[Escape from New York
delayed completion of this post this until after election night. All the
better. Now that the great danger has been dodged, let’s look to the
future. Advisories: 1) I’m talking here
about presidential elections. 2) You really have to see the videos.]
Having made the case against voting for Obama in a previous
post, it’s only fair for me to suggest the alternative.
I value the right to vote as fundamental. I have seen how people who don’t have that
right fight for it, and how people who get it for the first time eagerly
embrace it, and go to extraordinary lengths to use it. Although I consider electoral politics only
one aspect of a thoroughgoing democratic polity and of individual democratic
engagement, it would be hard to conceive of a democratic schema, no matter how
revolutionary, in which a transparent, trusted voting process was not
important. It may be one among many, but
a vote is an important political tool/weapon, and a terrible thing to waste.
For these reasons, I generally refuse to waste my vote on a
candidate of the RepubliCrat duopoly. George McGovern was the last major party
candidate I voted for.
(I lie. I relapsed once, when a woman friend of mine,
clearly desperate for Democratic votes, promised to buy me dinner if I voted
for Bill Clinton. Maybe I sold my
vote. Or maybe I responded to the kind
of plea Michael
Moore made yesterday,1 abandoning all pretense that there might
be some actual argument for voting for Obama, and urging his reluctant
correspondent to cast that vote simply as a personal favor to Michael
himself. At any rate, disappointed as
usual from my slip into electoral promiscuity, I realized that, regarding one’s
vote, whether it’s the attractions of my dinner date or the boyish charm of
Michael Moore, you shouldn’t give it up so easily. Respect Yourself, and all that. So, as often
happens in such cases, I’m not counting it.)
I have, though, always made sure to register and vote for
some third-party candidate whose politics I could actually support. No matter
how few votes that candidate got, I thought it was important that support for
alternative – substantively left and at least quasi-socialist – political
possibilities be registered and recognized, in a visible and measurable
way. This year, given the present
contours of the American electoral system, I have reluctantly concluded that, even
on these limited terms, voting for an attractive third party is no longer a
politically relevant gesture. For
countless presidential election cycles, in a kind of American political badminton death-match,2
those who vote third party and those who vote for the Democrat have been
volleying the Einstein quip that “doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.” Well, though not exactly in the same way, both
now have a point, and it’s time to play an entirely different game.
It’s necessary, first of all, to recognize how thoroughly
corrupted, untrustworthy, antithetical to democracy, and generally hopeless for
any progressive purposes, our electoral system is.
Liberals and progressives certainly seem to recognize, and
complain about, the corrupting effects of money on our elections, but the
extent and depth of that corruption have more radical implications than they
are wont to admit. Citizens United, which progressives rightly rail about, has brought
this into sharp relief, although the problems are prior to, and extend beyond, that
decision, and will not be solved by a constitutional amendment directed at
annulling it.
Another important decision that liberals never mention was the
one Barack Obama made – in direct contradiction to his promise and in contrast
to John McCain’s keeping of his – to forgo public financing in 2008. This decision by the ostensibly progressive
Democrat sanctioned making the presidential race an unlimited private
fundraising contest ad infinitum.
And a different decision would
have made a difference, creating a bipartisan precedent that would have put
severe pressure on subsequent candidates. Obama’s decision did the opposite. It
effectively eliminated any possibility that a presidential candidate would ever
forgo private financing, and took the whole discussion of such an option off
the table, rendering it one of those naive leftist plaints to which Serious
People need not pay attention. It was a substantive betrayal with significant consequences.
You can bet liberals would never cease to criticize McCain, if the decisions
had been reversed.
At any rate, as a result of these decisions, and of other
laws regarding PACs, Super PACs, 501Cs, and of the inequalities in wealth in
our society in general, we now have this year’s obscene $2 billon+ auction.3 And an auction it is. There is no straight-faced argument that the
billion dollars spent on each candidate does not buy access, influence, and
preferential consideration on policies, regulations, and legislation. There is no straight-faced denial that the
logic of explicit and implicit commitments made in the private-party,
wealthy-donor, fund-raising campaign is entirely different from that of the
promises and suggestions made in the public event campaign. There is no straight-faced denial, based on
the historical record, about which logic triumphs in the governance.
