Bush tries to win White House the old-fashioned way

["Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    George Doubleya is trying to get to the White House the old-fashioned
way: by stealing the election.

    It is by now clear as can be that the CNN/ABC/CBS/NBC exit poll on
Florida was not so far off the mark after all in forecasting a Gore victory,
for that is what the voters inteneded.

    But as we say in Spanish "entre el dicho y el hecho hay un gran trecho,"
(between the word and the deed there is a long distance) and thereby hangs a
tale.

    In West Palm Beach County, a heavily democrat county north of Miami,
more than 19,000 ballots for President were thrown out because they were
"overvoted" for Both Gore and Buchanan, and Buchanan's own total represented
4 times what it was elsewhere.

    To make a long story short, the election commissioner of the county --a
democrat-- decided to design what's known in the election industry as a
"butterfly" ballot. Palm Beach uses punch cards as ballots, you stick it
underneath a booklet with the choices and then with a probe you punch out
the space representing your candidate. Normally on this kind of ballot, all
your choices in a given race are on one side of a two-page spead of the
booklet or the other, with the openings to punch holes on your card in the
middle. In the case of West Palm Beach --and ONLY West Palm Beach-- Buchanan
appeared on the page opposite Gore and Bush, and the instructions were very
explicit: vote once on each page.

    One result was that Buchanan wound up with 3,000 or so votes that even
HE recognizes weren't really meant for him AT ALL. People saw Gore's name as
the second one on the ballot, punched out the second hole, and wound up
voting for Buchanan. The other result was that some 19,000 people --more
than 4% of the West Palm Beach electorate-- voted twice, once for Gore on
the first page (it is suspected), then for Buchanan on the second, where he
was the only choice.One more thing: although county-wide this averaged more
than 4%; reports indicate that up to 15% of the votes in some Black
precincts were rejected invalidated. For comparison, the degree of
"overvoting" on other statewide races on the same ballot was less than 1%.

    This is the kind of thing the courts dismiss all the time as "harmless
error," since (although they're loathe to this kind of plain speaking) the
real attitude of bourgeois courts and election offcials is "who cares how
Blacks voted," and  "civil rights are just a formality." Well, as it turns
out, even the great (mis)communicator Hisself, Al Gore cares, because
according to the latest data from the Florida recount, he was some 225 votes
or so shy of George Doubleya Bush, with virtually every vote in the state
counted and then recounted. A third count, this time by hand, is in the
works for Saturday in some areas.

    There isn't the slightest doubt in the minds of anyone who knows
anything about U.S. politics that if only the votes of even a couple of the
Black West Palm Beach precincts had been honestly counted, i.e., as the
voters themselves wanted it to be counted, Al Gore would have been
proclaimed president and everyone in bourgeois circles would have been
relieved, for Gore is ALSO winning the popular vote nationwide, by a mere
200,000 votes (out of 100 million) it is true, but winning nonetheless.

    I think I mentioned in a previous post that in certain television
newsrooms, the absolute catastrophe, meltdown scenario for the outcome of
the elections that had been carefully rehearsed the weekend before was that
one candidate would win the popular vote, and the other the electoral
college vote which actually determines who is to be president.

    TV news execs and bigfoot anchors and correspondents with six and seven
figure salaries very much consider U.S. bourgeois democracy THEIR democracy
and the two party system THEIR system -- and I would say quite rightly, too,
considering their income, standard of living, the social circles they travel
and the establishments and institutions they patronize.

    That was the nightmare scenario because it would call into question the
legitimacy of a "victor" who won through clever manipulation, in effect, of
the electoral college system, rather than through clever manipulation of the
people, which is the way you're supposed to win. I mean, the point of the
elections is to determine which candidate can best fool the people, and it
rather spoils things to having a loser at the fooling the people game take
up residence in the White House. The last time someone who was generally
recognized as having gotten elected through some sort of swindle was in the
White House (Nixon), the President placed US nuclear forces on the highest
state or readiness (during the 1973 mid-East war) and everyone thought it
was a dodge to divert attention from Watergate. That was when the NY Times
ran a famous editorial basically saying, that the biggest contribution Nixon
could make to the cause of American Imperialism was to resign. It took a few
more months to bring that about, but eventually he did.

