The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Whose vote will count in this election? According to Greg Palast, author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, close to 2,000,000 ballots were tossed out in the last election. According to CNN, those numbers are low. A CNN report estimates a couple million votes were lost due to faulty equipment--and another couple million or so were lost due to registration mixups. Lost votes did not impact all communities equally.
Listen in on the following exchange with NPR reporter Tavis Smiley:
Mr. GREG PALAST ("The Best Democracy Money Can Buy"): People don't realize that in America 1.9 million, almost two million, votes were never counted. You went and voted and they just chucked them out for technical reasons. I was noticing that there was a kind of racial stench to the ballots rotting in the Dumpsters, and the US Civil Rights Commission looking at some of my information, Harvard Law, determined that about half of the ballots not counted in America, one million ballots, are cast by black folk.
I first noticed this in Florida when I was investigating for BBC. I know--you know, a hundred and eighty thousand votes were never counted during the presidential election. That was determined by 537--a hundred and eighty thousand votes just chucked away. And I looked, and sure enough in the blackest county in Florida where most of the votes were lost, they were paper ballots, you made a mistake on a ballot--and by the way, a mistake meant writing in Al Gore's name.
SMILEY: Right.
Mr. PALAST: If you made a mistake on a ballot, your ballot was thrown out, couldn't be read by the machines. In the white counties, they had machine readers right in the ballot booths, and if you made a mistake, you got your ballot back and you got a new ballot. It was like a plantation system. So in other words, black ballot out; white ballot, make a mistake, you get another one. And so in Florida, I brought it to the Civil Rights Commission. They said, yes, of the 180,000 votes cast, their demographers say 54 percent were cast by black folk.
SMILEY: After all these years, tell me how it is that race--I mean, for that matter, this many years after the Voting Rights Act first went into effect, how is it that race can still play such a prominent role in electoral politics?
Mr. PALAST: Well, because it's not that the Bush family and Jeb Bush doesn't like black people. They just don't really like the color of their vote. In other words, if you knock out a black voter, you know what party is going to lose on that end.
posted by Outrage @ 8:47 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Some prefer a "see no evil, hear no evil" approach. Others wish to open their eyes to new ideas. For those in the latter category, I would like to recommend an excellent website, fairvote.org, home to the Center for Voting and Democracy. The Center is dedicated to finding ways to improve our democracy. One of its more attractive ideas is runoff voting, which would enable third-party candidates to run without jeopardizing the results of the general election. Instant runoff is common throughout the world (and present in some U.S. municipal elections), and I believe we should it to our federal elections...
As for the federal election results in 2000, the numbers speak for themselves. Most people in the 18-26 age range didn't make it to the polls. Many who did go to the polls, from all age groups, had their votes excluded, some on questionable grounds. The goal of any democracy should be 100 percent participation. When only a portion of the people come out to vote, and two million from that portion have their vote dismissed, you have a problem. Elections should not be ruled by a narrow base of special interests and their bribed advocates in Washington, and they should not be decided by bureaucrats or election administrators. People should have an opportunity to make their voice heard--and this voice should be what drives the future of our beautiful country.
I propose the following:
1) Ease voter registration rules--voter registration should be offered at all DMV offices. Registration should also be permitted right up until election day. The government should not be in the role of deciding who should and should not receive a vote. Any citizen should be given the utmost opportunity to be heard through the most crucial element of democracy.
2) Our electoral system should be revised to allow more input from third parties (again, see the Center for Voting and Democracy for ideas on this). People should also have the opportunity to vote for "none of the above." Democrats and Republicans should not be allowed to monopolize the political process. The two major parties each have their allied special interests, their sacred cows, their big donors. Once again, almost all races for the U.S. Houses of Representatives will be uncontested. Most members of Congress run in a district that is safely Democratic or safely Republican. This lack of competition is unhealthy for the political process.
If only verbosity were equated with wisdom...
I am not interested in redoing the 2000 election. It is a bit late for that, don't you think? For anyone who is interested in studying the Supreme Court decision, there is plenty to read at the Supreme Court website.
What I am interested in is ensuring that all adult citizens 18 years of age or older are granted the right to vote as guaranteed by the Constitution. As a factual matter, the numbers of disallowed ballots in the 2000 election (not to mention people who were turned away from the polls simply because they shared a last name with a convict) strongly suggests that this right was not adequately enforced four years ago. On this issue, Winston and I will have to agree to disagree.
We will also have to agree to disagree on whether voting should be universal or whether it should be reserved for those the government "deems" worthy of voting. My faithful correspondent apparently feels that the constitutional principles of "all men are created equal," "equal protection under law," etc. are less sacred than installing a series of tests as to who does and does not deserve a vote, with the presumed result being that only voters who agree with Winston's principles have the "intelligence" to participate at the ballot box.