We now have, it is increasingly obvious, elections by and
for the plutocracy, which create governments by and for the plutocracy that
make the minimum concessions necessary to prevent complete, militant, and
progressively politically-focused public disaffection. The net result is a government of millionaires
hired by billionaires. Yes, no matter
where s/he starts, if properly vetted by the plutocracy to allow his or her
accession to national candidacy, millionaire
is where the candidate ends up. The
moment s/he is nominated, s/he will probably get a sweetheart book deal, and be
a millionaire by the time of the election.
Meanwhile, as a result of all that private-party, wealthy-donor
hob-nobbing during two campaigns and meeting most of the explicit and implicit
expectations gleaned therein, the president knows that, upon retirement, there
will be money, lots and lots of money – from speaking fees, more book deals,
directorships, etc.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a retired president
having a comfortable life, which does require some multiple of the median
income in our unequal capitalist society.
He doesn’t have to drive a Chevy. Progressivism, even radicalism, is not asceticism. The matter for
concern is the accelerating tendency, tied to the increasingly plutocratic
development of the electoral system, for a political career to become a path
for dramatically changing one’s social, and usually therefore one’s political,
affinities.
This is true even for liberal Democrats, and it’s true especially
on the presidential level. It’s nice for Bill Clinton that he was able to go
from being the son of a struggling single mom to a guy who’s worth upwards
of $80 million.4 Maybe he “earned” that from...gee, what talent
would that be? Or maybe it has more to
do with the way he achieved the DLC5 plan of stitching the Democratic
Party (and himself) into the agenda of corporate America and finance capital. You decide.
And maybe the reason the net worth of Members of Congress increased
25% between 2008 and 2010 and “the economic disparity between Republicans
and Democrats has virtually disappeared” has nothing to do with that trajectory
of the party.6 And maybe I’m wrong, I’m just guessing here, but I’ll
bet that, for the same reasons, Obama, like Clinton, will end up a very wealthy
man.
So the current presidential election system is not only run
by plutocrats, it’s become a system for making plutocrats. This did not used to be the case. It’s sure not your granddaddy Harry’s
Oldsmobile; it’s Big Daddy Bill’s Maserati.
Democrat and Republican, from the party to the personal level, through
and through, it’s a plutocratic system, controlled by and for big money.
The grip of money is not just represented by the plutocratic
campaign finance system. That $2 billon
gets spent somewhere, and a huge chunk of it goes to television
advertising. That means media, from the
mega entertainment corporations to the hundreds of local-market television and
radio stations to the new internet platforms, have a big financial stake in
keeping the electoral contest the way it is.
They prefer a horse race in which unlimited amounts of money can be
spent on short, scripted spots in a hundred media markets to a campaign that’s
built from thousands of freewheeling face-to-face local meetings and
discussions. They want a campaign that
focuses on superficialities – personalities and platitudes – rather than on substantive
ideas and policies, one that sticks to the two-party script and avoids raising issues
that neither party wants discussed. They
certainly do not want any limits on the money the candidates can spend, or the
time they can campaign. The Campaign is an entrenched, money-making reality
show that the media is very comfortable with, that lasts for 18 months, and
that they do not want to cancel.
Meanwhile, in the reality community, one might notice that
certain unsustainable contradictions are becoming, well, unsustainable: the
entire world capitalist economy – including European social democracy – is imploding
and American hegemony is under challenge.
