Our Rigged Elections

Part II: Our Rigged Elections
By Mark Crispin Miller
The Washinton Spectator

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/101906O.shtml

Monday 15 October 2006

The GOP Playbook: How to steal the vote.

From the start, George W. Bush has pointedly refused to ask that we
make any national sacrifice to help us win the "war on terror." Soon
after 9/11 he urged us not to curb our appetites in any way, although to
do so would have made much sense, and makes sense now. After all, it’s
oil, in part, that U.S. troops are fighting for, and oil that indirectly
pays for all the guns and bombs now blowing those troops, and countless
others, to shreds. The patriotic thing would therefore be to lessen our
national dependency on fossil fuels, by driving less (or not at all),
and turning off the air conditioners, by buying fewer disposables, and
otherwise deferring to the greater good. Bush, however, will have none
of that, asserting that the best thing we can do to help win this war is
just go shopping.

Yet in one respect it’s not exactly right to say that our president
has asked nothing of us. Since 9/11, Bush has made astonishing demands
on all his fellow citizens, asking us to swallow more baloney than the
U.S. government has ever fed the people of this country. He and his team
have asked us to believe that 9/11 came as a complete surprise, that
Saddam Hussein was part of it, and that Iraq would soon be lobbing atom
bombs, poison gas, and lethal pathogens at Tel Aviv and Disney World.
They also asked us to believe that the Iraqi people would bestrew our
troops with flowers, then that the "mission" had been "accomplished,"
then that those friendly natives had been overrun by "foreign
terrorists" intent on wrecking the "democracy" that we were there to
build. And now Bush asks us to believe that things aren’t half as bad in
Iraq (not to mention Afghanistan), as they appear, and that his team can
win this war.

That most Americans do not believe a word of it, and therefore will
not vote Republican, attests to the diffusive power of truth, which in
this country still resonates despite the efforts of both government and
media to bury it. Bush’s big lies have prevailed not just because his
regime has so doggedly promoted them. For too long, those howlers also
had the benefit of a compliant press that simply echoed them.

But the truth about Iraq could not be spun away as more and more
Americans encountered it, traumatically, in their own lives, and as the
word spread ever further through the Internet and other unofficial
channels - an arduous process of enlightenment that the press has only
recently begun to help along. (The Democrats have mostly sat there
mute.) And so the White House’s claims about Iraq - and about 9/11,
Afghanistan, Katrina, the economy, the public schools, the global
climate and the GOP’s respect for "family values" - strike millions of
Americans as utter hooey.

Terrorism and Turnout - Of all the crackpot views pervading
BushCo’s faith-based universe, there’s one that still pervades the real
world, too: the myth of the two T’s. "Terrorism and turnout," as the New
York Times puts it, "were the ’two t’s’ that have been credited with GOP
dominance in the last three [sic] elections." And as they’d swept BushCo
to victory twice before, so will the two T’s shortly benefit the GOP
again - or so Karl Rove allegedly believes.

This year, AP reported recently, "the White House will reprise the
two T’s of its successful campaign strategy since 2002: terrorism and
turnout." In other words, the Bush Republicans expect to win again
through (a) fear itself, aroused by the eternal aftershock of 9/11; and
(b) by mobilizing the expansive legions of their Christianist supporters.

That sounds plausible - until you think about it. There’s no
evidence that either terrorism or the Christian right decided the 2004
election. A Pew poll published on November 11 of that year found that
the terror threat had driven only 9 percent of the electorate. There
were no sudden multitudes of "NASCAR dads" and "security moms"
supporting Bush in 2004 - and there was no electoral tsunami of
right-wing evangelism either.

For all the big talk by the leaders of the Christian right, Bush
was not re-elected by the faithful, as there were nowhere near enough of
them to pull it off. Nationwide, there were 4 million evangelicals who
hadn’t voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000, and Karl Rove wooed them. Even if
he got them all, however, that triumph would not explain the miracle of
Bush’s picking up 11 million more votes than he’d allegedly won against
Al Gore. This insufficiency is clearer still when we recall the
incumbent’s record disapproval ratings. Hovering in the high mid-40s,
Bush’s negatives were worse than Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968 and Jimmy
Carter’s in 1980. On the other hand, Democrats were extraordinarily
united. At registering new voters, they trounced the GOP by as much as 5
to 1 in big swing states. By contrast, Bush’s party was divided, with
many eminent Republicans, both moderates and hardcore conservatives,
either coming out for Kerry or for neither one.

