By Phil Nash
Published January 21st 2005 in AsianWeek
Today is
Inauguration Day for the second term of George W. Bush. In almost any
workplace, a person with Bush’s track record would have been fired or
demoted long ago. A person who was so unwilling to admit fault and
discipline subordinates who messed up would have been sent to human
resources to take a class in Management 101 (didn’t he learn anything
at Harvard Business School?). Bush also
benefited from voting technology and elections processes that were
deliberately and unfairly manipulated to give him an advantage in the
key states of Ohio and Florida. Partisan secretaries of state, who were
supposed to serve as impartial referees of the voting processes in
their respective states, doubled as co-chairs of the Bush-Cheney
re-election campaigns in their states. The clear lesson for the future
from these partisan operatives is that winning is everything, even if
one-person-one-vote democracy suffers. So much for being the party of
moral values. Meanwhile, on the federal level, Bush and
congressional Republicans delayed appointments to a key federal
elections oversight committee and prevented electronic voting machines
from having mandatory paper trails. Things were so bad that the
nonpartisan National Research Commission on Elections and Voting has
just released a study of the 2004 election that includes a terrifying
admission: It cannot say for sure that Bush won the popular vote in
Ohio. The commission’s Dec. 26, 2004, press release stated,
“While [the commission] found no evidence to support allegations of
concerted fraud, it nevertheless determined that non-uniform standards
in voting data collection and election administration make it
impossible to definitively put theories and accusations of fraud to
rest.” As if the uncertainty about the 2004 electoral outcome
isn’t bad enough, 2000 was worse: The losing candidate took office. A
nonpartisan report commissioned by America’s major newspapers states
clearly and unequivocally that if the vote counting in Florida had been
allowed to proceed in December 2000, former Vice President Al Gore
would have won under every possible scenario, with or without hanging
chads. That’s right: Gore won. This is not the conclusion of wild-eyed
conspiracy theorists. This is the conclusion of the major newspapers
that commissioned the vote-counting project. Read it for yourself at
www.aei.org/docLib/20040526_KeatingPaper.pdf. Why don’t you
know about this key fact? Because the report was released on Sept. 12,
2001. A major incident had occurred the previous day that resulted in
Democrats and Republicans singing patriotic songs together in the halls
of Congress. No one was paying attention, and if anyone was, no one was
seeking to undermine the president’s authority when the full extent of
the terrorist attacks was not yet conclusively understood. Coming
back to the 2004 election, let’s assume for argument’s sake that Bush
won the election in Ohio and therefore the nationwide Electoral College
vote. What type of “mandate” has he won? Given the almost even 50-50
nationwide split that includes the tainted vote counts, the only
mandate I see coming out of campaign 2004 is for Bush, Sen. John Kerry
and the rest of us to get behind some serious voting reform. As soon as
the inaugural is over, all Americans should start pressuring their
legislators to pass the single most important piece of legislation in
the 109th Congress: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.’s Voting Rights Amendment to
the federal Constitution. The amendment would create an
affirmative right to vote that is based on federal standards and
protections like the other constitutional guarantees. As the 2000 and
2004 elections proved, our “states’ rights” form of democracy — with 50
states; 3,067 counties; and 13,000 different election jurisdictions —
perpetuates separate, unequal and unfair voting standards, especially
for minority and poor voters. Tragically, we are one of only
11 democracies in the world that do not have an affirmative right to
vote in their constitutions; 108 other nations are ahead of us on this
key issue. How can we serve as a role model to Iraq and other nascent
democracies when our own voting system, the foundation of the world’s
oldest continuous democracy, has not been effectively overhauled in
more than 200 years? Now that the election and inaugural are over, we await Bush’s answer to this vital question.
Unfortunately, we have our
18th-century form of winner-take-all democracy where only two parties
can effectively compete. Bush was able to avoid substantive debate on
his record because he and his backers spent millions attacking the
record of the only other viable candidate.