Rewriting Our Rotten History of Elections

By Matthew Wheeland, AlterNet. Posted February 15, 2006.

Depending whom you ask, the state of the union's elections are either peachy-keen or in dire straits. With voting irregularities fast becoming the norm, election officials moonlighting as campaign leaders and highly suspicious differences in polling places from region to region, there is an ill-disguised sense that perhaps our democracy is not quite as strong as politicians and their mouthpieces would have you believe.

As of now, with Republicans in control of every branch of the federal government, much of the finger-pointing is aimed at the GOP. After all, if election reform has stalled in Congress since the 2000 election, it's likely that Republicans have built and maintained the roadblocks holding it up.

But it hasn't always been that way; in fact, as recently as 12 years ago, Democrats were the ruling party, riding out the tail end of a political dominance that stretched through much of the century. And Americans voted to give Congress to the GOP partly in response to widespread Democratic corruption. Now that cycle has turned again, and the Republican Party is staring down the barrel of voter wrath.

These kinds of cycles, the regular booms and busts of American politics, are at the heart of Andrew Gumbel's book "Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America," published last year by Nation Books. Gumbel, a reporter for the British newspaper the Independent, wrote extensively about the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. But in Steal This Vote, he looks at elections throughout this country's history, and although the picture he paints is not pretty, it offers solid hope for solutions. Gumbel spoke with AlterNet recently on the phone from Los Angeles.

Matthew Wheeland: I know this is a terribly complex and loaded question, but I feel like I have to ask you this first, to get it out of the way: Do you think that the 2004 election was stolen?

Andrew Gumbel: Well, a lot of people saw the kind of shenanigans that went on in Ohio, Florida and elsewhere, and were so appalled by what they saw that they concluded that the outcome of the election must have been compromised.

I think the question that you've asked, which a lot of people have asked, is actually the wrong one. And the reason for that is that we have a vast amount of evidence that the Republican Party in particular played very dirty in Ohio, they played very dirty in Florida. And the really urgent thing that needs to be addressed are those tactics and the rules that make those tactics possible, and in particular the political structure that enables the party in power with the means to be able to play dirty to do so. There's no real oversight by Congress or anybody else on how elections are conducted on the state and local level. That's the key point that needs addressing.

As far as the outcome of the results is concerned, we have the evidence about crazy rules that were issued by the secretary of state in Ohio, who was doubling as the co-chair of George Bush's reelection campaign. We have evidence of strange things going on in certain counties, as regards the counts, the functioning of the computer tabulation machines, the distribution of the machines to enable people to vote in the first place, the number of provisional ballots were issued, the number of provisional ballots that were rejected, both of which were abnormally high in Ohio and on and on and on.

These add up to a deeply dysfunctional electoral system. They do not, however, add up to proof that the election was stolen. The numbers just aren't there.

And you ask anybody, you ask Mark Crispin Miller, you ask Bob Fitrakis, any of the people running around, desperately wanting to believe that Kerry was the rightful winner of the election. They don't have the evidence either. When you press them, they will admit that they don't, and to insist that because there was this manipulation of the system, therefore the outcome is wrong, I think is absolutely disastrous in terms of political strategy.

Then you are guaranteeing yourself marginal status, and it means that the Republican Party and others who want to believe that the voting reform movement is somehow a bunch of kooks on the extreme left fringe making outrageous claims that they can't back up only get extra evidence to further those allegations.

What we need is very cool, clear accusations for which there is substantiating evidence in terms of the various malfeasance and foul play and lack of oversight. That needs to be the focus. This would create a situation where you can get on board not only Democrats who wish that George Bush hadn't been reelected for a second term, but also Republicans, because if we're talking about voting rights, then it is of burning interest to all voters, not just voters from one party or on one side of the political spectrum.

Matthew Wheeland is AlterNet's managing editor.

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