If This Situation Continues, Bend Waaay Over and Kiss Your Country Good-Bye

Mark Crispin Miller is a national treasure, and though many may use that phrase lightly, there is nothing light about his worth in gold. No one seems to be following the matter of the sanctity of the vote except for a very few progressive bloggers - and I use that word "progressive" as a synonym for "honest."

Although this tale is highly complicated, it’s well worth your close attention, if you’re concerned about the status of electoral democracy in the US, and the possibility of saving it. Some would say that Georgia is Ground Zero of Bush/Cheney’s grand subversion of our voting system. (Others would say the same of Arizona.) The situation there has been especially dismal since Election Day, 2002, when Sen. Max Cleland and Gov. Roy Barnes were both robbed of their victories – a theft for which, by now, there is abundant solid evidence.

And yet the Democratic Party (Cleland and Barnes included) continues to look steadfastly away from what went down there. Remember President-elect Obama’s big speech in Chicago’s Grant Park?

Remember his inspiring tale of Annie Hooper Nixon, the old Georgia woman whose forebears toiled in chains, yet who, that very day, had cast her ballot as a free American? Presumably, of course, she’d cast her vote for him – and yet it’s just as likely that her ballot counted for McCain, since Annie Nixon voted electronically, on a voting machine devised and operated by Diebold/Premier.

Although Obama was aware that she had cast an electronic vote (he ringingly invoked the moment “when she put her finger on that button”), he either somehow didn’t know, or simply doesn’t care, (a) that Diebold/Premier had from the start been owned and runby Christianist Republicans, and (b) had, early in the decade, signed a secret deal with Georgia’s SoS (Cathy Cox, a “moderate” Democrat) to manage most elections in thePeach State, where elections had, therefore, been largely privatized.

So, with “Democrats” like that – i.e., not only Cathy Cox, but Cleland and Obama and the rest of them – who needs “Republicans”? Both parties have long been complicit in the theft of our elections, even if the Democrats’ collusion has been passive.

Fighting for Democracy in Georgia (in the US, Not the Caucasus) Posted by mcm December 17, 2009 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Suzan __________________