These are fundamental problems, and neither Obama nor any other possible
Republican or Democratic president has any iota of a smidgen of an idea of
undertaking the kind of radical changes that would respond to these crises –
which are also opportunities – in a way that would move our national trajectory
in a progressive direction. On the
contrary, with capitalism reverting to its immiserating, and imperialism to its
militarist, core, any major-party president will embrace all that implies. Democrat or Republican, we are going to get
more of the same, just nastier: cuts in entitlements, the imposition of a bi-partisan
austerity agenda, long-long-term unemployment, expansion of the permanent
imperialist “war on terror” across Africa and the Middle East, ubiquitous drone
assassinations, unconditional support of Israel (including, quite possibly, an
epically criminal attack on Iran). The
difference: Maybe the Republican will be “louder” and the Democrat “smarter.” Fiddling
around the edges. Nobody is even promising anything different. No more “We’ll change the way Washington
works”; now it’s “You can’t change Washington from the inside.”7
All except the most self-deluded progressives know this. Haven’t
we already seen that all that will come of holding Obama’s “feet to the fire”
is warm toes for Barack. Not only Romney
and Obama, but both the Republican and the Democratic parties as institutions are fully part of the
problem, and from neither will a candidate or a solution that is not
pre-approved by the plutocracy ever
emerge. As I’ve said before,8
most progressive citizens know
that we have to get off this electoral merry-go-round that is getting us
nowhere. So, if you’ve gone out and voted for Obama, when you see the policies that you end up getting (no “if,” you already
got them), please consider getting off once and for all before the music starts
again. Unless you’re content to be ratcheted further right by your fear of the
next Big Bad Republican Wolf. (Dole, Bush, McCain, or Romney, it’s always the
most important election ever, isn’t
it?) Or, unless you actually think that,
in 2016, just in time to save us from the horrible results of 2000-2015, the
Dems are going to nominate a more seemingly – let alone, this time I swear, a more
really real – “progressive” candidate than 2008 Obama. If so, good luck with that.
Therefore, in American presidential elections to come, aside
from withholding our votes from the Democrats, we should all be prepared to
vote for a third party, right?
I’m afraid I’m not satisfied with that either.
____________________________________
In an America where there is no significant “left” at all, the
most important task is to build one – to create an independent progressive
movement that opposes the politics of both major parties. If we can do that, and as part of that have a successful electoral strategy that gets that
movement on ballots, in debates, fair access to media, etc., then, in
principle, yes, voting for that movement’s candidates is what we should
do. But, in practice, aside from the
scant likelihood of building such a movement in four years, the two major
parties have made it virtually impossible, legally as well as practically, to
compete fairly in the electoral arena.
Given the plutocracy’s two-party lock, the critique that says
third-party voting is a futile exercise that can never have any significant
political effect has to be taken seriously. I have lately and reluctantly come to conclude that even third-party
voting is not a sufficient or effective tactic for progressive who want to make
a difference using the electoral system.
I am convinced that the problems we now have in our
electoral system render it completely untrustworthy in the most basic sense,
and require a more radical break. The
possibilities for gaming the system have proliferated in unprecedented ways. We have all taken note of the
vote-suppression strategies:
voter-caging, voter-threatening, felon-disenfranchising, voter ID laws,
etc. Greg Palast, in particular, has
done a great job of exposing them.9 Progressives and Democrats are well
aware of these, although for some strange reason, the Democratic Party – whose
candidates are the overwhelming victims of these scams – does nothing much
about them for years at a time, and only pops up to protest a month or few
before presidential election day. There was some liberal and Democratic press during
this campaign about overwhelmingly Republican voter registration and
absentee-ballot trickery,10 but there is also a reluctance on the
part of the Democratic Party to pay consistent attention to these problems.
Progressive pay even less attention, and Democrats
positively avoid (John Kerry ran away from these in 2004) other serious
questions about fraudulent vote-counting procedures and unreliable electronic
voting machines. This, despite the fact
that there is significant evidence that the Democrats have had two presidential
elections stolen from them as a result of these problems.11
The issues surrounding electronic voting machines are
particularly important. If you’re going
to get upset about one guy throwing away 8, or 80, registration forms, realize
that that kind of retail fraud pales in comparison to the wholesale changing of
thousands of votes that can be invisibly
effected by a deliberately hacked, or even just “accidentally” defective,
electronic voting systems.