Let us bring a little social contract theory into this discussion. When people enter society, they give up certain freedoms in exchange for certain rights. The most important right is the right to participate in the democratic process, for without this right all other rights are virtually meaningless.
If our voting rules were as exclusionary as Winston advocates(by property does he mean landed property? or does one only have to have six figures in their bank account?), we would have a very large native population in the U.S. effectively excluded from the social contract. From a philosophical standpoint, there would be little reason why these devalued people should then have to pay taxes or obey U.S. law.
There was a time in history when the U.S. had poll taxes and literacy tests and denied suffrage to women, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, and people without property. This legacy is one that fills any reasonable person with shame.
Currently, the U.S. rate of electoral participation is well behind many of the world's democracies. This, too, should fill the observer with shame. The question is not how can we deny the vote to as many people as possible. The question is how can we fulfill the dream of universal participation.
Winston,
I appreciate your willingness to engage in healthy debate. Nevertheless, I cannot agree with your philosophy. I take great exception to your contention that poor people are the only people who vote out of self-interest. Do you mean to tell me readers of the Wall Street Journal don't vote Republican because they want to line their own pockets? What about all the tax breaks? The vast amounts of pork shoved into vast omnibus bills in the middle of the night? A pretty strong argument can be made that almost all voters take their personal prosperity into account when choosing how to vote. If these voters were eliminated, there would be no one left. This was not the intention of the framers when they designed the constitution. The framers were wise people and they understood that there's a certain amount of special interest involved in all political decisions. The key, they realized, is to balance these special interests. Our government has a balance of power, between the directly elected president, the representative Congress, and the appointed judges on the Supreme Court. But the most important way of balancing competing interests is through elections. I recommend taking another look at the Federalist Papers. The idea behind the Constitution is not that there would be no special interests. Rather, the idea behind American democracy is to blend so many different special interest that no single interest is able to seize predominance. A balance must be found between them.
Voting is not a privilege. As outline by the Constitution, it is a right, and there is an important distinction. Winston, your criticism of interest groups only seems to extend to those interest groups you disagree with. I don't know what your personal views are, but I guarantee that your views too correspond with one interest group or another. That doesn't make them bad.
In my mind, every time someone steps into the ballot box, it is as an individual. No one else has to know how you vote. It is a private choice, the ultimate independent choice. Voters are influenced, yes, but ultimately they have the freedom to make their own choice. Do they choose wisely? Not always. But the idea behind democracy is that, on balance, having more people decide is better than having less. Ancient governments were ruled by kings or noblemen. In modern times, most of the world has realized the fallacy behind the notion that some are fit to rule and some aren't.
As the recent woes at Enron show, a corporate model of governance is not always a good idea. I think what the founding fathers hated most was tyranny and lack of acounntability; the means they devised of thwarting these ills were elections and a division of power. When you say the founding fathers didn't believe in democracy, you are playing a game of semantics. The founders didn't want a direct democracy and there is some truth in your contention they found this idea to be unruly. But they certainly wanted a representative democracy.
Your ideas on whether or not there is a right to vote in this country would surprise the Supreme Court, chief arbiters of the supreme law of the land as devised by the Constitution. At a minimum, there are a large number of criteria that cannot be used to exclude people from voting: these include race, sex, and a poll tax.
Law aside, on a philosophical level the legitimacy for our government collapses without full election rights. In your rush to further elaborate your plan, you neglected to respond to many of the points I raised earlier. Please refer to them again.
It is good that you find yourself to be so free of a vested interest in the U.S. government. I can only presume that you don't drive government roads, didn't attend a U.S. college, aren't protected by police services or the armed forces, that you don't pay taxes, and that you will not receive Social Security or Medicare. Otherwise, you are not objective by your criteria, making you unqualified to vote. You seem to have neglected my point earlier that there are many ways people have an economic interest in the government. Again, please refer to my previous entries.
You seem quick to place judgment on the voting decisions of others but I would have to ask you this: what makes you think you are such a highly-qualified voter? Would you like your right to vote denied? Or do you, like George Bush, believe dicatorship would be a good idea as long as you were the dictator?
Finally, to address your idea of "shares" in the U.S. government. Personally, I find this idea detestable. People are not worth more because they have more money. And I happen to know a large number of people working very hard for minimum wage. I would argue that it is the hands of labor that built this country. As things stand, corporations and monied interests already wield a vastly disproportionate influence on our government. If anything, our government needs an adjustment in favor of hearing more voices from the working class.
The political leader who ignores the needs of the many in favor of the profit for the few does so at their own peril.
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