WHY I WILL NOT VOTE IN 2004
By Carolyn Baker
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation
is honest, truthful and virtuous.
Frederick Douglass
On May 3, 2004, the California Secretary
of State nixed all electronic, touch-screen voting in
the state and called for the criminal prosecution of
the Diebold Company. For those who have been
researching the questionable practices of Diebold and
the potential manipulation of electronic voting,
(www.blackboxvoting.com and
www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,63191,00.html),
California’s decision appears to be a victory for
American democracy but does not necessarily herald
hope for clean elections in November since
overwhelming evidence suggests that conflicts of
interest permeate the relationship between electronic
voting machine companies throughout the nation and
Republican politicians. For example:
• In 2000, 5 of the 12 directors of
Diebold, a leading voting machine manufacturer, made
donations totaling $94,750 to predominately Republican
politicians;
• Former Florida Secretary of State Sandra
Mortham (R) and Former State Election Supervisor of
California Lou Dedier (R) both have ties to Election
Systems and Software (ES&S), one of our nation’s
leading voting machine manufacturers and tabulators.
Sandra Mortham was a lobbyist for ES&S and the Florida
Association of Counties during the same time period.
The Florida Association of Counties made $300,000 in
commissions from the sale of ES&S’s voting machines.
(www.gregpalast.com) Still worse, it appears that
another episode of name purges is imminent for Florida
voters for the November elections, a re-run of 2000.
(http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=327&row=0)
Other states may follow California’s lead—or not.
If there is an election in November, 2004,
and it is not absolutely certain there will be, as I
will be discussing later in this article, I am not
willing to vote unless I can have a paper receipt
verifying my vote. This is not possible in the state
where I reside.
“But why don’t you vote absentee?” the
reader may ask. Because in a similar manner, absentee
ballots can be tampered with as they were in Florida
in 2000:
The data shows that out of over 21,500
absentee ballots cast in Escambia County, not one
voter overvoted their ballot by placing marks
next to the names of only two presidential candidates.
However, 296 absentee voters placed three or
more marks on their presidential ballot.
The odds against this occurring
naturally are vanishingly small. And when one
considers that the Escambia County Canvassing Board
manually duplicated over 2,400 absentee ballots that
were originally read by machine as
overvotes and undervotes, the only conclusion is that
the duplicate ballots created in Escambia
County did not reflect what was on the original
absentee ballots themselves.
(www.democrats.com)
While absentee voting may decrease the
odds of tampering, voter fraud itself is not the
principal issue for me. For most of my adult life, I
have been faced with “choices” that are not choices
when voting for political leaders. More egregiously
than ever before in U.S. history, the candidates for
President in 2004 are not choices but clones. And how
could it be otherwise when entire parties have become
clones of each other, rabidly racing to the center as
compliant corporate hand-puppets must do? The ghastly
debasement of the American political system
unequivocally eradicates valid choice, riddled as it
is with conflicts of interest, soaking in the sewage
of corporate contributions and a very well documented
drug money pipeline which helped finance the campaigns
of the Democrats and Republicans in 2000
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/politics/demo_party_prez.html).
Both political parties, with their mainstream media
handmaidens, portrayed the not-so-alternative Howard
Dean as a colossal nutcase (does anyone remember their
portrayal of Al Gore as “wooden”?) and the palpably
alternative Dennis Kucinich as “un-telegenic” and “too
divisive.” I hasten to add that I am closely watching
Kucinich to see if he will refuse to give his blessing
to Bush-clone Kerry. If he capitulates, I can only
rest my case. At this moment, however, our “choice” is
between the cowboy and the cadaver—both marinated in
Zionism and special interest skullduggery. The
abhorrent reality that someone like Kerry could
receive the Democratic Party’s nomination blatantly
demonstrates the depths of depravity to which it has
sunk.
Consequently, I have come to abhor the
mindless mantra “Anybody But Bush.” While John Kerry
is not a neo-conservative nor a co-author of the
Project For A New American Century (PNAC), he does
espouse global economic domination by the United
States. Moreover, on virtually every momentous issue,
Kerry is an echo of neo-con madness: He supports the
War on Terror, including sending more troops to Iraq;
he voted for the Iraq invasion; he voted for the
Patriot Act; he states that “the cause of Israel must
be the cause of America”
(http://www.counterpunch.org/kerry02172004.html); he
opposes the democratically-elected opponent of U.S.
imperialism in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez; he has no
problem with the recent U.S. backed coup in Haiti nor
the militarization of space
(http://kerry.senate.gov/bandwidth/cfm/record.cfm?id=180035).
In 2000, after Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced
a labeling law that would have given Americans the
right to know whether the foods they ate contained
genetically modified organisms, Kerry refused to
support that bill. Why? Gee, could it be that Monsanto
Corporation lawyers have contributed generously to his
Senatorial campaigns from 1997 through 2000?
(http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Kerry-Monsanto-Notmilk2feb04.htm).
Kerry’s national security advisor, Rand Beers, has
been deeply involved in the toxic defoliation programs
(compliments of Monsanto) in Colombia, one of the
countries the Bush Administration is planning to
invade and occupy in its so-called War on Terrorism
(translation: non-war on drugs and for oil).
