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9 January 2005
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The confrontations which occurred in two
special sessions of Congress last Tuesday (6 January) ended with a defeat for
democracy, despite heoric resistance on the part of a
few elected representatives. The alternative press in
In the
Below, in item A., we have from
Item B. is
an account published in The New Standard in which investigative
reporters, from Brian Dominick and Ariella Cohen,
give a blow-by-blow account of the violent debate which took place at the
special sessions in both houses of Congress last Thursday.
Item C.
Linda Burnham writes of the challenge that the 2004 elections present to
American feminists, who have for too long ignored the social class divisions
within women's groups, and who have not effectively addressed issues of racism
and other social prejudices which have divided women as a group.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble3
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
________________
A.
from Monty Kroopkin
Subject: my comment on Electoral
College vote & links to reports
Dear friends and family,
As you may have already heard,
Senator Barbara Boxer joined with House members on January 6 to object to
certification of the Electoral College vote for
I have received more than one appeal
for letters of support to be sent to Senator Boxer, Senator Reid, and the
members of the House voting for the objection. I am not passing those appeals
on in the form they were written.
I do not share the enthusiasm of
those that think their stand was courageous. Had they really wanted to be
courageous, they might have objected to the Electoral College vote in every
state where problems were reported, especially those with paperless electronic
voting machines, thereby delaying the final Republican majority rubber stamp of
the results by days, not just hours.
They could have bluntly declared they/we cannot accept the validity of
the results unless and until the raw data from the exit polls is released and
all other investigations of "irregularities" have been truly
concluded. Or they could bolt the corrupt One Party "2 Party" sham
and join the Green Party or the I.W.W. or do countless other things that might
warrant the word "courageous".
The investigations continue,
including the one in the House, and we really do not yet know who won this
election, or if it was won by illegal means, worthy of prosecution or even
impeachment. But raising at least some objection was simply the moral thing to
do, and, in an arena of rampant immorality like Congress, that alone may
deserve some comments of support.
Therefore, I have put the contact
information at the bottom of this letter. I plan to send them a copy of this
letter.
--Monty Kroopkin
ooo
Links to Articles and broadcast
transcripts on
Democracy Now (Pacifica Network TV
news):
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/07/1621240&mode=thread&tid=25
CSPAN complete coverage of house and
senate debate on the objection:
http://www.c-span.org/
The
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1070
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54512-2005Jan6.html?sub=new
PLUS a few related background
articles:
The senior Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers of
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20050105-1502-electoralcollege-ohio.html
The top Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee has asked The Associated Press
and five broadcast networks to turn
over raw exit poll data:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000741150
TV Networks Officially Refuse to
Release Exit Poll Raw Data
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1044
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy t r u t h
o u t | Report
http://truthout.org/unexplainedexitpoll.pdf
PLUS MORE ARTICLES ON THE OBJECTION:
New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/07/politics/07elect.html?oref=login
http://www.latimes.com/search/dispatcher.front?Query=%22electoral+college%22+and+%22barbara+boxer%22&target=article&x=12&y=6
San Diego Union-Tribune:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050107/news_1n7congress.html
San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/07/MNGFDAMQ1B1.DTL
CONTACT INFORMATION FROM SAN DIEGO
UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST ACTION GROUP:
Email Senator Boxer at:
http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/webform.cfm
Contact information from MoveOn:
"Sen. Boxer and Sen. Reid need
to hear a big thank you from all of us now
that we've begun this public debate.
Please let them know that you support them
by signing our thank you letter at the
link below.
http://moveonpac.org/boxer_reid/
"Thousands of us called our
Senators to encourage them to step forward and open this debate. We know that
that support was important in making this leadership possible.