Questions regarding these machines are surrounded by a lot
of obfuscation, but it’s really quite simple: They are inherently opaque to the
user and the election official, and it has been proven time and again that they
generate false results and are relatively easy to hack. One recent example: “Tests on an electronic
voting machine that recorded shockingly high numbers of extra votes in the 2010
election show that overheating may have caused upwards of 30 percent of the
votes in a South Bronx voting precinct to go uncounted.” 12
Oops. 30% of votes lost! What
the hell, it’s only the South Bronx.
Do not comfort yourself thinking this is a one-off. There are scores of such incidents. Look through the links below.
According to Black Box Voting, about 90% of votes in all
fifty states are now counted
electronically. That includes the votes that are cast electronically on DRE (Direct Recording Electronic)
touch-screen machines, without a paper audit, and those that are cast using optically-scanned
paper ballots. It’s important to
recognize that it’s the counting
that counts. To revise Stalin
accordingly: It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people machines
who count the votes. I am convinced that
these machines have created a voting system in the United States in which citizens
have no reasonable certainty, and no way of ever verifying, that the person they
vote for will receive the vote cast.
This is an extraordinary turn of events.
One wants to dismiss or ignore it, but if we really value our right to
vote, we must confront all the evidence and its implications.
Look into the links below for yourself, and, please, take a
look at the following 8-minute excerpt from Hacking Democracy,13 the HBO documentary based
on Bev Harris’s work at Black Box Voting. In it, you will see an election official from
Tallahassee (Leon County), Florida, who had been appointed to oversee the
statewide 2000 recount before the Supreme Court stopped it. He was curious about the machines in use,
since he had noticed that Volusia County machines had counted backwards to -16,022 votes. As he says:
“In the 17 years that I’ve been an election administrator, my experience is that
that kind of subtraction cannot occur accidentally. Someone consciously tried to affect that
computer system, and consciously tried to perpetuate a fraud to steal votes.” In order to test the Diebold Accuvote machines
in question – which a Diebold executive and a senior software engineer had just
testified in open hearing could not be
hacked through the memory card – he undertook this test:
So, not only is the electoral process corrupted by the
financial control of the plutocracy, not only is it rendered politically moot
by the convergence of the two major parties on the essential political
paradigm, it is also untrustworthy in the most fundamental sense, leaving the
voter with no reasonable certainty that s/he actually voted for whom s/he thought
s/he did. There could be a problem with
your machine in your precinct, or there could not, it could be a deliberate
hack, or it could be a software glitch – and you will never know.
It’s worth noting that the optical scan machine you see in
this video is the better system from
the point of view of election integrity.
With these machines, the original hand-marked paper ballots on which the
vote is cast remain available for an
audit. Of course, the audit will only be done if the count raises some suspicion, which, as you’ve seen, it would
not. And it can only be done if election
officials don’t discard the paper ballots, as they sometimes do,
illegally. But it is at least
possible. With the DRE machines, most of
which give no paper receipt, the vote is cast and counted electronically, and there is no voter-verified paper
trail against which the electronic results could
ever be audited.
The spread of these machines also directly affects what we
think we might accomplish with third-party voting. With systems like this in place, third-party
votes are not just brave and clear, if futile, markers of political
difference. These votes can now become a
kind of electronic electoral slush fund, available to be moved around
unnoticed. In a close race in a swing
state, the public, the press, and the Democrats themselves might notice if a
few thousand Democratic votes went missing.
But who’s going to notice that a thousand or so votes from the
Libertarian and Green candidates combined, got shifted to the Republican
candidate. The third party share of the
vote will go from 3% to 2.5% of the vote, and the Republican will eke out a
hard-fought victory. Gore, Kerry,
The Democrat will accept the will of the voters. Wouldn’t want to be a bad sport. Actually, as I’ll discuss below, it’s: Can’t cast
too much doubt on the legitimacy of the bipartisan game.
