patricia Goldsmith
The American electorate is looking more and more like the polar bear stranded on a shrinking ice floe-still powerful but with democracy melting out from under our feet. Unlike the polar bear, however, we should be able to analyze our situation and take action. The first thing we have to do is accept that certain familiar features of our habitat, which we have depended on in the past, are just gone.
We now have more media outlets than ever before, but their mission seems to be to drown out any molecule of truth. And our inter-dependent voting and justice systems have been reduced to slivers of their former selves.
For example, as time has gone by, the true significance of the Supreme Court's selection of George W. Bush as president has become more and more painfully clear, in spite of efforts on the part of the media and across the political spectrum to obscure the bald truth: In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court shamelessly sided with a gang of Republican congressional aides swinging baseball bats who originally shut down the vote count and threw the case into the courts.
In a slapdash job of constitutional interpretation, the conservatives ravaged four foundational relationships in our constitutional system. It usurped the role of the Florida Supreme Court in interpreting state law. It usurped the role of the American people by halting the counting of ballots in a presidential election and effectively choosing the president for them. It usurped Congress' powers to accept or reject the states' electoral college votes. And it reversed the proper distribution of powers in federal government by having Supreme Court justices appoint the president rather than vice versa.
It's important to remember that this was not a recount in the usual sense. Florida's punch machines produced a number of so-called over-votes and under-votes. These were valid votes, but physical inspection of the ballot was necessary-and feasible. Often the voter's intention was completely clear.
The media had already called the election in GWB's favor, which no doubt gave the Florida GOP legislature, under Jeb Bush, the courage and ass-coverage to declare that they would send electors committed to George W. Bush, no matter what the outcome of the actual vote count.
Agreeing with Jeb and going even further, the Supreme Court used the opinion to remind the American people that the electorate does not really have a constitutional right to vote. The Constitution only mentions electors; the popular vote is just a custom.
Supreme Court justices appointing the president in defiance of the popular vote-in a total repudiation of the right to a popular vote-that's about as activist as you can get. And we already have indications that Bush's appointees to the Court are continuing in the same direction.
Starting off his tenure with the breathtaking gall that would soon become familiar, one of Bush's first initiatives prescribed the remedy for his own theft of office: the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which required every state in the union to buy electronic vote machines-from highly partisan Republican vendors.
In spite of the crudeness of these power grabs, most of which took place right out in the open, it is only now that we can begin to see how it all came together. In an important article by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis, Network Hosting Attorney Scandal E-Mails Also Hosted Ohio's 2004 Election Results, we not only get more evidence that the GOP hacked electronic voting machines in Ohio in 2004, but we see how this links up with the firing of US District Attorneys:
There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official" Secretary of State website-which gave the world the presidential election results-was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's firing of eight federal prosecutors.
Did you get that? The servers the White House used to carry on illegal e-mail correspondence with GOP congressmembers about what they wanted from federal prosecutors-a wish list that included demands for prosecution of non-existent cases of voter identity theft and relief from the legitimate prosecution of Republicans-are the same servers that improperly hosted the 2004 Ohio election results.
Rosenfeld and Fitrakis go on to say:
Privatizing elections and allowing known partisans to run a key presidential vote count is troubling enough. But the reason Congress must investigate these high-tech ties is there is abundant evidence that Republicans could have used this computing network to delay announcing the winner of Ohio's 2004 election while tinkering with the results.
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