Bush’s evangelical advantage was further diminished by the heavy
national turnout on Election Day: 60.7 percent, the highest in
thirty-six years (and it was no doubt even higher, as there were
thousands of reports of Democrats who couldn’t vote because their names
had somehow vanished from the rolls). High turnout tends to favor
Democrats. In any case, the Christianists’ peculiar brand of "moral
values" drove few voters to the polls: Pew found that only 3 percent had
been incited by the specter of gay marriage, while only 9 percent named
"moral values" as their main concern.

A Credible Pretext - In short, Bush/Cheney was not swept to
re-election by a national surge of theocratic zeal. And yet Bush’s most
fanatical supporters were essential to his "victory," which they enabled
by providing a persuasive-sounding rationale for it. Because there was,
and is, no reasonable explanation for that win, it was efficiently
explained away as having been effected by the non-existent multitude of
True Believers. Providentially, their votes came pouring forth late on
Election Day, especially in Ohio - a propaganda line without a shred of
evidence to back it up. (The late-day turnout in Ohio’s rural districts
was, in fact, quite light.) And yet that notion soon became gospel, as
the media, and the Democrats, mechanically echoed the mere say-so of the
Bush team and the Christianists themselves.

For the subversion of democracy, some such convincing rationale is
just as crucial as computers, ballot "spoilage," Jim Crow laws and party
goons - and the regime now needs a sturdy pretext more than ever, as the
Republicans have reached new lows in popular esteem. Thus the two T’s
are now all-important; and, to complicate Karl Rove’s project even
further, only one of them remains as feasible as both appeared to be in
2004. Since then Bush’s Christian-right support has been eroded by the
war and the economy, BushCo’s accommodationist stance on immigration,
the party’s failure to stamp out abortion, same-sex marriage and
"obscenity," and, not least, the low farce of Foleygate.

"Terrorism" is now the one and only argument whereby the ravaged
GOP might arguably validate their next amazing win. This explains why
Rove has had the White House stick so closely to the "terrorism" script,
even though the White House has itself conceded that this script is not
so credible: Bush admits that there’s no evidence of links between Al
Qaeda, 9/11 and Saddam Hussein - and yet he continues yawping at the
links between them, most startlingly in his anniversary speech a few
weeks ago on September 11.

That oration kindled broad astonishment at the psychotic fixity of
its key thesis: i.e., that U.S. troops are in Iraq to halt the spread of
global terror (and not themselves a major stimulus thereto, as Bush’s
own intel establishment has bluntly noted). That line has been disdained
not only by the media but also by the GOP’s top pundits and
Congressional candidates, more and more of whom, the New York Times
reported on September 3, "are disregarding Mr. Rove’s advice."

That Rove won’t give it up attests to its essential function as
pre-propaganda: Bush et al. shout of "terrorism" not because they think
it will win votes. They don’t care whether people vote for them or not.
Rather, they’ve been hammering at "terrorism" in the hope that it will
fly as a convincing reason why the GOP retained its grip on Congress,
even though the party has no mass support. The strategy reflects, in
part, on the immense credulity (and, to some extent, complicity) of the
political establishment, which cannot, will not, does not want to see
that this regime has never even been elected.

Such terror-obsessed pre-propaganda also tragically portends an
imminent "surprise" deployed, before Election Day, to make Bush’s empty,
crazy argument seem suddenly believable. Whether it’s a second 9/11, or
a huge "defensive" strike against Iran, or a paralyzing combination of
the two, a move like that would serve to make the recent Bush/Cheney
line on "terror" sound prophetic rather than insane.

"Counting" the Vote - However they may seek to validate the
electoral fraud, the Bush bunch are now in a superb position to effect
it. First of all, computerized voting and vote-counting are today far
more extensive than they were two years ago, thanks to the relentless
efforts of the GOP, the e-voting manufacturers and not a few compliant
Democrats.

Although some victories have been won for democratic practice
through tireless bipartisan citizen activism, most notably in Colorado,
North Carolina and New Mexico, such grassroots triumphs have been
overshadowed by the juggernaut’s immense success at reddening blue
America. In 2004, 23 percent of the electorate cast their votes on
"direct-recording electronic" (DRE) machines. Today, according to
Election Data Services, it’s over 39 percent. And nearly 41 percent will
have their votes counted by computerized scanners - a method preferable
to using DRE machines, as it allows for paper ballots, but a risky
practice nonetheless. Thus over 80 percent of next month’s vote will be
counted secretly, by private vendors closely tied to Bush’s party.

