We Need a Landslide
Instead, they appear to be battling for dominion over Whatthefuckyoucallitstan, that unholy gerrymandered monstrosity composed of Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and whatever other battered electoral college zombie has staggered into swing state limbo.
But the national vote matters.
A lot.
Especially if you look ahead to the post-election struggle that a close outcome will bring — as Karl Rove certainly is.
And he’s not alone.
Unhappily, a pundit consensus is emerging that this year’s presidential elections will be so close and so tainted that is unlikely to be a legitimizing event in itself.
With the election still a week away, a Niagara of abuses and miscues — like the 58,000 missing absentee ballots in Broward County, Florida — is already pouring forth from the failed state election systems.
Recently Jimmy Carter stated (I’m paraphrasing here) that a gangbang in a monkeyhouse has a better chance of producing a fair outcome than an American presidential election.
Partisans are gearing up for the post-election struggle to challenge, discredit, or cripple any winner who can’t escape the margin-of-error dead zone and claim a convincing victory.
Before we bemoan the decline in our national political discourse, please read David Greenberg’s excellent “Was Nixon Robbed?” on the 1960 election that explodes the myth that Nixon graciously declined to contest Kennedy’s (and Daley’s) dirty work that probably cost him the presidency.
Actually, Nixon contested the outcome vigorously via his proxies, through December, and in the face of Eisenhower’s disapproval.
All that’s happened since then is technology, money, and the media have supersized the contested election drama until the creaky, obsolete “almost is good enough in horseshoes, hand grenades, and vote counting” state-run electoral mechanism is collapsing under the combined weight of internal stress and outside scrutiny.
Contested-election mercenaries, backed up by thousands of lawyers and millions of dollars, are ready to sling charges and countercharges of voter suppression (the Democrats’ hobbyhorse) and voter fraud (the bete noire of the Republicans).
Voter suppression and vote fraud only matter in close local races. Unfortunately, under the current system we have 11 close local races, and they will determine the next president.
The Electoral College system, which has essentially thrown our billion dollar election into the hands of a few hundred thousand undecideds in a dozen small swing states, thereby encourages and rewards vote abuse.
The states — underfunded, inadequate, inept, buckling under all this money and pressure — have shown themselves incapable of cleaning up their own act.
So the abuses are inevitable.
And as long as the Democrats, the Republicans, and states remain intoxicated, like rats swimming in a beer vat, by the quadrennial outpouring of money and power that the insane current electoral system brings them, the abuses will continue.
Admitting some partisan bias here, I think the Republicans have a deeper commitment to perpetuating these abuses than the Democrats.
That’s because voter suppression is a big, important component of what Republicans do in their role is the ideologically driven minority party. And it is best done in dark corners and in the shelter of sleepy, ignored local administrations that are either reliably Republican or usefully mismanaged.
By contrast, the pro-Democratic voter fraud that the GOP is snorting about doesn’t seem to amount to very much.
The Golden Age of Democratic voter fraud — when Texas ballot boxes were stuffed at gunpoint to get LBJ into Congress and the dead walked in Cook County to give Kennedy victory in Illinois — is long since passed. If anyone is going to crank up massive voter fraud, it’s going to be Diebold friendly Republicans, not Dems.
Today’s Democratic voter fraud — typically a matter of registering a ghost, duplicate, or concocted voter and then obtaining and submitting an absentee ballot — is laborious, relatively expensive, risky, and low-volume. It’s suited to local races with small turnouts.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Democratic voter registration binge improperly incentivized solicitors to pad their numbers to meet quota. But even if there are thousands of bogus registrations, they still have to be voted.
And that’s, as George W. Bush would say, hard work.
In fact, a lot like skilled blue collar piece work.
The accounts I’ve read indicate it takes $10 to $20 bucks a head to deliver a bogus vote; it takes patience and handholding to gather absentee ballots and obtain or forge signatures; and, in Republican-controlled districts, it takes the gumption to risk a felony rap absent the benevolent favor of a friendly judge.
Voter suppression, however, is classic Republicanism. It’s outsourceable, automated, white collar, cost efficient, easily scalable to high volumes — and legal.
On the local level, the Republicans can invest a couple hundred dollars to hire and train a poll watcher, and give him or her the tools to tie up an inner city polling place for hours with bogus challenges until hundreds of impatient voters to give up and go home or even miss their chance to vote. That’s pennies a vote.
And anybody can be a poll watcher. The Republicans announced they are hiring 3600 poll watchers in Ohio alone.
If the Republicans are controlling the state electoral apparatus, voter roll purges can disenfranchise thousands at a keystroke. If some legitimate citizens lose the opportunity to vote, no biggee! It’ll probably get cleared up after the election. It’s legal if partisan motivation can’t be proved. And best of all, it’s free! The taxpayer picks up the tab!
Between the nationwide Republican voter suppression machine, the Democratic registration binge, and the incompetent, underfunded local electoral apparatus caught in the middle, each side will have plenty of dirt to sling at the other.
And if the election is close, the temptation to engage in a scorched-earth campaign of attacks not only on the opposition but on the fundamental validity of the election process may be well-nigh irresistible.
Maybe we need electoral reform. Later.
But we urgently need national reconciliation and unity.
Now.
So the popular vote had better be huge for Kerry.
Not just to show that all those new voter registrations were legit.
Not just for Kerry, his legitimacy, and his political viability as president.
Because the value of our democracy, flawed as it is, needs to be affirmed by all Americans so we can come together.
I don’t want to give George Bush the chance, in a last lame duck act of divisive partisanship, to screw up our democracy as badly as he’s screwed up everything else.
That’s why we need to get out the vote not just in the swing states but across the country.
For Kerry — and our country, and our democracy, we need more than victory.
We need a landslide.
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
