THE FIX

DEMOCRACY BETRAYED
By Jack Random

In the wake of the 2004 presidential election, the bold defenders of the Electoral College cannot suddenly fall back on the popular vote to assert the validity of the result.

The Electoral College is an affront to every individual, red-blue or gray, who believes in the principles of democracy but this election was fought in the battleground states because both sides agreed to play by the rules of the game.

On May 4, 1970, the counterculture of the late sixties was forced underground and the mass protest movement was effectively assassinated when four students at Kent State University in Ohio were gunned down by the National Guard. Ten days later, two more were gunned down at Jackson State in Mississippi. The administration of Richard Nixon (the man who so inspired Governor Schwarzenegger) had served notice: There is a price to pay for exercising your freedom of speech and that price may be your life. It was an act of terror and a betrayal of fundamental liberty so brazen it deserves no other title than treasonous.

Thirty-four years later, in the critical state of Ohio, the state that decided the presidential election, something stinks to high Heaven and the cry of treason is on the breath of every true believer, red-blue or gray.

Voting machines unaccountably cast thousands of votes for the president where no votes existed. In key counties, election monitors from the press were barred from observing the proceedings (allegedly the result of a government issued terror alert), while boxes of mail-in ballots went uncounted or simply disappeared. In precincts with registered voters in the hundreds, thousands of votes were recorded. In nearly all cases, the “error rate” decidedly favored the president. As any beginning student of statistics knows, “error” that consistently favors one result over another is not error at all: It is known as bias and, in the case of electoral politics, it is known as the fix.

CNN’s exit polls showed John Kerry winning Ohio by 53 to 47 percent among women and 51 to 49 percent among men. Unless there was an extraordinary turnout among the gender-neutral, something was rotten on Election Day.

Contrary to the cursory explanations given by the exit pollsters, random sampling is not guesswork. It is the foundation of the scientific method and its track record is rock solid. If the numbers were off by such an astounding margin, it cannot be rationalized by random error.

In the name of democracy, we must demand to see the raw data, the methodology and techniques for sampling. There can be no defense of shielding this information from objective review that is not corrupt to the core. It is in the compelling interest of every American to know beyond all doubt that our democracy is in working order. At the very least, we can be certain that a great many operatives were engaged in a conscious effort to defraud this election. We must demand an investigation that will uncover the offenders. We must demand that they be prosecuted and sentenced to the full extent of democracy’s righteous wrath.

John Kerry was wrong to concede the election before every vote was counted and every vote was accounted for. Once again, the Democratic Party was complicit in the betrayal of democracy. Once again, we must ask: What are you afraid of? Were the Democrats also guilty of conspiracy to defraud an election?

If the price of defending democracy is the appearance of a poor loser, the choice should be clear to any individual of conscience.

Once again, we may never actually know who won this election but we do know who lost: We, the people, lost. When the Parties are at play, the people lose every time and that is a result we can all mourn as one.

Jazz.