Reply #23: Did Bush Steal the White House Again? [View All]

January 14, 2005

Did Bush Steal the White House Again?

by Lance Selfa
www.dissidentvoice.org
First Published in Socialist Worker


But after a few minutes of speechmaking on the importance of electoral reform, the Congress went ahead and dismissed the complaints about Ohio, certifying Bush as the victor in that state, and therefore the next president.

...

As Salon’s Tim Grieve described the spectacle, “There was no sense of history being made, no sense that anything was really happening at all.” In the end, the Democrats’ performance in 2004 was only slightly improved over their dive in 2000.

...

If there was anything notable about the election and the dirty tricks involved in it, it was how similar Election 2004 was to every other election organized in the U.S. Alone among major industrial democracies, the U.S. leaves election administration in the hands of corrupt and partisan local officials -- and vote-counting to the private manufacturers of voting machines. And the Electoral College -- a relic of the pre-Civil War era --c hooses the most important office in the country, not a nationwide popular vote.

...

The dirty secret of American “democracy” is that neither major political party wants elections to be truly democratic and free. Instead, they want a system that predictably produces victories for their corporate money-soaked candidates.


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http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Selfa0114.htm