This has all only been possible since the 2000 election, and
the prima facie evidence about this
points to Democrats being the overwhelming victims. (Remember, it’s virtually
impossible to get dispositive evidence, although the testimony of this computer programmer
[also discussed in other sources below] regarding Florida 2000 comes damn close.)
But anyone who thinks that the Democrats would never do such a thing, or that
Republicans are just whining when they notice and complain about such issues,
has never met Johnson in Texas or Kennedy in Illinois. When there are 24 instance of electronic voting
machines flipping Romney votes into Obama votes in North Carolina, Democrats
should not, as this
guy does,14 pooh-pooh the problem, based on the election
director’s assurance that it’s “nearly technically impossible“ to hack the
machines, along with his patriotic insistence that the legitimate questions
raised are “irresponsible and unfortunate because they undermine the public’s
confidence in the electoral process.” This
attitude, which attempts to shut down important and legitimate questions lest
they “undermine the public’s confidence” is exactly what caused Gore to surrender
in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, and will ensure that we never find out what the hell is going on. The “public’s confidence in the electoral
process” and in the “nearly” impossible-to-hack electronic voting machines, should be shaken. Unless you also want to pooh-pooh this,15
from Tuesday’s election in Pennsylvania:
Of course, this kind of visible problem is not as insidious as the ones
that remain invisible.
It is worth considering in some depth the seemingly
mysterious question of why the Democrats put up with all the crap that’s been
pulled on them since the 2000 election.
Why do they constantly back off from serious fights about these issues? The answer to that question actually reveals a
profound deception at the heart of our scam democracy. There are arguments that neither major party
wants to make, issues neither will bring up, even if it hurts them electorally
to keep quiet, and that is because, as Matt
Stoller explains quite sharply, “winning
the race isn’t as important as ensuring that the political class is protected
from democracy” [my bolding].16 For both Republicans and
Democrats, “The secondary goal is to win the election; the primary goal is to
keep the public out of the deal-making.”
Neither party really wants the public to look too closely at the
election process; neither party wants to shake the public’s confidence to such
an extent that the public might actually start thinking about, and demanding,
an open and transparent election process, with all that would entail, as
opposed to the managed media bout that never escapes plutocratic control. Either party will lose the election rather
than disrupt that well-managed game of consultants, bundlers, pollsters,
scripted debates, and media gurus, and hand it over to – well, people who are out of their
control. Either party will lose the
election in order to protect the political class from democracy. As the woman
in Hacking Democracy said: “It’s as
though our country is one country pretending to be another country.” And it’s
as though our election is one election pretending to be another.
More than a little disheartening, I know. But it’s always tough to watch the sausage
being made, and this is the mystery meat that’s behind the menu of “democratic”
platitudes. This is the process we’re showing our confidence in when we vote in
America today.
It’s also important to understand what it means when the
Tallahassee voting official says, “Vendors are driving this process of voting
technology in the US.” It is for-profit
vendors who provide their proprietary
technology, their testing procedures,
and their assurances, which election
officials rely on. The Accuvote machine cannot be hacked! We also know what kind of corrupting
possibilities such a system involves. Low-paid, harried, election officials and workers in underfunded offices
are approached by deep-pocketed companies who want contracts, and who promise
to make their work easier. (“You don’t even have to count the votes. We’ll do
it for you, instantly and automatically!”)
And we know how this contract process works, from the Pentagon on down:
the election-machine lobbyists can imply, to low-paid county and state officials
who make decisions on voting-machine contracts, that well-paid jobs might be
available should they want to change careers at some point in the near future. As can be expected, this creates a web of
financial and inertial interests that encourages local election workers to fend
off any questions and investigations, and insist that you move right along,
there’s no problem here, no matter what you don’t see that you’re entitled to
see by common-sense political right, and sometimes even by law.
