Sometime very soon, major media recounts of the Florida vote will show that the election was a fraud; that Bush lost the state and thus the nation. The question is -- how shall citizens respond?
April 3, 2001 |
LIKE THIS ARTICLE ?
Join our mailing list:
Sign up to stay up to date on the latest headlines via email.
Steve Cobble is an expert on a wide range of election and government issues and has served as a campaign advisor to many candidates, including Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. He is currently a consultant on democracy issues with the Institute for Policy Studies.
Sometime very soon, it is extremely likely that the major media are finally going to demonstrate what most of us have known all along -- that the Florida vote count was a fraud; that President-Select Bush really lost both that state and the nation; that the voice of the people was gagged.
|
| How Shall We Respond? When the results of the media recount are released in April or May, a coalition of groups -- including the Institue for Policy Studies (IPS), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Independent Progressive Politics Network (IPPN) -- are calling for National Days of Action. (Stay linked to www.ips-dc.org for details.) Join the coalition at the Supreme Court when the results are announced, or at your local courthouse or favorite demonstration site. Call a press conference. Before then, wherever you live, gather people together to fight back. No justice, no mandate. Get out your old armbands, to symbolize the thousands of African American voters falsely purged and abused by the Florida authorities. Put on a ribbon. Have a mock funeral for democracy. Even better, use humor, as www.democrats.com and Citizens for Legitimate Government and many others are doing. (When the Nation magazine gets done with its naming contest for "His Illegitimacy," maybe we can have a slogan contest -- we need hundreds of thousands of tasteful, but funny, bumper stickers ... ) Pass on this essay, and the details about the National Days of Action to everyone on your e-mail list. Support real electoral reform, that counts every vote, and insures that every vote counts. Give your Senator and House member the support they need -- or the attention they fear -- to make sure they "just say no" to right-wing judges and retrograde public policies. Mandela, Havel, Aquino, Walesa. Recent history is filled with examples of nations that won their democracies only because the masses of their people refused to give up when confronted with violations of voting rights, fraudulent elections, and illegitimate rulers. They sat in. They took to the streets. They faced down dogs and fire hoses. They rallied in the town squares. They lit their candles, rang their bells, wrote and sang their songs, marched and picketed, until justice was won. Perhaps we can draw strength from their examples, as we try to revive our democratic rights. So, wherever you live, whatever the group you're connected with, please send us your suggestions for actions. We'll post them, as a step in resisting the illegitimacy of this President-Select, and turning outrage into action. -- Steve Cobble |
| |
|
The question is -- how shall we respond? How will we collectively speak truth to power about "His Illegitimacy?"
Though the exact time is still undisclosed, in the coming days eight news organizations will complete their exhaustive review of the 180,000 Florida "undervotes" and "overvotes." One partial recount has already been released by the Miami Herald/USA Today, which only dealt with a select number of "undervotes" and had inconclusive results (depending on how hanging chads were counted, the results ranged from Bush winning by 1,655 votes to Gore winning by 393.)
The eight other news organizations -- the New York Times, Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Palm Beach Post, St. Petersburg Times, the Tribune Co. (which owns the Los Angeles Times), and CNN -- are expected to release their results and initial analyses all on the same date. We should note that this is not the partial and biased count recently released by Judicial Watch, in an obvious attempt to undercut the media analyses.
-