The GOP has also furthered mass disenfranchisement by passing Jim
Crow laws of startling brazenness (yet that have gone largely unnoticed
by the press). The Ohio legislature has passed a law that quadruples the
price of recounts, makes machine audits near-impossible, hinders
registration of new voters, tightens partisan control of the election
work-force and requires all voters to bring IDs to the polls. Photo IDs,
effectively a poll tax, are now required in Indiana and Florida - where,
moreover, it is now illegal to hand-count paper ballots once they have
been "counted" by machine. Through such laws - and epidemic lawlessness
– the party will control the vote throughout the nation on November 7.

Brazen Behavior - While the party has pre-empted innumerable votes
below the radar, it has also shown a steely willingness to thwart the
voters openly, if they should dare resist the party’s will. Take, for
example, last summer’s special race in San Diego to fill the empty seat
of the felonious Randy Cunningham, a former Republican congressman who
is now doing time for accepting bribes. Although leading in the
pre-election polls, the Democrat, Francine Busby, lost to Brian Bilbray
of the GOP; and then it came out that the party’s poll workers had been
ordered to take the e-voting machinery home with them for several days
before the vote.

At the news of this jaw-dropping wrong (it being a very simple task
to fiddle with the gadgets’ memory cards and thereby fix the final
count), San Diegans called for an investigation and a new election. A
week after the election - and seventeen days before the vote was even
certified - Bilbray flew to Washington, where he was summarily sworn in
by House Speaker Dennis Hastert. In late August that amazing move was,
still more amazingly, approved by Superior Court Judge Yuri Hofmann, who
argued that the state of California had no jurisdiction once the Speaker
of the House had made the people’s choice.

If Dennis Hastert can choose Brian Bilbray for that seat,
irrespective of the will of the electorate, why bother having House
elections anywhere? Indeed, why bother with elections? Why not just have
Congress’s membership decided by the Speaker of the House - or by
President Bush himself? Maybe that imperial arrangement would amuse the
press as much as it appeals to Bush & Co. Otherwise there might have
been some coverage of the scandal by the news media, which has largely
disregarded it (while Hastert’s role in Foleygate is a huge story).

Eleventh-Hour Plan - Such journalistic silence makes it all the
likelier that the Republicans will get away with it again - although
it’s also possible, of course, that they will somehow fail to steal it
on Election Day. Chance, accident, imperial over-reaching and/or popular
resistance can thwart the best-laid plans. If that should happen,
though, the party has a plan to fix the problem; and the press’s eerie
silence on the danger of election fraud could help that strategy succeed.

If the GOP should lose the House or Senate, its troops will mount a
noisy propaganda drive accusing their opponents of election fraud. This
is no mere speculation, according to a well-placed party operative who
lately told talk radio host Thom Hartmann, off the record, that the game
will be to shriek indignantly that those dark-hearted Democrats have
fixed the race. We will hear endlessly of Democratic "voter fraud"
through phantom ballots, rigged machines, intimidation tactics, and all
the other tricks whereby the Bush regime has come to power. The regime
will, in short, deploy the ultimate Swift Boat maneuver to turn around
as many races as they need so as to nullify the will of the electorate.

Of course, the Democrats themselves have a rich history of election
fraud, but there’s no evidence of much, if any, since Bush came upon the
scene; and yet with very few exceptions, they have doggedly refused to
speak about the growing danger of such fraud, so that the GOP - the very
perpetrators of that fraud - will be the first to make an issue of it.
The press too has ignored the issue, other than to bleat, from time to
time, that such malfeasance has been common "on both sides." Thus this
besieged democracy appears now to have no defenders but ourselves. But
we can do that vital work if we will only face what’s happening and
spread the word, and stand united not as party members, or as liberals,
moderates and conservatives, but as Americans.

--------

Mark Crispin Miller has authored many books, including Cruel and
Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order and The Bush Dyslexicon, and is a
professor of culture and communication at New York University.

