Our Primary System Sucks….

and we have these weird caucuses and superdelegates and primaries that “don’t count.” Yes, we do have a lot to complain about and to fix.

However, it’s still better being a Democrat during primary season than being a Republic. At least we Democrats don’t stop counting votes because we don’t like the result.

Republics seem to feel that 87%, not 100%, is the magic number of votes to count in Washington State. Ever-so-surprisingly, stopping the vote count and declaring John McMaverick the winner halted a decisive weekend sweep by Hackabee, the Candidate Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken.

“The Huckabee campaign is deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities in the Washington State Republican precinct caucuses. It is very unfortunate that the Washington State Party Chairman, Luke Esser, chose to call the race for John McCain after only 87 percent of the vote was counted. According to CNN, the difference between Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee is a mere 242 votes, out of more than 12,000 votes counted—with another 1500 or so votes, apparently, not counted. That is an outrage.

“In other words, more than one in eight Evergreen State Republicans have been disenfranchised by the actions of their own party…”

This is just hilarious. Not only do they hate fair national elections, they hate fair elections WITHIN THEIR OWN PARTY. They’re like brothers and sisters cheating each other at “Go Fish.” Jeebus, what a bunch of crooks!

Look, I don’t think that caucus victories mean a whole heck of a lot compared to primary victories. A primary election is much more like a regular election, where hundreds of thousands, or sometimes millions, of voters come out to express their support for their chosen candidate, whereas a caucus is much more like a town hall, where supporters of candidates group together and try to convince all the caucus-goers to vote their way. I’m not saying that a caucus victory is meaningless, but I don’t see it as translating into widespread support for a candidate.

Barring a true miracle, the hated and despised McMaverick will indeed be the Republic candidate for President. But if I were he, I’d take a good look at Hackabee’s strength in the South and Midwest, and at the fact that CPAC and fundie conservatives hate me, and perhaps I’d offer Hackabee the VP slot.

Not that it will help him win. But what else can he do?

Ah, Hackenfreude. It’s a beautiful thing.

Time for A Recount in New Hampshire?

Dennis Kucinich thinks so.

“Without an official recount, the voters of New Hampshire and the rest of the nation will never know whether there are flaws in our electoral system that need to be identified and addressed at this relatively early point in the Presidential nominating process,” said Kucinich, who is campaigning in Michigan this week in advance of next Tuesday’s Presidential primary in that state.”

We all know how completely flummoxed the pundits and the candidates themselves were at the results of the New Hampshire election, since previous polling had shown huge leads for Senator Obama. (Although Zogby now claims that he had a poll that showed much closer numbers for Clinton and Obama, he didn’t feel it was representative because it had been done over a shorter time period.) So wouldn’t a hand count be a good idea?

YES. I think it would be a great thing if the ballots were hand-counted. Unlike many states, New Hampshire uses paper ballots with optical scanning machines, so there is a record as to how each vote was cast. But here’s the rub: Who’s going to pay for the staffers who will have to count tens of thousands of votes?

I’ll tell you who: No one. And that, my friends, is yet another reason why the government, and not private corporations, should own our franchise.

Where’s the accountability when something goes wrong (as in 2000, 2002, 2004…)? Oh, sure, individual people who help rig elections, if caught, do go to jail. The phone-jamming RNC operative in New Hampshire; the election workers in Ohio; they’ve paid for their crimes. But what about fixing the problems with the machines? What about double-checking the results? Shockingly, since ES&S, Sequoia and Diebold are all owned by Republic FOB’s (Friends of Bush), the Deciderer has been, er, decidedly lax in pointing the finger at these e-voting companies for the (very kindly stated) poor quality of their products.

If the (Madamab-style) government owned our franchise, there could be a budget set aside for hiring of staffers to count, and recount, the votes, if necessary. There could be a process to be completed and standards to be met for requesting a recount, so that time was not wasted on frivolous demands. And, if we did use machines to cast and count our votes, their code would be open-sourced and each vote would be cast on paper.

Dennis is right, as usual. I personally think that New Hampshire was an anomaly, due to the very large number of Independent voters there who apparently made up their minds on the day of the vote, and I don’t believe there was fraud involved. But what if there were? In the face of such a surprising result, there should be no question: a hand recount should be done automatically to rule out any wrongdoing or error.

Our franchise demands no less.

Republics to America: Voting is for Me, Not for Thee

“I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
–— Paul Weyrich, at a 1980 training session for 15,000 conservative preachers in Dallas.

I first heard that quote on the Thom Hartmann show, and after I picked my jaw up off the floor, my first coherent thought was “Of course!”

It has always seemed obvious to me that the Republics do not espouse American values. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say, “Screw you! I’ve got mine.” Yet over and over again, that’s what they say to everyone who is not as privileged as they. Tax cuts are only for the super-wealthy. Unions are bad for big business – never mind that they help better the lives of working people. War? It’s when we say it is – it makes us and our friends rich. Science? Forget it – it interferes with our rape and pillage of the environment.

What some of us don’t realize, is that the Republics know they don’t represent the majority view; they’ve known it for decades, as the quote above illustrates. In our American “majority rule” system, that means that normally their party would not be able to hold a great deal of power. But this is an unacceptable outcome for the Republics – so, of course, they cheat.

Election fraud triumphed in 2000, 2002 and 2004, and it was narrowly avoided in 2006 due to a huge turnout and a large increase in voter awareness and election monitoring. (Remember when KKKarl said he had “the math” in 2006? We know what he meant, don’t we?) Note: If you are still skeptical about election fraud, read Greg Palast, Bob Fitrakis and Brad Friedman.

And voila! Thanks to the “genius” of KKKarl Rove and his operatives in the Justice Department, the Bush Administration has taken election-stealing to a new level.

From Alternet.org:

State welfare offices across the country are not offering millions of low-income Americans the opportunity to register to vote when applying for public assistance despite a federal law requiring them to do so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting registration report and experts who say the Department of Justice and states are to blame.

“It’s huge. It’s another area where the administration is failing us,” said Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute, speaking of the Department of Justice’s oversight of the nation’s voter registration laws. “They are not pushing states to recognize their voter registration responsibilities.”

At the same time, the Justice Department’s Voting Section, which enforces voting rights and supervises elections in some states, is pressuring 10 states to do more to purge voter rolls — or remove ineligible voters — before the 2008 presidential election, according to letters sent to state election officials this spring.

So they are 1) denying welfare recipients their opportunities to register to vote, and 2) pressuring states to purge their voter rolls of “felons” prior to 2008 (Why not? It worked so well in Ohio and Florida).

Is it any wonder the new Democratic Congress went after the Justice Department so quickly and persistently? Now, thanks to their investigations, we are finding more and more evidence that the Administration was using the traditionally non-partisan Justice Department for its illegal vote-suppression activities.

Luckily for the American majority, 11/7/06 changed everything.