Nice job Donna!
She makes the really excellent point that, if the Repubs had lost, due to any reason whatsoever, you can bet they’d be fighting to recount every single vote.
I hope there’s somebody listening out there.
Kerry and Edwards: are you listening?!?
Worst Voter Error Is Apathy Toward Irregularities
By Donna Britt for The Washington Post.
Is anyone surprised that accusations of voter disenfranchisement and irregularities abound after the most passionately contested presidential campaign in memory? Is anybody stunned that the mainstream media appear largely unconcerned?
To many people’s thinking, too few citizens were discouraged from voting to matter. Those people would suggest that not nearly enough votes for John Kerry were missed or siphoned away to overturn President Bush’s win. To which I’d respond:
Excuse me — I thought this was America.
Informed that I was writing about voter disenfranchisement, a Democratic friend admitted, “I’m trying not to care about that.” I understand. Less than two weeks after a bruising election in a nation in which it’s unfashionable to overtly care about anything, it’s annoying of me even to notice.
But citizens who insist, election after election, that each vote is sacred and then shrug at hundreds of credible reports that honest-to-God votes were suppressed and discouraged aren’t just being hypocritical.
They’re telling the millions who never vote because “it doesn’t matter anyway” that they’re the smart ones.
Come on. If Republicans had lost the election, this column would be unnecessary because Karl Rove and company would be contesting every vote. I keep hearing from those who wonder whether Democrats are “too nice,” and from others who wonder whether efforts by the mainstream media to be “fair and balanced” sometimes render them “neutered and less effective.”
Perhaps. But the much-publicized voting-machine error that gave Bush 4,258 votes in an Ohio precinct where only 638 people cast ballots preceded a flood of disturbing reports, ranging from the Florida voting machine that counted backward to the North Carolina computer that eliminated votes. In Ohio’s Warren County, election officials citing “homeland security” concerns locked the doors to the county building where votes were being counted, refusing to allow members of the media and bipartisan observers to watch…
Why aren’t more Americans exercised about this issue? Maybe the problem is who’s being disenfranchised — usually poor and minority voters. In a recent poll of black and white adults by Harvard University professor Michael Dawson, 37 percent of white respondents said that widely publicized reports of attempts to prevent blacks from voting in the 2000 election were a Democratic “fabrication.” More disturbingly, nearly one-quarter of whites surveyed said that if such attempts were made, they either were “not a problem” (9 percent) or “not so big a problem” (13 percent).