Prosecute Election Officials Involved in Stripping Legitimate Voters of the Right to Vote
Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, Legislation, Opinion, Quid-pro-quo: Corruption, The Vote, U.S. Elections, Vote 2008 Comments (4)
Any individual, be they low-level election officials, state governors, or non-state actors, who participates in an effort to deprive legitimately registered or entitled-to-be-registered voters of their vote, should be prosecuted. The denial of Constitutional rights is not just a civil liberties issue, not simply a matter of accidental incompetence, and when it involves the actual election process, it is an assault on the government of the United States, which is ultimately supposed to be led by the will of the voter.
That in the year 2000 it was argued before the Supreme Court that there is no Constitutional right to have your vote counted, that not stopping an unfinished count would just confuse the process —and most unbelievably of all, that this would cause “irreparable harm” to Gov. Bush’s tenuous lead in the existing count—, that the Court accepted this argument, viewing the Florida process as so perilously close to unconstitutional, for denying “equal protection” by seeking equality in the vote by various means, is an unbelievable travesty of jurisprudence.
That we are still arguing about whether every vote should be counted and/or verifiable, is yet more astonishing, given the time elapsed since November 2000. Eight years —eight!— to get to this place where we still have even one official in public office who questions whether it is a good idea to hold an election with machines in place that provide zero physical record of a voter’s intent, that somehow we should accept that millions of ballots be “spoiled” and discarded, that we should allow even one single voter to be silenced on technicalities, is —more than a shame and an outrage— a threat to our representative democracy.
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Political corruption involved in the crafting of the “Help America Vote Act” (HAVA) —Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) and “superlobbyist” Jack Abramoff, both involved in hashing out HAVA’s terms, just happen to be in prison now, for corruption— rendered the law at least as much a peril to the legitimacy of American elections as a help. The manufacturers of voting machines have been investigated for knowingly distributing machines with virtually zero security safeguards, easily tamper-prone and which consistently switched votes to Pres. Bush in the 2004 elections.
The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) reports that 2.7 million voters have been erased from states’ registration lists since 2004, meaning even the heroic grassroots get-out-the-vote effort waged by the Democrats this year, registering literally millions of new voters, may be to some extent neutralized by the number of registrations simply thrown out with no warning to the voters concerned.
The former US attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, is now under an independent federal criminal investigation, relating to his alleged role in the untimely dismissal of 9 federal prosecutors. The most outspoken of these, David Iglesias, says the whole affair hinged on political pressure exerted on himself and others to trump up charges in unsubstantiated complaints about “voter fraud”.
Justice Dept. officials have even admitted that Gonzales wanted Iglesias and others gone for “refusing” to prosecute alleged voter fraud cases he was personally pushing. In fact, even that, as a reason for dismissal, could not be justified, because Iglesias did investigate them. His office looked into the allegations for 2 years, finding no evidence that federal election fraud charges would be warranted in those cases. Charges were not filed because the allegations were unsubstantiated.
If in fact government officials were actively seeking to use the justice system to rig the election process, by prosecuting legitimate organizations or individuals and ignoring corrupt officials routinely purging hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters from registration rolls, without notifying them or even seeking information to shore up their databases, then crimes against the United States Constitution were committed, and those officials should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Local officials involved in less sweeping or even seemingly harmless efforts, whose direct result is the stripping of voting rights, of any kind, for any reason, should also face prosecution. Our electoral system should not and cannot hinge on the administrative choices of partisan politicians and government officials: that is the absolute negation of democracy, however subtle the means. In the United States, a legitimate election means no one is deprived of the vote, and every voter’s intent is recorded and counted. Period.
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