Editor,
The “basket of deplorables” is gradually waking up to their newest American nightmare. Indeed, they did not install the new regime alone. The decisive loss of the popular vote by 3 million was hard to overcome, both psychologically and politically, which explains repeated attempts to invent the myth of 3 million illegal voters.
However, their substantial size was still extensive enough to allow the anti-democratic forces in the Republican Party to stage an electoral coup and turn the results to their favor. Russian assistance was not needed, although it did help. Nor was the FBI director James Comey’s illegitimate interference 10 days before the election necessary with his letter to Congress about a renewed investigation of Clinton e-mails, although this too did help.
The Electoral College lends itself to manipulations, especially as electronic voting machines are used to (dis)count and flip votes. Today the fabrication of the “alternative fact” of the 2016 “election” has become political reality. No one dares to question the official outcome.
Americans ought to be suspicious. That they are not is part of the problem and indicative of this Orwellian predicament. We have seen in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 how easily elections can be stolen. As Secretary of State Katherine Harris’ fabricated majority of 537 votes rapidly evaporated in the Florida recount, the Supreme Court ordered a halt to it. Up to 100,000 votes from Black districts were left uncounted.
In Ohio, the Republican IT expert Michel Donnell helped switch votes to a Republican majority four years later. When Donnell finally decided to confess to the fraud in December 2008, he conveniently (or rather, suspiciously) died in a plane crash the day before he was scheduled to speak to the court.
The whole world still suffers the catastrophic consequences of the deliberately reckless political incompetence of the Republican Party during the eight years of Bush’s reign of (t)error.
It is easy to start wars. It becomes increasingly impossible to stop them.
Today we see North Carolina’s Republican Party undo the will of the people through gerrymandered districts, purged voter roles and depleted voting sites. North Carolina’s stranglehold of democracy is emblematic for the whole country.
In Detroit, Michigan, one investigative report alone uncovered 75,000 uncounted Black and Latino votes. Moreover, at least 55,000 names were disappeared through false crosschecks of voter roles. The margin of victory in Michigan is 10,000.
Similar Jim Crow tactics were discovered in Wisconsin and used in other swing states where poor districts equipped with non- and malfunctioning machines could not register votes. Machine recounts would repeat their errors. Hand recounts were conveniently stopped or simply denied. Given the narrow margins of victory in many swing states, it is clear that the polls did not err with their unanimous prediction of a Clinton victory. The error lies in the public’s trust in a corrupted voting system.
Given the systemic fraud in the U.S. electoral system, Mitt Romney was understandably upset about his defeat in 2012. He had underestimated Obama’s massive lead, which was simply too big to overcome. The same is true with John McCain in 2008. The seven million votes that estimates say were undone through voter suppression were not enough to overcome Obama’s comfortable cushion of probably twice as many votes.
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Consequently, closer elections need the protection of regulatory safety measures. If Obama-haters could dare to question the president’s nationality in the face of his birth certificate, the American people must show principled defiance in their uncompromising demand for a hand-counted proof of the election results.
The lesson is simple. Only paper ballots and hand recounts can guarantee clean elections. Without either we must consider the “so-called” president, as Congressman John Lewis says, “illegitimate”.
Joachim Oberst
UNM faculty