This is another example of the neo-liberal, privatizing
(i.e., capitalist) logic now being instituted everywhere from schools to armed
forces: abandoning the principle of adequately funding and staffing public
agencies to perform vital public services, in favor of turning public money
over to private contractors and their profit margins. Now, it’s voting, a core task of democracy,
which should be undertaken by public servants in complete transparency, that is
being put in the hands of for-profit firms with proprietary technology. It’s
utterly corrupt and utterly untrustworthy.
And it’s accelerated by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), passed after
the 2000 election – ostensibly to rationalize the voting process, but actually
providing incentives for this contract boondoggling.
I am not a technophobe. I build my own computers, and love my smartphone. My son is a software engineer. I also know
what kind of complicated code is hidden behind “user friendly” computer
interfaces. What’s going on there is not accessible to voting citizens and
election workers, and should in no circumstance be protected from public
scrutiny as “proprietary.” That way lies
scam.
I also know that, with voting, simpler is usually better. In
2006, I sat in a classroom (that had been used as a polling station) in Ramallah,
along with other international observers and representative of every party on
the ballot, and watched the vote count for the Palestinian elections. The poll
supervisor, a teacher at the school, opened the ballot boxes (which had been
observed all day), showed every person in the room each hand-marked ballot, and
put them in separate piles, with someone marking the vote count for each party
on the blackboard as he went along. If
there was an incorrectly or ambiguously marked ballot, everyone saw it, and all
the party representatives gave their opinion about how to count it. On some of these, the intent of the voter was
obvious; and they were counted accordingly; on others, it was impossible to
tell, and they were invalidated. Everyone
could see every ballot quite clearly. There was no disagreement. There were over a hundred ballots. It took an hour and a half or so. They weren’t doing it for Tom Brokaw. At the end of this process, the result was
posted on the door of the classroom for everybody to see. There was no doubt about the outcome. The poignant moment for me was when, in the
midst of this process, the woman sitting next to me, representing the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said to me something like: “You must
think we are so backward here, counting votes one by one like this. I’m sure you have a more advanced system in
America.” From the hole I was crawling into in my mind, I replied: “I’ve sat
through two presidential elections in the United States in the past six years,
and I still don’t know who actually won them. I know, without a doubt, who won
here. Please understand, it is I who is learning from you.”
The two lessons learned (besides the one about how our
government has no lessons about democracy to export – and certainly not by
force of arms – to anybody, and, oh yeah, the one about “the only democracy in
the Middle East”) were: 1) You can have a trustworthy democratic election if you want to, and 2) The simpler the
better; the hand-marked paper ballot, hand-counted in the polling station, is
the gold standard for a democratic election. Until we have a technology that meets that
standard of transparence, leave the video screen for Words with Friends. If the
votes are not counted on the spot, in front of observers from the candidates, with
the result immediately publicly displayed, it’s a good bet there’s a scam in
progress.
To return to the USA, we won’t even go into the fact that
elections are administered by a plethora of different state and county bodies,
with no consistent criteria, or into the irrationality of the Electoral
College, which turns a national election into a few state contests, where some
votes count
a lot more than others.17
These are persistent constitutional issues that skew the American electoral
system even further.
___________________________
All of this leads me to the conclusion that the only
effective tactic for presidential elections within our present electoral system
is not voting. I don’t, of course, mean privately sitting home and sulking. (I’m
not quite going George Carlin. Although he does have a wonderful point about who
gets to complain, I prefer his take on the American
Dream.) I mean a public, organized boycott that demands the electoral
system be reformed in such a way to earn the public’s confidence, in a way that
gives a consistently reasonable certainty that your vote will count for whom it
is cast.
Voting in the present system is like sitting down at a poker
table where you have no reasonable certainty that there are 52 cards in the
deck, or that they are not marked, and where you do know that the dealer is
bought, and is going to count the chips and allocate them to the players behind
a screen. Sitting at that table is not a
sign of how much you treasure your money/vote, but of how easy it is to get you
to waste it. The only thing you achieve,
and the only reason the dealer wants you to be. at the table is to give
credibility to a process that has none. And
the only reason you would sit at the table, knowing all this, is because you want to believe in its credibility,
too. As in all confidence games, it’s
the mark’s own belief that gets him taken.