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Part I: The Elephant in the Polling Booth
By Mark Crispin Miller
The Washington Spectator

Sunday 01 October 2006

To say that this election could go either way is not to say that the
Republicans have any chance of winning it. As a civic entity responsive
to the voters’ will, the party’s over, there being no American majority
that backs it, or that ever would. Bush has left the GOP in much the
same condition as Iraq, Afghanistan, the global climate, New Orleans,
the Bill of Rights, our military, our economy and our national
reputation. Thus the regime is reviled as hotly by conservatives as by
liberals, nor do any moderates support it.

So slight is Bush’s popularity that his own party’s candidates for
Congress are afraid to speak his name or to be seen with him (although
their numbers, in the aggregate, are even lower than his). It seems the
only citizens who still have any faith in him are those who think God
wants us to burn witches and drive SUVs. For all their zeal, such
theocratic types are not in the majority, not even close, and thus
there’s no chance that the GOP can get the necessary votes.

And so the Democrats are feeling good, and calling for a giant drive
to get the vote out on Election Day. Such an effort is essential - and
not just to the Democrats but to the very survival of this foundering
Republic. However, such a drive will do the Democrats, and all the rest
of us, more harm than good if it fails to note a certain fact about our
current situation: i.e., that the Democrats are going to lose the
contest in November, even though the people will (again) be voting for
them. The Bush Republicans are likely to remain in power despite the
fact that only a minority will vote to have them there. That, at any
rate, is what will happen if we don’t start working to pre-empt it now.

Even though this election could go either way, neither way will
benefit the Democrats. Either the Republicans will steal their
"re-election" on Election Day, just as they did two years ago, or they
will slime their way to "victory" through force and fraud and strident
propaganda, as they did after Election Day 2000. Whichever strategy they
use, the only way to stop it is to face it, and then shout so long and
loud about it that the people finally perceive, at last, that their
suspicions are entirely just - and, this time, just say no.

An Inconvenient Truth - That Bush/Cheney stole their "re-election"
is not a "theory" but a fact that has by now been proved beyond the
shadow of a doubt. The case was made, first, by the House Judiciary
Committee - or rather by its Democratic members, who conducted a
meticulous inquiry into the debacle in Ohio. (The Republicans boycotted
the investigation, and obstructed it.) Its findings were released on
January 5, 2005, in the so-called Conyers Report, after Rep. John
Conyers (D-MI), the committee’s ranking Democrat. The Republicans
attacked it, and the press and leading Democrats ignored it; yet that
report was sound, its major findings wholly accurate.

In July of that year the Democratic National Committee came out
with its own study of Ohio, which offers still more evidence of fraud -
before concluding, weirdly, that there was no fraud but rather much
"incompetence" (all of which somehow helped only the GOP). Despite its
stated contradiction of the House report, the DNC analysts disprove not
one of Conyers’s findings.

A few months later, the House report was bolstered by a thick
volume of evidence compiled by the investigators who had helped the
Democrats conduct their research in Ohio: Bob Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman
and Steve Rosenfeld. Their book How the GOP Stole America’s 2004
Election and Is Rigging 2008 reconfirms the House report with rich
documentation, and evidences further fraud as well. Although the book
went largely unreviewed, its findings proved unassailable; as did my
essay in the August 2005 issue of Harper’s, "None Dare Call It Stolen"
(this was the first time any major medium addressed the issue).

While such works dealt only with Ohio in 2004, others soon
appeared, demonstrating that Team Bush, that year, defrauded the
electorate nationwide. My book Fooled Again documented the
ultra-rightist crime wave that undid countless votes not only in Ohio
but in Florida, Pennsylvania, Oregon, New York, New Mexico, Nevada,
Arizona, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Iowa, New Jersey,
Georgia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi and the
Carolinas. It also detailed the interference of Bush/Cheney with the
votes of millions of Americans abroad.

Despite a national media blackoutno reviews in any major U.S.
dailies or newsmagazines, no interviews on network TV or radio, or on
NPR or PBSFooled Again eventually found a large readership through the
Internet, C-SPAN, Air America, and broad local radio coverage.

This past June, the case against the Bush regime was expanded by
three major works. Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss’s Was the 2004
Election Stolen? devastates the fiction that the exit polls conducted on
Election Day were wrong. Despite Freeman’s scrupulous research, that
book too went unreviewed. Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse dissects the huge
fraud(s) whereby the Bush/Cheney ticket "won" New Mexico despite the
strongly Democratic inclination of the state’s Hispanic voters, who
turned out in record numbers to dump Bush. (Somehow, over 17,000 of them
cast no vote for president, according to the e-voting machines deployed
in Democratic precincts.)

