Thomas Paine wrote, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery"--or, y'know, to make him like a woman, since it was another 150 years or so after he wrote before women were enfranchised in the US.
This week's US election didn't meet international standards for clean elections
paperless electronic voting
No paper trail, no recount. Diebold delivers the votes. The ghost votes in the machines. Exit polls (which were accurate in paper ballot states) showed Kerry winning Florida and Ohio.
absentee ballots
Plenty of people never got theirs--college students, military folk in Iraq, sundry expatriates.
In a course I teach, out of 16 students, one didn't get her absentee ballot fromAlaska. Another has a friend stationed in Iraq, who didn't get his ballot; neither did any of those he's stationed with.
registration problems
Sproul was hired by the republican party to register voters, and apparently encouraged workers to ditch, destroy non-Republican registration forms.
polling access
People turned away for lack of identification. It happened in New Orleans, I hear. Voter intimidation & supression was not infrequent, and worst for students and, of course, in communities of color.
disenfranchisement
felons, former felons, possible felons, people with names that resemble those of felons, people who might vote democratic--purged, purged, purged.
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Her face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, she sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of her feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm . . . . irresistibly propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the pile of debris before her grows skyward. (Walter Benjamin, revised)
