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I
Do Not Concede
Kerry,
man, what happened? What happened to the promised armies of
lawyers, planes waiting to take them where they’re most needed,
etc. etc.? What happened to ‘we’re going to count every vote
and every vote will count’? From where I sit Wednesday afternoon
things look bad, but by no means decided. There are a lot
of electoral votes that are very tight.
OK, so it does, at first blush, look less close than in 2000.
Bush appears to have the popular vote, and the margin, so
far, in Ohio appears to be bigger than 537. But it’ll be a
long time before I stop saying “appears to be.”
I’m not a sore loser. I’ve backed plenty of defeated candidates
and lost causes, and I think I know a little bit about gracious
defeat. I don’t see a conspiracy behind every loss. If the
only difference really out there in this election were the
provisional ballots in Ohio, I’d still want them counted,
but I’d agree that the statistics seem to favor Bush. But
the lists of things going wrong in this election were so large,
so numerous, so incredible, that it feels like no stretch
at all to imagine they could account for 2 million votes.
The stories are still coming in. Tens of thousands of wrongly
purged voters; 60,000 absentee ballots not mailed just from
Broward County alone; hours-long lines that parents and working
folks couldn’t afford to stand in in Ohio; voting machines
in Florida and Texas telling people they’d voted for Bush
when they hadn’t; calls telling people to vote between 7 and
9 in Las Vegas—when the polls closed at 7 PM; hackable electronic-voting
machines providing no paper trail or way to verify your vote,
built by Republican donors who won’t reveal their code; Republican
challengers in the Ohio polls; exit polls suspiciously different
from election totals. And the list goes on and on and on.
(For details, go to www.gregpalast.com, www.blackbox
voting.org, and www.michiganimc.org.)
Given all this, there’s no way I can agree that this election
was fair. And those who agree shouldn’t shut up about it.
Remember how sick you felt watching the footage at the beginning
of Fahrenheit 9/11 when the black representatives from
Florida kept trying to protest the ending of the recount,
but were forced to concede, one after the other, that no senator
would support and therefore legitimize their protest? Remember
wondering what the hell you’d been doing while that was going
on, and why it hadn’t more closely resembled raising holy
hell? (OK, maybe I’m projecting here. But I hope others shared
that feeling.) Guess what: Here’s chance No. 2.
It’s awfully hard to fight for a candidate who has conceded.
But that’s the candidate we have right now. And it’s clear
that one of his mistakes was planning to deploy his lawyers
after the fact, when the voter roll purges, registration scams,
unreliable voting machines, absentee-ballot losing and intimidation
tactics were underway well beforehand. If the Kerry campaign
and the Democratic Party had spent all its energy fighting
those things instead of trying to keep Nader off the ballot,
maybe we’d be in better shape.
And maybe the huge progressive mobilizations, which put an
incredibly impressive amount of work into trying to turn out
such an overwhelming majority for Kerry that these problems
would be moot, should also have focused a little more attention
on making sure their turnout was going to have one of its
most basic rights respected. That’s a tough call, since their
efforts were clearly bearing fruit in places like Pennsylvania,
Maine, New Hampshire and Michigan, and are probably to be
credited for a lot of the impressively high turnout. They
should be given major props for an amazing job in any case.
But meanwhile, every lost, spoiled, intimidated, wrongly recorded
and purged vote should still be fought over. Even if there’s
no chance of getting Kerry in office (which I don’t yet fully
believe), even if in the final count Bush would have won fair
and square, they should be fought, every last one. Every shenanigan
should be exposed, condemned, and protected against, because
otherwise our democracy becomes a mockery.
Former President Jimmy Carter told NPR recently that the Carter
Center, which monitors elections in dozens of countries around
the world, including some pretty poor ones, wouldn’t monitor
the United States if it were a foreign country because we
don’t meet the most basic minimum standards of fairness that
the center requires before it agrees to help. How pathetic
is that?
It will be easy to forget this issue: No one wants to drag
this out, to have the constant reminder of disenfranchisement
and a lost election, to fight for what may be merely a smaller
margin of defeat. It is a natural impulse to want to mourn
and move on, trying to gird ourselves for the battles ahead.
And they will be important battles. But if we don’t fight
for the integrity of our democracy itself, the rest of the
battles will get progressively harder and harder, and less
and less meaningful. (Find other people who aren’t giving
up at This Time We’re Watching, www.ttww.org.)
I’m not saying don’t mourn. I’m not saying don’t look ahead.
All I’m saying is I’ve got Carl Shurz on my mind: “Our country,
right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong,
to be put right.” We’ve got some serious putting right to
do.
—Miriam
Axel-Lute
maxel-lute@metroland.net
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