Putin congratulates Russians, reveals New Year secret
Thanking all Russians for their "victories, achievements, understanding and trust" in 2016, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday wished "peace…
Don’t get your hopes up, you desperate souls desiring anyone but Donald Trump as US President. But Green Party candidate Jill Stein is forcing recounts in three narrowly won Trump states (Wisconsin (0.7 per cent), Michigan (0.3 per cent) and Pennsylvania (1.2 per cent) which, if all switched winners, would put the slightly less unpopular Hillary Clinton in the White House. Yes, it’s a long shot and this is clearly an election that ordinary Americans — 42 per cent too discouraged or disgusted to vote — can’t seem to win whichever way it goes. Still, a recount is good news for a nation bedeviled by a messy voting system that needs tight monitoring and conscientious reforms. The bad news is that Democratic Party apparatchiks are blaming the Russians and not the Republicans or, for that matter, themselves for Trump’s triumph.
Those same intelligence agencies who guaranteed that Iraq was awash in WMD and earlier failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union asserted, without proof but with hands on hearts, that the wily Russians, and Russians alone, electronically interfered with election tallies. This self-serving accusation was pounced on by Democratic Party stalwarts who, as WikiLeaks rudely revealed, did not mind in the least indulging in electoral high jinks that favoured Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. The oddball notion is that Vladimir Putin, font of all evil, was so scared of Hillary Clinton that he schemed to install in the Oval Office the useful idiot, Donald Trump, who at the moment happens to be considering as his Secretary of Defence a former Marine Corps General nicknamed “Mad Dog.”
Red Scare tactics, once relics, are all the rage again. Hillary Clinton’s camp is always eager to scoop up right-wing tropes to appeal to wavering Republicans, whom they treated as the only voters worth their time, which is a key reason why they lost in the first place. Yet Americans are culturally programmed to loath ‘sore losers’ so the incendiary accusations against Putin offer the perfect patriotic cover for Hillary to support the recount. Keep in mind that reputable critics since the 2000 election debacle (when the Supreme Court made George W. Bush the winner) have been pleading futilely for serious action against the Republicans’ wide array of vote suppression tactics as well as for remedies for untrustworthy electronic voting machines. If a contrived Russian threat is required to attract much needed scrutiny, then it may work out ironically in favour of the US electorate after all.
The studiously ignored alarms here are nagging discrepancies between exit polls — usually accurate to a single percentage point — and final results. Instead of treating these gaps as reason to investigate the reliability of the vote, authorities instead blame polling techniques and therefore treat vote tallies as sacrosanct. The tacit message to anyone tempted to rig the vote, electronically or otherwise, is that they will get away with it. Jonathan Simon, author of Code Red: Election Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century, finds that in every difference between exit polls and final vote this year the trend leaned toward Republicans, as earlier investigators note about every election since 2004. The difference this year was 4.9 per cent in Wisconsin and 5.6 per cent in Pennsylvania, with higher gaps in Ohio (8.5 per cent) and North Carolina (5.6 per cent).
The trouble is that the USA does not conduct a single national presidential election. As a director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University observed in 2004, when John Kerry lost to George W. Bush on the basis of a suspicious skewed vote in the decisive swing state of Ohio, ‘’We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.’’ Defenders of this vast ramshackle system say it is therefore too difficult to tamper with, while critics nonetheless compile worrying evidence that it is easy to play shady games within it. The eviscerating of the 1965 Voting Right Act by a conservative Supreme Court in 2014 also freed the States from reassuring forms of Federal oversight.
In 2004 in Cleveland, which votes overwhelmingly Democratic, a quarter of voters silently were deleted from registration rolls over the previous four years — enough to have swung Ohio and elected John Kerry President. Greg Palast in The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, records a menu of devious means by which several million minority, poor and elderly voters, who trend strongly Democratic, had their voting rights or ballots negated. The latest vote purging method is called Crosscheck, which Palast reckons purged 1.1. million Democrat-leaning voters from voting rolls in battleground States.
Finally, the liability of electronic voting machines to untraceable hacking, demonstrated many times by investigators, led California to discard paperless vote machines entirely. Yet 15 states run entirely on paperless voting systems, which cannot be verified, while these machines are liberally mixed into the voting systems of most other states. The software codes are legally considered the manufacturers’ private property, which is simply an insane arrangement for civic elections.
Does Trump, with his ferocious conservative cabinet appointments thus far, strike anyone as a chump who Russia figured would be kinder and gentler to it? The strongest objection to charges of electoral hanky-panky is a shrewd Republican official’s observation that for it to be true you would have to believe a Republican cabal is engaged in a brilliantly conducted conspiracy while all the Democrats are dumb as a bunch of rocks. Good point, but only meticulous recounts can answer urgent questions about interference and its sources. American elites are perfectly capable of undermining democracy without any help from anyone else.
The writers are authors of ‘No Clean Hands and Parables of Permanent War.
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