And if the dealer is spending as much money and energy as
the plutocracy does to get you to sit at that table, it must be because he really
does need that sanction of credibility from you. That is what he is paying for. That,
therefore, is the one power you have in the electoral system. And the most
effective – indeed, I would contend, the only
principled and effective way to use
it in the current system is to withhold it.
That’s why I think Michael Moore is exactly wrong when he
says to his non-voting friend: “Your presence at the polls is what they fear
most.” No, it is our absence, en masse, from the polls that
the ruling plutocracy fears most. They
fear their inability to plausibly claim that they rule with the consent of the
governed, that the system they build and sustain is recognized as substantially
democratic by its own citizenry. Voting for Obama or any other Democrat is not
going to give the ruling class the slightest headache, nor, under present
restrictive conditions, is voting for a third party. Having the percentage of
registered voters drop to 30% or 25%, rather than the 50% or so it is now, and publicly proclaiming why, would give
them a migraine – and might also encourage changes in electoral conditions that
would make voting for a third-party feasible.
It is the only thing I can imagine doing – with one’s vote, within electoral politics (mass, militant street
action would be even better) – that would make a significant difference.
I’m not now talking, as I was before, about whether, as a
progressive, you should withhold your vote until you find an acceptable
candidate. I’m talking about a prior,
prerequisite decision: whether, as a citizen, to withhold a vote because the
general corruption and lack of integrity of the electoral process makes a
mockery of casting it.
A boycott for election integrity also has the advantage of
being easily understood. If one starts
with an honest assessment of how screwed-up the present system is, and promotes
a boycott as an act, not of abandoning, but of using the right to vote in another, more powerful way, it could easily appeal beyond right and left, even
as it would, I think, tackle questions – such as the elimination of electoral
college (by amendment or by a deal among states), strict public financing, opening
the process to third parties, fixing a campaign season with media, poll, and
announcement limits, establishing absolutely transparent voting and counting
procedures under the auspices of public institutions, etc. – that would
implicitly move the discourse leftward in a widely attractive way. Of course, it would have to be public, with
supporters signing on publicly, and explaining the rationale, personally and in
public campaigns. There is such a movement
already,18 and I suggest we help it to grow and move in a generally
progressive direction during the next four years.
The citizen’s vote is the political equivalent of the
worker’s labor-power, and it should be given only in exchange for a fair deal.
Not necessarily maximal, just fair. You can work with dignity and integrity
under capitalism, before you demand to take over the means of production, as
long as you get a fair wage. But not for
a penny a day, and not if you know you might get cheated out of even that. Such
insulting nonsense calls for an exercise of the one economic power you have as
a worker: a strike. Similarly, a citizen
can vote with integrity in any election, even when no candidate is the one s/he
really prefers, as long as s/he has a reasonable certainty that his/her vote
will be counted for whom it was cast,
But without that minimal assurance – well, to wax poetic: There is some
shit one should not eat.
Really, WTF are we waiting for? Let’s got off the merry-go-round now. Let’s use, rather than waste, our right – our
power – to vote, in the only way that will make a difference to the plutocracy
that now has our electoral quasi-democracy 1000% locked up. Deprive them of the one thing they are
spending $2 billion to get from you.
Boycott the vote!
Wisdom comes from all around the world, even 80s movies: Sometimes the only winning move is not to
play.
Links and notes:
1“Letter to a Non-voter.” http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/letter-non-voter
2De Düva, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2QmLWWxq4. [If you haven’t seen it, you
must.]
3Open Secrets, http://www.opensecrets.org/pres12/index.php?ql3#out.
