Will America's Democracy survive the Bush/Republican ballot-box Power Play

With the last presidential debate and candidate John McCain making, in my view, a hyperbolic and irresponsible statement about ACORN "destroying the fabric of our democracy", the McCain campaign has jumped desperately into the gutter with its only remaining campaign strategy: scare the voters into staying at home on election day. In fact, McCain had been the keynote speaker at an ACORN rally in 2006. McCain = erratic, pretty sad.

Barack Obama is right in calling this election historic but not only is it historic because the country faces an economic crisis and a recession, and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This election is an historic test of the voting process in the United States. The previous two presidential elections were tainted and many would say illegitimate. In the election of 2000, George Bush lost the popular vote. It was only the electoral college, the state of Florida and a friendly Supreme Court which saved Bush from defeat.

In fact, Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris (and, wouldn't you know, she was Bush's campaign chair for Florida) had, before the election in 2000, begun a massive purge of Florida's voter registry, a purge that was aimed at African Americans, the poor and certain Democratic leaning counties in Florida. The purge was done recklessly, hastily and probably illegally. Then also there appeared a new and strange kind of ballot - the butterfly ballot, surely designed to be confusing and to cause errors by the voters. There were the problems with chads, machines jamming up, long lines and polling places moved and/or inaccessible. It took the Supreme Court to determine the winner of the election of 2000 and the Supreme Court elected Bush in a 5 to 4 vote.

The 2004 election for president was similarly tainted, the only big difference being the site of the theft and shenanigans, i.e. the state of Ohio. Similar to the 2000 election in Florida, the Ohio Secretary of State (overseer of elections) just happened to be a strong supporter of George Bush and, as chance would have it, the chair of the Bush campaign in Ohio (no conflict of interest there!!!). Once again the race for president, between Bush and Kerry, was extremely close, the deciding electoral votes coming down to the state of Ohio. Polls and exit polls had shown Kerry leading in both Florida and Ohio. But in Ohio (as in Florida previously) there were long lines at the polls, missing voting machines, malfunctioning voting machines and electronic voting machines that could be easily tampered with (by someone in the know). Most election officials had little idea how the new electronic machines operated and had to contact private (mostly Republican owned and operated) companies to fix any problem that might arise. The above is just a thumbnail sketch of the problems in Ohio and across the country in the 2004 election.

Here we are in 2008 and the McCain campaign is trying to suppress the vote and intimidate the voters by threatening ACORN. This is the new Republican campaign strategy, which has gone national and high-tech/digital: systematically suppress the vote; make it hard to vote; make it scary and confusing. This tactic is a very close cousin to the disenfranchisement of African American voters in the Jim Crow South. It took the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 to end this disenfranchisement.

Once again, the McCain campaign, the RNC and the Bush administration are going after their favorite target of late - ACORN. We will have to see if the Republican bullying and immoral tactics work and whether democracy can survive in the United STates.