    Now the rulers and their acolytes don't change the presidential election
system for a very good reason. There is in the United States a cult of the
constitution, which has about as much to do with the text itself and its
content as most Churches have to do with the Bible, but is extremely useful
as the ultimate appeal to authority. To view the constitution as the work of
mere mortals that can be altered simply because most people want it to be
would undermine its usefulness.

    Prior to the voting, however, never in the wildest dreams of those
partisans --or enemies (and there were some)-- of the U.S. political system
involved in those rehearsals was what actually happened even considered as a
possibility.

    And what actually happened is that a "well intentioned," "politically
correct," hyper-"liberal" (by all accounts) democrat election official, who
wanted to make the font size of the candidates names larger for the senior
citizens, effectively disenfranchized some 20,000 or more people. What she
did in changing the type size of the candidate's names was to bump
Buchanan's name and some others onto the facing page. This made the voting
process confusing enough to throw the plurality, and with it ALL the
electoral college votes, to the candidate who was not favored by MOST voters
in the given state.

    None of this would be either here or there except for one thing: the
unfortunate, unintentional result of this well-meaning election official's
attempt to make voting easier and more accessible for seniors was to deny a
disproportionately Black, Hispanic and poor number of voters of their right
to cast a meaningful vote.

    Now, normally, in a vote counting dispute of this kind the attitude of
Marxists would be to treat it with all the contempt it deserves as the
supreme expression of the emptiness of bourgeois politics.

    But I think in this case that would be wrong. There can be no doubt that
a clear plurality of Florida voters wanted Gore to be president instead of
Bush. And since those voters whose clear intentions are being ignored are
"OUR" voters, working people, and, moreover, in the case of Blacks, people
whose right to vote was bought at no small cost in blood in the 1860s and
1960s, I say in THIS case we have no choice but to wade into the muck of
bourgeois electoralism and demand that some mechanism be devised and adopted
to make our more dangerous bourgeois opponent president. I say "more
dangerous" because he proved to be better (and the exit polls confirm this)
in fooling working people, and especially the Black and (oppressed) Hispanic
communities, than Bush.

    The rights of working people, even the right to be wrong, is more
important than the convenience of the marxist movement.

    In the contest between Bush and Gore, we as class-conscious workers were
completely indifferent. We advocated a vote for Nader or a more explicitly
socialist candiate, or expressed sympathy for abstention, as a way of
encouraging working people to stop relying on the likes of a Bush, Clinton,
Gore or Nixon to solve out problems for us, and instead to take things into
our own hands by organizing our own protests, movements, unions and
eventually, our own political party.

    NOW, it seems to me, the issue is different. It is the democratic right
of Black, Haitian, Hispanic and other working people to have their vote
count just as much as a rich white person's vote, despite the (let's be
generous, for once) the well-intentioned mistake of an election official who
unintentionally wound up making the ballot quite confusing, something which
had a disproportionate impact on working people and especially the most
oppressed layers of our class, those to whom English is, at best, a second
language, those who are, at best, semi-literate, etc.

    Now, the Democrat and Republican parties sent to Tallahassee to oversee
the recount two of the most experienced, trusted, poilitical operatives of
the American ruling class, former secrataries of state Warren Christopher
and James Baker. This --clearly-- shows the concern of the American
capitalist class and their poltiical representatives that the situation that
has been created could easily spin out of control, further undermining the
legitimacy of U.S. political institutions and especially the presidency.

    I thought at first this meant some sort of fix had been put in place,
and would soon be revealed. This appears now to be not the case. Throughout
the day (Thursday) Republican statements have hardened around the idea that
Bush won on Tuesday in Florida and that's it. At the same time Christopher
is pointing out the obvious -- large number of Blacks and Hispanics don't
vote for Buchanan, the only solution is to find a way to recognize the true
will of those voters in the count.

    Tempting as it may be to stand off in this war between the democrats and
republicans, with only an occassional shout of "take no prisoners -- both
sides"  to register our presence, I think that would be wrong. The stance of
the worker's movement must be with the Black and Haitian communities and
working people of Palm Beach County who have been denied the right to a REAL
vote in this elections.

José