It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
At first it was just one story of a few people hired by the Republican Party ripping up the registration forms of new Democrats. Now, it's become much bigger than that.

As the entry below this one relates, George W. Bush's brother Jeb, who is still Governor of Florida, has been caught ordering the names of Florida citizens to be removed from the lists of eligible voters, even though he knew that many of the people on the list were in fact legally entitled to vote. The voters removed from the list were from a group that tends to vote for Democrats.

Now we're also hearing about people who were instructed to destroy Democratic voter registrations in Oregon, West Virginia and in Pennsylvannia. The company behind this illegal obstruction of Democrats' votes? Sproul and Associates, run by Nathan Sproul, former head of the Arizona Republican Party, former leader of the Christian Coalition in Arizona, and currently contracted to work for the Republican National Committee to perform "voter outreach".

The Republican hit squad of Sproul and Associates is also encountering charges of electoral fraud in Michigan, Missouri, Maine, and Ohio - all battleground states.

In South Dakota last week, six Republicans from South Dakota, including the state director of the Republican Victory Program, were forced to resign from their positions processing absentee ballots when serious questions arose about the integrity of the absentee ballot system in South Dakota. Now there are fears in South Dakota that the absentee ballot system may have been stuffed with fake votes for Republicans.

In Milwaukee, which is a majority Democrat city, Republican county officials have been caught blocking the creation of adequate numbers of ballots, so that hundreds of thousands of voters, most of them Democrats, will not be able to vote at all on Election Day, simply because there will be no ballots for them to use.

In 2000, we had to wait until Election Day to start learning of Republican electoral fraud. In 2004, the Republican efforts to attack the machinery of American democracy have been exposed weeks before Election Day - and yet it may be too late to make a difference.

America cannot afford to have another fraudulent presidential election. Our American elections are starting to look more like those run by Russian dictator Vladmir Putin. Bush says he's looked in Putin's eyes, and he liked what he saw. We're seeing the result of that affection for totalitarianism.

This year may be the last chance we have to save America's democractic traditions, and turnout is the key. The Republicans may be able to wipe out hundreds of thousands of Democrats' votes, but that just means that we need to turn out that many more Democrats to vote - while we still can.

Posted by J. Clifford Cook at 10:19 AM. # (permalink)  




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