(http://www.counterpunch.org/donahue01262004.html)
While I could cite evidence ad nauseum of
the Bush-Kerry clone syndrome, even that is not my
ultimate reason for refusing to vote in 2004. Anybody
But Bush (AB) enthusiasts argue that although Kerry is
an echo of the Bushonian cacophony, he will give us a
pro-choice agenda and appoint more balanced judges to
the Supreme Court, which Bush intends to pack with
Scalia clones. That the AB adherents could have such
unswerving, faith in their cosmetically-improved Bush
carbon-copy to steer the ship of state in a decisively
less fascistic direction, particularly in the face of
all evidence to the contrary, is both astonishing and
predictable. Make no mistake: John Kerry, like his
Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, is a corporate
globalist. Neo-con in denial? Imperialist more
marketably packaged?
Yet even this is not the quintessential
reason why I will not vote in November. Like the rest
of my generation, I was assiduously schooled in the
virtue of doing my civic duty—casting my ballot on
election day or facing four years of guilt and shame
attended by clichés about not complaining if I didn’t
vote. I was also taught that my vote is sacred because
my right to clean, honest, democratic elections is
sacred. My elementary and secondary teachers
inculcated their propaganda about the evils of the
Soviet Union and third world countries where elections
were non-existent at worst and appallingly corrupt or
offered citizens no valid choices at best. How
fortunate we were to live in America!! Hundreds of
thousands of American soldiers had given their lives
so that we could vote freely in clean elections
offering legitimate choices of candidates. Feminist
“sheroes” like Margaret Sanger and Alice Paul marched
and tirelessly campaigned so that women could vote
alongside men. Nothing, I was exhorted, was more
sacred or precious than my vote. Flag waving and apple
pie notwithstanding, I showed up at the polls every
four years throughout my adult life, proudly marking
my paper ballot and feeling gratified that I could
vote in free elections, even as my choices every four
years became increasingly absurd. All of that changed
for me in 2000 and has continued to change throughout
the past three years. Suddenly, the reprehensible
extent to which the voting process had become an
atrociously rigged game jolted me from my teddy bear
notions about free, fair, and valid elections in
America. Sadly yet indisputably, I became no longer
willing to play in a rigged game—no longer capable of
espousing “lesser evilism.” My vote, you see, is far
too sacred to me. But worse, and this is my point, I
now know that in America, we are not heading into
fascism, not about to enter fascism, not on the verge
of fascism—we are LIVING UNDER fascism. Today, it is
incontrovertibly clear to me that my vote has as much
meaning as the votes of Germans under Hitler, Russians
under Stalin and Mexicans under seven decades of the
PRI Party. In essence, there was a time when not
voting would have been for me a sacrilege; today,
casting my vote for anyone, especially the “lesser of
two evils,” is inestimably odious. Should I not vote
for Nader who “has every right to run,” or Kucinich in
order to “make a statement”? Should I not simply
realize that no governments are perfect, they never
have been, they never will be, and I should simply
“hold my nose and vote” for one of two clones or a
candidate who cannot possibly win? Shouldn’t I settle
for casting a “symbolic” vote? To answer “yes,” to
these questions is to consent to the debacle that the
American voting process has become. To answer “yes” is
to remain in denial of the totalitarian government
under which I now live. As an American, it is my
divine right, to vote in a clean election with a paper
record of my vote for a valid candidate who offers an
authentic choice for leadership of my government.
Therefore, were I to vote, I would disavow my
commitment to the kind of America our founding fathers
constructed, the kind of America for which men and
women fought and died and marched and struggled since
1776. Hence, the most patriotic American act I can
perform on November 4, 2004 is to stay as far away
from the polls as possible and inform as many other
Americans as possible of the realities of the
totalitarian state in which they reside.
Moreover, I have come to understand that
if American citizens have any hope of transforming
their government, they must not rely on voting every
two, four, or six years at the polls, but rather vote
every day with their time and money by refusing to
consume media that is lying to them, refusing to
patronize corporations that are enslaving them and
refusing to participate in a phony electoral charade
that drives their nation deeper into fascism. In other
words, boycott the system in every manner humanly
possible, and above all, do not collude in the lie
that any part of it works on our behalf!!!
Eclipsing all of the aforementioned
arguments, however, is the ominous likelihood of a
pre-election catastrophic terrorist attack in the
United States, brought to us by the same players in
the American government who were complicit in the
September 11, 2001 attacks. Condi Rice’s recent hint
of possible pre-election terrorist attacks
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4772054), underscored by
subsequent warnings from Bush and Rumsfeld lend weight
to the odds. Should there be another terrorist attack
on American soil, it is axiomatic that the terror
level color code would immediately be elevated to red.
The United States would be in the throes of a national
emergency in which the Constitution would be suspended
and martial law declared. Most likely, panic and chaos
would prevail, and the majority of terrified Americans
would acquiesce to a Presidential order or a
Congressional vote to suspend the national election.
I have no crystal ball, nor would it would give
me any pleasure to be right about this horrifying
possibility, but to discern that the United States
government is now being run as a criminal enterprise
is to also understand that its leaders are as likely
to accept being voted out of office as Al Capone would
have, had he been mayor of Chicago in the 1920s.
I refuse to live the lie called “democratic elections”
in the United States in 2004 and thereby join, in the
words of Benjamin Franklin, those who have “become so
corrupted as to need despotic Government, being
incapable of any other.” If you are still considering
voting for “the lesser evil,” ask yourself exactly how
much despotic government you still need, and why you
need it. Or in the more homespun, no-B.S. style of
Thelma and Louise, “Ya get whatchya settle for.”