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by Thom Hartmann
"Never again!" says the slogan in an email I received from an activist friend. "Never again will we allow a stolen election in the USA!"
But how are we going to stop it?
The major American political parties have an answer - it's already working for them in the Ukraine - but it's very much a sword that can cut two ways.
Interestingly, it was first used in the US.
On December 4, 2000, in time to change the outcome of the Electoral College vote, Greg Palast published an article in Salon.com, made into a BBC television documentary shortly thereafter, that laid out solid evidence of massive electoral fraud in Florida, perpetrated against the majority-Democratic-voting African American community by Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush. Without this fraud, Gore would have easily carried the state.
Even more glaring, a consortium of news organizations found and reported on the front page of The New York Times (and other papers) on 12 September 2001, that in Florida "...a statewide recount -- could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his [Gore's] way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent." (The Times apparently chose to bury this fact - that Gore actually won the 2000 election - in the 15th paragraph and behind a misleading headline because the nation had been attacked on 9/11 the day before.)
Not only was the election of 2000 stolen by the Bush brothers, but it was proven by the later statewide recount that - even after Jeb's knocking thousands of African Americans off the rolls - Gore still would have won Florida had all the votes been counted.
This was outrageous news, enough to bring people into the streets. And there were demonstrations - loud and angry ones. But they were round-the-clock in front of Al Gore's VP residence in Washington DC (shouting with bullhorns "Get out of Dick Cheney's house!"), outside (and often within) vote-counting headquarters' in Florida, and entirely composed of Republicans.
Where were the protesting Democrats? Other than those in a few of Florida's African American communities and the Congressional Black Caucus, they were largely invisible. If Democrats and progressives had taken to the streets in mass numbers nationwide that November and December, it's entirely probable that the Supreme Court would have backed off and allowed a statewide recount to continue, and Al Gore would have been president for the past four years, instead of George W. Bush.
Ironically, the Democratic Party knows how to highlight election fraud and start national movements to bring down administrations that try to steal elections. A Party-affiliated group has helped do it four times in the past four years.
But not in Ohio, Florida, or anywhere else in the USA.
Instead, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Madeleine K. Albright, Chairman) has joined up with a similar organization affiliated with the Republican Party (the International Republican Institute - John McCain, Chairman), other NGOs, and US government agencies to support the use of exit polls and statistical analyses to challenge national elections in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
In three of those four nations they succeeded in not only mounting a national challenge, but in reversing the outcomes of elections.
The election reversals were accomplished by funding local groups - most made up of a core of activists and college students - who worked to topple regimes that had rigged their own re-elections.
As Ian Traynor - one of the finest investigative reporters working in the world today - notes in a 26 November 2004 article in The Guardian titled "US Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev," "the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes."
The campaign to unseat corrupt regimes is funded by groups affiliated with both the Democratic and Republican parties, Traynor notes, as well as the US State Department, the US Agency for International Development, and non-governmental organizations including George Soros's Open Society Institute and the late Eleanor Roosevelt's organization Freedom House (a group whose board of directors is now chaired by the notorious former CIA director R. James
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