"Unfortunately Sen. Boxer is
already under attack from the conservative forces who
approve, through their inaction, the voting problems that shut out large
numbers of voters -- disproportionately minority voters. After you sign the
thank you letter we need you to help get the word out through the media by
writing letters of support for Sen. Boxer to the editors of your local
newspaper. Please click below to get started.
http://www.moveonpac.org/lte/lte.html?zip=92117<e_campaign_id=16
"As we've written before, the
winners of these tainted elections assert that their outcomes didn't depend on
the fraud. But even in sports, referees call penalties and enforce the rules,
whether or not the game is at stake. Nowhere in the Constitution does it
describe some acceptable level of denying Americans their votes. That's why
Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Stephanie Tubbs
Jones (D-OH) and other Democrats
have been working so hard to investigate what happened.
"Hundreds of thousands of
concerned Americans have been speaking out for weeks about the voting problems.
Today Democratic representatives and senators listened and stood up for voting
rights.
"Thanks for everything you do.
"--The MoveOn
PAC Team
________________
B.
from Brian Dominick and Ariella Cohen
The NewStandard
Electoral Vote Challenge Meets
Venomous Response in Congress
by Brian Dominick and Ariella
Cohen
In special sessions of both chambers
of Congress Thursday, Republican lawmakers met a handful of Democratic
colleagues with vitriolic diatribes when the latter raised concerns about
electoral irregularities that took place during
In a departure from traditional
procedure, the joint session of Congress convened to certify the electoral vote
count and officially recognize George W. Bush as president elect broke up for
two hours of separate debate among senators and representatives. The special
session was activated when Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) joined
Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) and other House members in
challenging the certification of
Rather than an attempt to overturn
the outcome of the 2004 election, Democratic legislators said they wished to
use their protest as a means of highlighting what they consider ongoing
election problems that stand little chance of correction unless the status quo
is confronted.
"This objection," Tubbs
Jones said on the House floor, "does not have at its root the hope or even
the hint of overturning the victory of the president but it is a necessary,
timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious
process in our democracy. I raise this objection neither to put the nation in
the turmoil of a proposed overturned election nor to provide cannon fodder or
partisan demagoguery for my fellow members of Congress."
Speaking to the press Thursday
morning, Boxer announced her decision to co-sign Tubbs Jones' objection.
"Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be
guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted and that in the
voting booth," Boxer said, "their vote has as much weight as any
senator, any congressperson, any president, any cabinet member, or any CEO of
any Fortune 500 corporation."
The chief concerns raised by
dissenting politicians were mostly straightforward, like the alleged
misallocation of voting machines that affected primarily Democratic districts.
Voters waited "hours and hours
and hours in the rain to vote," Boxer said. "Why did an estimated
5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling places in frustration without having
voted? How many more never even bothered to vote after they heard about
this?"
Boxer also asked, "Why did
To punctuate the urgency of her
appeal, Boxer said the time has come to "cast the light of truth on a
flawed system which must be fixed now. Not in years from now, but now."
The fiercest debate took place in
the House, where visibly frustrated Republicans unleashed verbal attacks on
their Democratic colleagues. Representative Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) said she
regretted that so early in the 2005 session, Congress was "bogged
down" in "frivolous debate." She warned the American public not
to be deceived by dissenters, whom she called "aspiring fantasy
authors" of "wild conspiracy theories," possessing "no
credible agenda for
Florida Republican Ric Keller distilled his message down to three simple
words: "Get over it," he told Democratic detractors. Rep. David
Hobson, an Ohio Republican, called the proceedings "outrageous."
House Majority Whip Roy Blunt
(R-Missouri) said questions about
In an apparent attempt to argue
against the Democratic challenges, Blunt continued: "People do have to
have confidence that the process works in a proper way. They don't need to
believe that it is absolutely perfect because after all it's the greatest
democracy in the history of the world. And it's run by people who step forward
and make a system work in ways that nobody would believe until they see it, to
produce the result of what people want to have happen on election
day."