More noticeably, Rolling Stone ran Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s,
comprehensive study of Ohio, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"a piece the
media could not ignore because its author was too famous. Thus Kennedy
appeared on some shows that had been closed to all us other analysts,
although his piece relied explicitly on our research; and even he was
treated like a fantasist, or a felon, by the likes of Neil Cavuto,
Tucker Carlson, Wolf Blitzer and Charlie Rose. Aside from those
interrogations (and a decent head-to-head with Stephen Colbert, who let
him finish several sentences), Kennedy too was disrespected by the
media, which either blacked him out or put him down.

In short, the awful truth about 2004 has been denied by right and
left alikeand, strange to say, more loudly on the left. Indeed, whereas
the right has largely chosen to avoid the issue, the only journalists
who have purported to "debunk" the "theory" of Bush and Cheney’s stolen
re-election have been liberals and progressive (and, ordinarily,
excellent reporters): Mark Hertsgaard at Mother Jones; Russ Baker at
TomPaine.com; David Corn at The Nation; and, above all, Farhad Manjoo at
Salon.

Their "refutations" of the case are largely based on the mere
exculpatory say-so of a few unconscious (or complicit) Democrats. And
yet, although the work of these debunkers has itself been thoroughly
debunked (and Manjoo, therefore, quietly assigned to other topics), it
has done much to propagate the myth that there’s "no evidence" that Bush
& Co. subverted our democracy. Such denials have been persuasive not
because they are well argued but because the truth is terrifying, and a
lot of people (including those reporters) very badly need a reason to
believe that all is well. Such wishful thinking has kept "the liberal
media" from dealing with the direst threat that our democracy has ever
faced.

And yet most of our fellow citizens sense that threat. A Zogby poll
in August found that only 45 percent of the American people felt "very
confident" that Bush was re-elected "fair and square," while the rest
either doubted it or were "not at all confident" about it. The numbers
of the blithe have been decreasing as the people have learned more and
more about BushCo’s fascistic antics in 2004 - and, as well, about the
fatal flaws in the e-voting systems that the Republicans have been
aggressively promoting since 2000. (Some Democrats have abetted them.)

The flaws of such systems have been exposed repeatedly by activists
like Bev Harris, Brad Friedman, Clint Curtis, Lynn Landes, Earl Katz and
Bruce O’Dell, and have also been solemnly detailed in many academic
studiesfrom, among others, NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice; Princeton’s
Center for IT Policy; RABA Technologies; SAIC (Science Applications
International Corporation); the U.S. Government Accountability Office;
and a cohort of computer scientists at Johns Hopkins, Rice and Stanford
universities. (See previous issues of the Washington Spectator, here and
here.)

Read together, all those exposés and studies tell of a close and
wholly illegitimate relationship between the corporate vendors of those
voting systems and Bush/Cheney’s GOP. Three of the four firms that sell
those systemsDiebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivichave tight links with the
party. The fourth, Sequoia, has also tended to malfunction in
Bush/Cheney’s favor.

Now we have strong evidence of a covert partnership between those
interests that "count" some four-fifths of U.S. votes and the party that
controls our government. In a follow-up piece for Rolling Stone, Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr., quotes the shocking testimony of a Diebold
whistle-blower who, along with other employees, took part in the
surreptitious placement of a software "patch" in the company’s machines
in Georgia (whose electoral system had, just weeks before, been
privatized through a secret contract with the Secretary of State). The
order came directly from Bob Urosevich, president of Diebold’s e-voting
machine division. "We were told not to talk to county personnel about
it," says Chris Hood, a consultant to the company. And what about that
patch? "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the
system, which it didn’t do," Hood noted. "The curious thing is the very
swift, covert way this was done."

All this happened one sticky day in August 2002. On Election Day,
some ten weeks later, the official outcome of the vote baffled everyone:
Senator Max Cleland, a Democrat whom polls showed had been leading his
opponent, Saxby Chambliss, by five points, lost by seven points. In the
race for governor, Democrat Roy Barnes, who had been leading Republican
Sonny Perdue by eleven points, lost by five. Both losses were
inexplicable, and Cleland’s was especially poignant. A war veteran and
triple amputee, Cleland was quite popular in Georgia, whereas Chambliss
was unknown - and a chickenhawk to boot, a "bad knee" having kept him
out of Vietnam. Chambliss’s attack ads had cast Cleland as a traitor,
because he had voted against establishing the Department of Homeland
Security. And now the people of the Peach State had apparently been
swayed by their fear of terrorism into believing that those ads were right.

