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Many Democrats and progressives believe now is the time for national advocacy groups to organize an effort similar to the one our nation has been promulgating in the former Soviet states and the Republicans used in Florida in 2000. The blueprint is laid out in Ian Traynor's article in The Guardian at www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html, and the template is both simple, straightforward, and already demonstrated to work.
The next national elections will be held in the United States in 2006, and there's a lesson for us in the 1972 midterm elections.
Although Richard Nixon won a landslide re-election that year, carrying every state except Massachusetts, he was out of office within 18 months because the House and Senate were in Democratic hands and Senator Sam Irvin was able to proceed with an investigation of Nixon's crimes while in office. Opposition control of Congress is about the only way to hold a president accountable: Republican control of Congress led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. (And when a President appoints his own attorney as the nation's head prosecutor - Attorney General - it becomes virtually impossible to prosecute the President outside of the House or Senate.)
Thus, the first key to returning America to multiparty rule and re-opening the political process will be in electing progressive Democrats (and Independents like Vermont's Bernie Sanders) to the US House and Senate in 2006.
But first we must prepare to take on a Republican machine that has already corrupted the electoral process in the past three elections, and knows how to "pull a Ukraine" in any state at any time with single a phone call to Jim Baker or Tom DeLay. In a preemptory move, Republicans are now calling for an end to exit polls in the USA because, as RNC Chairman and former Enron lobbyist Ed Gillespie noted on November 4th, "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day, in 2002 the exit returns were wrong on Election Day, and in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day - all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."
Each of those three "skewed" elections was an opportunity for national mobilization.
In 2000 it could have been to highlight the removal from voting rolls in Florida of tens of thousands of African American Democrats. The 2002 election could have revealed the "trade secret" software running non-paper-trail voting machines in Georgia that defied the polls and threw out Max Cleland (helping establish Republican control of the Senate in 2002). And the 2004 election could have again raised questions about voting machines, Florida purge rolls moving to other states, dirty tricks (phone calls to registered Democrats telling them their polling places had changed, etc.), and, as Fitrakis has documented, disclosed patterns of precinct and machine placements in Ohio (and other states) that caused thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - of Ohio Kerry voters to give up and leave 10+ hour lines because they had to go to work or pick kids up from school.
Some will suggest this is a dangerous strategy because Republicans will simply organize their own exit polls, PR machine, and national mobilization. To them, I'd point out that this is already happening.
Republicans are getting ready, and have known since 2000 how well this can work in America. Without a countervailing grass-roots but national response, we'll continue to move toward a Stalinist type of state, with single-party rule, "purges" of the intelligence and law enforcement communities, increasing limits on civil liberties, and widespread cynicism about politics leading to increasing nonparticipation in the process. .
As generations of activists have taught us, we can't wait around for politicians to fix a corrupted political system. It's going to take - as the Ukrainians are now showing us - involved and active citizens to make this happen, and that requires an organizational framework to cut through the political and media fog.
And now is the time to begin.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."
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