Calling the proceeding "an
assault against the institutions of our representative democracy" and
"a threat to the very ideals it ostensibly defends," Majority Leader
Tom DeLay (R-Texas) denied that any voter
disenfranchisement took place anywhere in 2004 or 2000. He accused Democrats of
crying wolf, and wondered "what will happen" when a future election
is actually stolen.
Rep. Tubbs Jones, one of the members
of the Congressional Black Caucus, that spearheaded the challenge, preempted
Republican attacks by setting the tone of the admittedly symbolic protest.
"It is on behalf of those millions of Americans who believe in and value
our democratic process and the right to vote that I put forth this objection
today," she said. "If they are willing to stand at polls for
countless hours in the rain, as many did in
North Carolina Democrat Mel Watt
couched his objection in terms of the
The handful of Democrats who
acknowledged the voter disenfranchisement made clear that while
In the end, each house had to vote
on whether to accept
Staff Report Details Voter
Disenfranchisement
Thursday's challenge was bolstered
by a report on
Entitled Preserving Democracy: What
Went Wrong in
The report also recommends immediate
appointment of a joint committee to investigate election irregularities.
"Votes weren't counted and
there was possible machine tampering," Judiciary Committee staffer Dena Graziano told The NewStandard
Thursday. "Clearly, election law wasn't carried out the way it was
supposed to be in
Even the third party-sponsored
recount in
Problems found in the investigation
of the recount included insecure storage of ballots and machinery, the counting
of irregularly marked ballots, and a failure of counties to allow witnesses for
candidates to observe the recount -- a right guaranteed in
The report concludes that the Ohio
Secretary of State's failure to set specific standards for the recount yielded
a lack of uniformity that may violate the Due Process Clause and the Equal
Process Clause of the Constitution.
Federal law states that all
controversies regarding the appointment of electors must be resolved at least
six days prior to the seating of the electors on December 13. The judiciary
report points out that the official recount of the
Bush/Chaney 2000 Campaign may have
intentionally delayed the certification of the electors in order to make a
complete recount impossible before the December 13 seating.
Today on Capital Hill, protesters
rallied in support of the election challenge taking place in Congress and
calling for further investigation into the election.
"The hope is that we can create
some new legislation to fix the problems we saw this election," Graziano said, adding that members of Congress plan to
create laws to fix problems that the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) did not
address.
Following the 2000 election, the
senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr.
(D-Michigan), drafted the Help America Vote Act. Since last November, the
The Judiciary Committee Democrats
cited sources ranging from New York Times articles to Board of Elections
records and voter testimonies in their report. The 102-page document relies on
experiential and statistical data, as well as extensive legislative
foregrounding, to prove that the misallocation of voting machines in minority
and low-income precincts resulted in mass, illegal disenfranchisement.
The long poll lines in
According to state funding records
contained in the report, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) processed
$32,562,331 for the fiscal year 2003 and $58,430,186 for 2004 election costs. A
lack of public information on how
Under election policy, voter history
and past turn-out statistics decide how many machines will go out to each
polling location, a deployment strategy that discriminates against voters in
areas with a shorter or less steady history of electoral participation.
Last month, the Washington Post
reported that "in Franklin County, '27 of the 30 wards with the most
[voting] machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush...[while] six
of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for
Kerry.'" Quoting this data, House Democrats say that patterns of machine
deployment in the state violate legal codes.
"A conscious failure to provide
sufficient voting machinery violates the Ohio Revised Code which requires the
Board of Elections 'to provide adequate facilities at each polling place for
conducting the election,'" the report states.
Committee investigation also found
the process surrounding the casting and counting of provisional ballots deeply
problematic.
In the report's analysis,
Blackwell's decision to restrict the use of provisional ballots was
"critical in the election," and the restriction may have resulted in
the "disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of voters." The report
mentions that one polling place in
"In our judgment, Mr.
Blackwell's restrictive interpretation violates the spirit, if not the letter
of HAVA," the report says.
According to their investigation,
other states with broader readings of the federal code did not report the
"chaos and confusion that Mr. Blackwell claimed to be the rationale for
his decision."
