International Monitoring of American Elections

Should there be an international committee to monitor American elections? What an insult! How humiliating. Come on, that’s only for countries whose governments invade other countries, hold suspects without trial and then torture them. That’s only for those primitive oligarchies where one third of the wealth is owned by one percent of the population. Oh wait…

Several months ago, Susan Sarandon got a rise out of the Black Helicopter crowd when she suggested that our 2006 election needs to be monitored, “just like Haiti and Iraq.”

During the summer of 2004 thirteen members of the House of Representatives signed a letter to the UN requesting that they monitor the upcoming presidential election. The press secretary for one of the House members said “We bill ourselves as the greatest democracy, so therefore we should have applied to our own situation what we send out and promote and claim that we are to the rest of the world. There clearly was a demonstrated, systematic effort to ensure that the votes of certain people were not counted in the last election.” Later that summer, the U.S. State Department invited an Austrian human rights group to monitor the election. The Neocons went berserk. A rightwing think tank called the idea “frightening” and “an absolute threat” to America’s independence and sovereignty.

The bottom line is: Don’t let your vote get stolen. If your voting precinct doesn’t provide a verifiable way of tracking your vote, please vote Absentee.

Senator Barbara Boxer introduced the Confidence in Voting Act shortly before Congress adjourned this year. This bill would request (but not mandate) that all voting precincts make paper ballots available. The federal government would reimburse local jurisdictions for the cost of providing paper ballots.

I haven’t been able to find out what happened to the bill. I got an e-mail saying the bill was voted down on party lines, but I deleted it. I read somewhere else that the bill is still stuck in committee somewhere, which won’t help anybody this November.

This is NOT a partisan issue, and the Democrats haven’t exactly been knights in shining armor. Why the F#$&!#! did they wait until the last minute to introduce this bill?? For almost two years there have been rumors and accusations about Diebold stealing the 2004 election. Twenty-three months later the Democrats introduce a bill to correct this problem? Glad they’re on top of things.

Here and here are two excellent sources of information on voting scandals and how you can protect yourself against being disenfranchised.

cross-posted at Bring It On!