That year there were other such anomalies, induced, perhaps, by
what some wags called "Diebold magic," as the company’s product figured
heavily in those other states where far-right candidates won upset
victories: Colorado, where Republican Wayne Allard, down by nine points
against Democrat Tom Strickland, won by five points; and New Hampshire,
where Republican John Sununu, down by one point against Democrat Jeanne
Shaheen, won by four points.

As odd as such reversals seemed, and as conspicuous a role as
Diebold evidently played in them, there were no calls for inquiry, as it
was easier to say that "terrorism" - or maybe "family values" - had
simply grabbed the voters’ hearts and minds in Georgia, Colorado and New
Hampshire. (Diebold, in fact, had no hand in Republican Norm Coleman’s
startling victory over Walter Mondale in Minnesota - the born-again New
Jerseyite having trailed the favorite son by five points, then winning
suddenly by three.) Thus did the Bush Republicans take back the Senate,
thereby canceling out the Democratic edge enabled briefly by Jim
Jeffords’s controversial exit from the GOP.

Saving Our Democracy - We must delve into the recent past, not to
quibble over ancient numbers but to find out where we really are today.
For what happened in some states four years ago, and in most states two
years ago, is still happening now, and in more states than ever: a vast,
complex and incremental process of mass disenfranchisement - which is,
in fact, the only way the Bush Republicans could ever get "elected," as
their program is not conservative but radical, irrational, apocalyptic:
i.e., unacceptable to most Americans, liberals and true conservatives alike.

This is why they’ve gerrymandered Texas and (less visibly) Virginia
– and also why they’ve packed the Supreme Court with comrades
disinclined to outlaw gerrymandering (unless it’s Democrats who try it).
This is why they are dead-set against repealing state laws
disenfranchising ex-felons - and also why they’ve used the "war on
drugs" to jail as many likely Democrats as possible. (This would also
help explain the post-Katrina diaspora, and especially the out-of-state
internment of over 70,000 Louisianans.) And this is why the Bush
Republicans push e-voting machines in every state, and program them to
flip votes cast by Democrats into votes "cast" for Republicans, and
systematically provide too few machines to Democratic precincts, and
keep on arbitrarily removing Democrats from voter rolls, and "challenge"
would-be voters at the polls, and simply throw out countless ballots of
all kinds, and spread disinformation on Election Day. These are just
some of the devices that were used not only in Ohio to ensure
Bush/Cheney’s "re-election," but in every state where they could pull it
off - on both coasts, in the Midwest, and throughout the South.

In the next issue of the Spectator, I’ll elaborate on the GOP’s two
likeliest moves in November’s mid-term elections. For now, we must do
all we can to make everyone aware of what’s been going down - and, most
important, what is now at stake. As the press and the Democrats have
failed to call for any actual reform of the election system, Bush and
Co. are now in a superb position to retain their legislative power,
regardless of how people vote (or try to vote).

We need a massive turnout in November - but not because it will put
Democrats in power. We need the biggest turnout ever, as a protest on
behalf of free and fair elections in America. Such a turnout will make
it that much harder for the Bush Republicans to spin their victory as
legitimate. (This is why the GOP in several states, including Maryland
and Colorado, is urging people to vote absentee next month: to make the
opposition appear that much smaller.) But more important, such a turnout
will prepare people for the crucial fight to come - the effort to save
our democracy.

If we get millions out to vote, without informing them they may
well "lose" anyway, the blow will devastate them, just as Kerry’s abrupt
concession did in 2004. It took two years to get Americans mobilized
again. If Bush and his allies steal the next election, we won’t have
years to start resisting. The resistance must start on Day One, just as
in Ukraine and Mexico; and so the people must be ready for the fight -
and so they need to know enough to wage it, and to win it.

--------

Mark Crispin Miller has authored many books, including Cruel and
Unusual: Bush/Cheney’s New World Order and The Bush Dyslexicon, and is a
professor of culture and communication at New York University.