It's all about the vote. Count all the votes. Every vote counts. My Vote is my Voice. Yet, until this year, it never occurred to me how many legally registered voters remain silent in this country. No, I'm not talking about those who choose to stay home and intentionally snub the system. I am talking about all the votes that have never been counted because there was no controversy.
Watching the events of our (Washington State) governor's race, I have been awakened to a glaring injustice that must occur in a vacuum every election cycle. While the media and the political parties remain focused on the "point spread", almost nothing is said about the 1000 plus votes each candidate gained between election night and the mandatory machine recount. Keeping in mind that, with a wider point spread on election night, there would have been no recount and those 2000 plus voters would not have been counted at all. With only 25 of the state's counties reporting results for the ongoing hand recount, each candidate has already picked up another 150 plus votes. The largest counties have not even reported in and yet, in the largest county (King) we already know that there were 561 votes not counted in the first two counts because of an administrative error. This means we are now looking at, at least, 2800 voters who would have had their vote stripped away if there had been no recount triggered by some arbitrary point spread. I have been told that there were over 3000 "undervotes" in Snohomish County (ballots that recorded no vote for governor during the machine counts). Surely some number of these ballots will produce results during the hand recount. It is conceivable to me that, at the end of this process, some 5000 registered voting citizens may have had their voices silenced on election day.
Now none of this may have much effect on the eventual outcome. As a matter of fact, the point spread is growing again in favor of the initial "winner". But the question must be asked, how many votes have been left on the auditor's floor in every election where there was no controversy? Some may ask if it really matters if there is a clear winner. I mean, after all, that is the point of the excerise isn't it? Maybe if we can concentrate more on the process and less on point spread, we might be able to convince people that their voice matters.
Mike's Blog Round Up
43 minutes ago
1 comments:
I'd like to add that as I have been listening to Air America on AM 1090, myriad reports are coming out of Ohio of voter fraud. For instance, Kenyon College, known for its rampant liberalism, had but a single voting machine for its campus, and students had to wait in line up to 11 hours to cast votes. Meanwhile, at Nazarene University - roughly 4 miles away - had no lines, no wait for its student voters. Other precincts in Democrat counties had similar experiences, and while the Secretary of State's office claims that there were no more available electronic voting machines, it actually turned out that there were 81 more machines locked away that were deliberately not issued to underequipped poor and minority voters. And there's more, much, much more. What has happened in Ohio is an absolute travesty, a mockery of justice, a rape of democracy. Yet our government has the nerve to demand a re-vote in the Ukraine. Folks, we need to build our own re-vote army. We need to gather ourselves, our bodies, our anger, and our humiliation - we need to make our way to Washington D.C. and have the biggest goddamn sit-down strike the world has ever seen.
Post a Comment