____________
C.
from Linda Burnham
Z Magazine
No Mandate from
Women of Color
by Linda Burnham
Millions
of people worked as hard as they possibly could to turn the country onto a
different path and still the village idiot was
elected.
What
to make of such an outcome? What do we know about the participation of women of
color at the polls? Did women of color and White women move in the same
political direction? And how do the results inform women's rights and racial
justice activists about the critical tasks ahead?
It's
an exceptionally bitter pill, but we must swallow it whole. The November
balloting, a referendum on an aggressively militaristic foreign policy, defiant
of the most basic human rights norms, was a stunning setback for peace and
progress. No real alternative course of action was offered by a cowed and
strategically bankrupt opposition party. But it is still the case that, given
the choice between delusional, reckless empire building and the faint
possibility of a more measured approach to world affairs a majority of the
electorate chose the former. They also chose to reinstate an administration
that promotes massive disinvestment from communities of color, a bold assertion
of patriarchal values in public policy, and privatization of every last scrap
of social capital.
There
are nearly as many theories about how we arrived at this outcome as there are
voters. But we can be clear about at least one thing. Had it been up to
women-of-color voters, the current resident of the White House would be packing
his bags and heading back to
According
to CNN exit polls based on over 13,000 respondents, Bush received 62 percent
and Kerry 37 percent of the vote from White men. Fifty-five percent of White
women voted for Bush, while 44 percent voted for Kerry. Only thirty percent of
men of color voted for Bush, while 67 percent of them voted for Kerry. Most
significantly, 75 percent of women of color voted for Kerry, which
means less than one-quarter of women of color supported the current
administration's policies.
The
voting patterns of women of color led the trends in our communities, which voted
heavily Democratic. Bush received only 11 percent of Black votes. Unsettled
controversies remain regarding the Asian American and Latina/o vote, but Bush
received a decided minority of votes in these communities as well. An estimated
24- 34 percent of Asian American voters and 33 percent - 40 percent of Latina/o
voters supported Bush.* A substantial majority of Arab American voters also
cast their ballots for change. Native American figures are not available.
Much
has been made of the gender gap in US elections. Organizations stake their
political strategies and their income streams on the margins between male and
female voters. The gender gap refers to the difference in the percentage of
women and men who vote for a given candidate, and to the tendency of women to
vote more heavily Democratic than men. On
While
some statistics talk to us, others virtually scream out for interpretation.
Let's contemplate, for a moment, the
Does
it make sense for feminists to give their entire attention on the 5-10 percent
electoral gap between women and men and none to the 30-80 percent gap between
women of color and white women? What are the strategic consequences of that
focus?
If we
are striving for reality-based politics, and we certainly cannot afford to do
otherwise at this moment in history, we will conduct a deep inquiry into why
and how women's political thinking diverges so profoundly along the colorline. What motivated a majority of White women,
especially in the South, to identify their interests so thoroughly with those
of the Republican Party? How we can begin to bridge the racial chasm in US
politics to further a progressive agenda?
There
are no ready answers to these lines of inquiry. But perhaps pursuing them
honestly will jog us out of denial for long enough to think creatively about
how to approach the bleak four years ahead.
_________________________________________________
*
Figures for Black vote from CNN exit polls. Latina/o vote
from the Willie C. Velasquez Institute and NBC. Asian
American vote from Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and APIAVote. Arab American vote from
Arab American Institute.
**Census
figures categorize 61% of
Web
Resources
Women's
Voices, Women Vote: http://www.wvwv.org/
Votes
for Women 2004: http://www.votesforwomen2004.org/
Center
for American Women and Politics: http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/
Willie C. Velasquez Institute: www.wcvi.org
Asian
American Legal Defense and Education Fund: www.aaldef.org
Arab
American Institute: www.aaiusa.org
APIAVote: www.apiavote.org
* Linda Burnham is the Executive Director
of the Women of Color Resource Center in