| Published Monday, November 29, 2004 by CommonDreams.org |
| How To Take Back A Stolen Election |
| by Thom Hartmann |
...Ironically, the Democratic Party knows how to highlight election fraud and start national movements to bring down administrations that try to steal elections. A Party-affiliated group has helped do it four times in the past four years. But not in Ohio, Florida, or anywhere else in the USA.
Instead, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Madeleine K. Albright, Chairman) has joined up with a similar organization affiliated with the Republican Party (the International Republican Institute - John McCain, Chairman), other NGOs, and US government agencies to support the use of exit polls and statistical analyses to challenge national elections in Ukraine, Serbia, Belarus, and the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
In three of those four nations they succeeded in not only mounting a national challenge, but in reversing the outcomes of elections.
The election reversals were accomplished by funding local groups - most made up of a core of activists and college students - who worked to topple regimes that had rigged their own re-elections.
As Ian Traynor - one of the finest investigative reporters working in the world today - notes in a 26 November 2004 article in The Guardian titled "US Campaign Behind the Turmoil in Kiev," "the campaign is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years, has been used to try to salvage rigged elections and topple unsavory regimes."
The campaign to unseat corrupt regimes is funded by groups affiliated with both the Democratic and Republican parties, Traynor notes, as well as the US State Department, the US Agency for International Development, and non-governmental organizations including George Soros's Open Society Institute and the late Eleanor Roosevelt's organization Freedom House (a group whose board of directors is now chaired by the notorious former CIA director R. James Woolsey).
Woolsey's participation aside, Traynor's report implies that this coalition of political, governmental, and philanthropic groups is more interested in promoting the will of the local people than in propping up regimes friendly to the US. One of the four candidates they've supported in the past four years was even openly anti-US (Kostunica in Serbia). The common denominator among the nations targeted is that in all four there was widespread evidence the regimes in power were planning to steal the elections.
One of the keys to making the program work is tight organization and planning before the election begins. The resistance movement is carefully branded with a single-phrase slogan such as "He's Finished" or "High Time," and an uncomplicated logo is designed - like the fist used in Serbia or the ticking clock used in Ukraine - that's easily reproduced on posters and stencil-spray-painted in public places.
On Election Day, Traynor reports, the apparatus springs into action. Their main tool is a nationwide set of exit polls along with election observers supplied by credible organizations like the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE - which monitored the 2004 US elections and raised questions about non-transparent electronic voting machines). The exit poll results are released to the public before the official results, putting the regime in power in the difficult position of being reactive rather than proactive in declaring victory.
Because in each of these nations the media - radio, TV, and newspapers - are either controlled by, beholden to, or owned by supporters of the regime in power, the disparity between the exit polls and the official election result is trumpeted through non-traditional media like the internet, local activist groups, and mass rallies, until a critical mass is achieved, forcing the mainstream (regime-friendly) media to cover the story.
At the same time, nations who claim the ideal of free, fair, and transparent elections are encouraged to speak out, further inflaming the issue. This is no accident, of course - Traynor reports that the US government itself invested over $44 million in challenging the results of the Serbian election, and is estimated to have put $14 million into supporting groups challenging the recent Ukrainian election.
Thus, we have the irony of US Secretary of State Colin Powell saying of the Ukrainian election: "We have been following developments very closely and are deeply disturbed by the extensive and credible reports of fraud in the election. ... We call for a full review of the conduct of the election and the tallying of election results."
In many ways, such campaigns are exactly what Republicans did in 2000, when they organized an airlift of aides from Tom DeLay's office in Washington DC to riot in the Florida offices where votes were being recounted. That Ukraine-like guerilla theater led to national media coverage and the intervention of the US Supreme Court. The theater of protest - most Americans thought the angry people banging on the vote-counting windows were Floridians and didn't realize most had been flown in from Washington DC - became its own story and helped forge public pressure to shut down the Gore campaign's attempt to determine the real Florida count. It was also so effective at grabbing the headlines that it eclipsed the Greg Palast's scoop showing criminal and widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in Florida.
Here we are again, in 2004, with another dubious election.
And, although evidence of fraud and vote rigging in the 2004 US election is mounting today, there was no widespread mobilization like the ones we encouraged in other nations or saw in Florida in 2000. Thus, it's extremely unlikely national institutions like the mainstream media, Congress, or the Supreme Court will seriously challenge or even expose to the general public the many deficiencies of this election.
Because the Democratic party and progressive activists failed to plan a PR response to election-rigging in Florida and Ohio (among other states), such efforts (and some damning and shocking new revelations) are now being carried in "new media" like the internet by folks like Bev Harris, Greg Palast, and Bob Fitrakis, and in foreign media like New Zealand's "The Scoop", and the BBC.
Many Democrats and progressives believe now is the time for national advocacy groups to organize an effort similar to the one our nation has been promulgating in the former Soviet states and the Republicans used in Florida in 2000. The blueprint is laid out in Ian Traynor's article in The Guardian at www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html, and the template is both simple, straightforward, and already demonstrated to work....