4Matt Stoller, “Bill Clinton’s $80 Million
Payday, or Why Politicians Don’t Care That Much About Reelection,” http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/its-not-about-reelection-bill-clintons-80-million-payday.html
5The Democratic Leadership Council represented
the “corporatist” wing of the Democratic Party, formed explicitly to counter
the economic populism represented by such Democrats as George McGovern. Bill Clinton was its greatest alumnus. It
folded in 2011, since it the Democratic Party had essentially become it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council
6“Net Worth of Lawmakers Up 25 Percent in Two
Years, Analysis Demonstrates,“ http://www.rollcall.com/issues/57_51/And-Congress-Rich-Get-Richer-209907-1.html
“The Congressional Wealth Gap,” http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/08/the-congressional-wealth-gap/.
8”Election Choices: Obama or Not,” http://www.thepolemicist.net/2012/10/election-choices-obama-or-not.html
9 “Greg Palast on How the GOP Is Planning to
Steal the 2012 Election,” http://truth-out.org/news/item/11500-greg-palast-on-how-the-gop-is-planning-to-steal-the-2012-election
“Billionaires and Ballot Bandits: Karl Rove and the
Republican Dark Art of Election Theft,” http://www.alternet.org/print/tea-party-and-right/billionaires-and-ballot-bandits-karl-rove-and-republican-dark-art-election-theft
10“Virginia GOP Caught Throwing Away Voter
Registrations,” http://fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/virginia-gop-caught-throwing-away-voter-registrations/23973/
“Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises,” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html?_r=1&hp&pagewanted=all
“Records Show Rick Scott Campaign Hired Alleged Boletera, Or
Absentee Ballot Broker, In 2010,“ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/17/rick-scott-hired-boletera-boletero_n_1890552.html#slide=1202478
‘
11Just a few sources:
“More Questions for Florida,” http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2004/12/66002?currentPage=all
“From The Programmer's Mouth: How The 2000 Election Was
Fixed,: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-YXvxYbck
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?, http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm
Richard Hayes Phillips, “Witness To A Crime: A Citizens'
Audit Of An American Election,” http://witnesstoacrime.com/table.htm
Mark Crispin Miller at http://markcrispinmiller.com/
Brad Friedman’s BradBlog, http://www.bradblog.com/?page_id=4454,
“Princeton team issues report on voting machine security,” http://blogs.princeton.edu/itsacademic/2008/10/princeton_team_issues_report_on_voting_machine_security.html
And the indomitable Bev Harris, at http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
12“Machine Casts Phantom Votes in the Bronx,
Invalidating Real Ones: Report.” http://www.wnyc.org/blogs/empire/2012/may/09/reports-find-machine-errors-led-uncounted-votes-2010/
14Steven Rosenfeld, “Republicans Whip Up Fears of
Rigged Voting Machines to Delegitimize a Likely Obama Win,” http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/republicans-whip-fears-rigged-voting-machines-delegitimize-likely-obama-win
At the same time, Rosenfeld writes that “Security experts
have said online voting isn’t secure.” in
“How Republicans Are Trying to Steal the Election” http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/how-republicans-are-trying-steal-election?paging=off.,
He should pay attention to what security experts say about electronic voting
machines. See, for example, Princeton
report above.
15“Video: Possible voting malfunctions in
Pennsylvania,“ http://www.salon.com/2012/11/06/having_trouble_casting_your_vote_snap_a_photo_and_send_it_in/
See also, “Internal memos confirm OH SoS applied
untested/uncertified software patches that could steal it for Mitt Romney,” http://markcrispinmiller.com/2012/11/internal-memos-confirm-oh-sos-applied-
untesteduncertified-software-patches-that-could-steal-it-for-mitt-romney/
16Matt Stoller, “The Fake Election: 10 Arguments
The Republicans Aren’t Making,”
17Alex Parene, “Let’s kill the electoral college
so we never have to pay attention to Ohio and Florida again,” http://www.salon.com/2012/11/05/lets_kill_the_electoral_college_so_we_never_have_to_pay_attention_to_ohio_and_florida_again/
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