GlennLog

Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo

< Thanks to Journaling | Main | Did Google Pay Playboy for Rights? >

August 10, 2004

Troubled Elections Will Have Monitor

A country which had massive voting irregularities, and had to rely on a small cabal of unelected officials with ties to one candidate to "decide" the race will have its election monitored. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will monitor U.S. elections under a 1990 agreement that the U.S. is party to, but which wasn't invoked previously. Perhaps Jimmy Carter will visit, too. (Oh, wait, he became partisan at the DNC event.)

Fortunately, the Republican-led House is hard at work to prevent election fairness through impartial third party monitoring. The US House of Representatives last month approved an amendment to its version of the federal budget bill barring the United States from requesting United Nations observers of US elections. First, you get UN monitoring; then, we have to turn in our guns; next, the black copters arrive; finally, One World Government. I believe that's how it goes.

This is kind of like the Republicans trying to prevent easier voter registration, because most people who register through the means typically promoted (DMV, etc.) register as Democrats. Mmm...smell that democracy.

Florida has said it won't use a Republican-controlled company's list of felons who are ineligible to vote after it turned out that the list was largely inaccurate and disenfranchised tens of thousands of legitimate voters.

What's the world coming to when the politician who says what you agree with most is Al Sharpton?

Let's just say this clearly: blacks were denied the vote in Florida in 2000 just as definitively as they were denied the vote from Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Act. No politicians should be happy with that; Sharpton called bullshit on it, and bravo to him. The white pundits (in a great montage shown by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show) leapt on Sharpton's "disrespect" for speaking the truth at length.

But you can't walk away from civil rights. If this were the 1960s, I would have expected Florida to be shut down after the 2000 elections with peaceful protests in every city. But people are worn down, and Florida is a state run by the police, if not a police state. We need a Martin Luther King, Jr., of voter enfranchisement--an avatar who can catalyze this problem.

Posted by Glennf at August 10, 2004 6:23 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
https://db.isbn.nu/mt3/mt-tb.pl/2345

Comments