The narcotizing effect of a juicy conspiracy theory

There's a good chance that, by now, you've read "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?," Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s piece in this week's Rolling Stone. If you haven't, you should--not because it contains much you hadn't heard at one time or another. If you've been paying much attention to any news source outside of the major networks and newspapers, a lot of it will be depressingly familiar to you (especially you p3 readers in Ohio--and you know who you are).

The effect of the article is two-fold: First, it's assembled all the facts that have come out in the last two-plus years, stacked up end to end to end, and it is an appallingly long list. Second, it is thoroughly documented--its 208 footnotes run almost as long as the article itself.

The pattern Kennedy identifies is clear, and the presentation is fairly cautious, given the charges he's investigating:

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. "We didn't have one election for president in 2004," says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. "We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities."

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004 - more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes. (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots. And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes - enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.

"It was terrible," says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. "People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct - it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened."

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen," Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. "You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb."

And it goes on, marching grimly through the data, from there.

We kicked this around at last week's DL meeting: What to make of this article? Some were of the opinion that this represented the first rays of disinfecting sunlight on the rot that is our current voting system; the corps of elite journalists at the big news outlets will begin to follow the story if only because it's slowly penetrating into their cocktail-circuit chatter. Others shook their heads glumly and said this just shows the Illuminati-style scale of Republican vote rigging and vote suppression across the country in the face of which there's little to be done, and efforts at election reform are pointless--as, indeed, may be the very act of voting itself.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that we can't dwell over Kennedy's article for very long: Its intonation of offense after offense, the drone of one scandal after another, soon makes it difficult to get up out of one's chair.

And get up out of our chairs we must. Here's Chris Bowers' narrative about demanding election reform, but the conclusion isn't easy going: An electoral process that's been corrupted and perverted down to the level of the local precinct is going to have to be won back, one precinct at a time, by people willing to participate.

Don't' look to Big Outside Powers to fix this problem--look to yourself. If you want election reform, then take control of your local voting infrastructure, the way so many grassroots Democrats have taken control of their local party infrastructure. If you are looking for someone else to solve the problem through editorials in the Washington Post and so called "moderate" Republicans in Congress, you have already lost. Don't look to someone else to solve the problem--look to yourself. Don't just thrill at your identity being validated by RFK Jr. in Rolling Stone--take control of your local electoral infrastructure.

Most of you aren't going to be running for local ward Democratic committee, or state Democratic committee--let alone both. Where then--as the Skirt pointed out to me in an email--does one even start?

The takeaway from Bowers' diary for the non-overachievers among us isn't getting involved at the ward level of your party, although it can't hurt. What I found most striking was simply that he put himself out there physically. He got out of the house.

Here are some things to put on your To Do List:

• Put your senators' and representative's phone numbers in your speed dialer, and then use it. Seriously. Let Gordon Smith know why God gave you all those "anytime minutes." If a piece of legislation is important enough to bitch about over beer to a couple of friends, it's important enough to call the people representing you.


• Get yourself out to rallies, marches, speakers, house parties, etc. Don't be put off by the carnival aspect of some of them--embrace it. Show up. Be counted.


• Volunteer. If there's a candidate or a measure you care about, one you already know will have your vote in November, give them a few hours of your time. Help put up yard signs. Stuff envelopes. Do something.


• Go see the Al Gore documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," and then--and this is the tricky part--find three people to talk to about it that aren't among the circle you normally discuss politics with.

I'm sure there are more ways to put yourself out there, and I welcome them in the comments. (Blogging--and even buying a round at the next DL meeting--don't count.)