But I think the reactions to these charges, as to those surrounding Florida in 2000, limns a difference between liberal and conservative thinking. Conservatives believe that if you Follow the Rules, You’re Right—so if a secretary of state hath the legal power to manipulate voting machine distribution in an area, if an obviously bad ballot has been approved via the established process therefor, then what’s your problem? There is merit in this, in that if rules can always be bent in the service of an abstract ideal like “fairness” or “justice” or “democracy” or “common human decency”, you end up with capricious government by men and women using these ideals for their own power (just like the “Chrisitian” Theocrats would give us—”The Bible Rules” translates into “Men Who Interpret the Bible Rule”).

We liberals, on the other hand, tend to pay more attention to whether the rules themselves are fair etc.., and judge the rules themselves by the outcomes they produce (people not starving because they’re bad at making money, results of the election matching a supposedly accurate exit poll). This has a great deal of merit in my opinion, as we, being secularists (and in cases like mine, atheists) do not believe, as some conservatives seem to (see de Maistre), that The Rules were set up or endorsed by some god or a god-like Tradition—they are social technology with a particular aim (an economic game that doesn’t shoot the losers, an election that reflects the preferences of the voters, who in turn represent a fair sampling of the population) and limitations. It suffers from the defect described above: meeting the Ideal can become rule by the (real or faked) idealists.

There will always be tension between these two poles, or rather I hope there will be, because neither side is right all the time or completely right at any time: if exceptions to the standard way of doing things are allowed at will, the rules become a tool of oppression by the ones making the exceptions; if the rules are rigidly held with never an exception allowed regardless of outcome, they become the instruments of oppression by those whom they favour by their nature. (Don’t say you’ll find rules that favour no-one—no technology is perfect.)

(I further think that people who are absolutely convinced that the election was stolen are suffering from a misplaced faith in and assessment of their fellow citizens. The former want to believe that their countrymen couldn’t possibly be [in the aggregate] stupid/evil/venal/misinformed/{other snarl-word} enough to vote in That Clown. Well, what do you expect who know about reality mostly from churches, mediocratic schools, the maedia, and [now] blogs?)

(This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t fraud and manipulation of the rules.)

What we aren’t getting to in this discussion is how winner take all elections magnify hair’s breadth margins into mandates. That the Republican’s can nudge 49.9% to 50.1% doesn’t surprise me.

As I have written here before in a democracy the rich, not the majority, will do what it takes to make a majority vote for those who will do their bidding. In the US that means an odd coalition of Christian fundamentalists and small govt. Republicans held together by fear mongering + lots of sececy and spin.

But we loose so much diversity of opinion on the way to our 2 party he said she said state. And the Bushies (really Rove/Cheney dontcha think) have taken full advantage of this.

As Kennedy points out in his article, exit polls can be used to detect just the sort of funny business that went on in Ohio. Instead, the exit polls in 2004 were mysteriously corrupted with “real time” voter returns, which completely ruins the point of the exit polling. Whoever gave the order to corrupt the 2004 exit polling data should be forced to explain themselves.

Excellent show, Chris and the ROS crew; rock on! Please keep giving this story air; it is one of the few places in the media where our moribund Democracy might breathe, if only shallowly.

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winston_dodson Says:

June 21st, 2006 at 5:26 am

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I acknowledge viewing your post.

t’s very sad indeed that so many of us have this gnawing sense that our collective will has been thwarted in 2000 and 2004. The silence has been deafening on this issue in the main stream media. Why?

All the while a steady bunch of folks have been keeping a vigil, collecting data, watching, reporting, writing articles. Some were on last night.

Did you hear how delighted Rep. John Conyers was to be talking about this?

This issue has been starved for air- which is a story in itself. If the RFK/Rolling Stone article did nothing more ( and it did a lot) simply bringing the subject up again, now especially, would have been enough. But the article itself, and now the discussion, leaves me boiling.

Thank you ROS and I hope you keep on this. Did I understand you are doing a show about the voting machinery?