How to Steal an Election

"The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards...."

So it's old news: The 2000 presidential election was stolen, and so, by the way, was the 2004, though by different methods. Blah, blah, blah. Many on the left feel this is a foregone conclusion. Those on the right claim the Democrats are just whiners and sore losers.

But the Republicans won because -- guess what? -- they're in power. And, as some of their members like to say, "Might makes right" or "Power creates truth" or something like that.

We'll never know who really won these elections, like we'll never really know the truth about Jesus Christ or God/Allah/Yahweh or the Big Bang or what the smallest, most basic particle/energy-force/building-block/what-have-you of the universe is or even who killed John Kennedy. The truth is never absolute. Like a hyperbolic curve, it can get close to absolute but there's always that chance that -- oops! -- what happened is not really what we thought at all.

That's why speculation, re-examination, combing through data, all that time-consuming stuff that researchers, investigative journalists and historians like to do really is worthwhile, and why there's always a chance, no matter how great the odds, that what we thought once was true really isn't....

How to Steal an Election
By Andrew Gumbel, AlterNet
Posted on February 15, 2006

[Editor's Note: This is an edited excerpt from Steal This Vote by Andrew Gumbel, published by Nation Books.]

"If you do everything, you'll win." -- Lyndon Johnson

A few days before the November 2004 election, Jimmy Carter was asked what would happen if, instead of flying to Zambia or Venezuela or East Timor, his widely respected international election monitoring team was invited to turn its attention to the United States. His answer was stunningly blunt. Not only would the voting system be regarded as a failure, he said, but the shortcomings were so egregious the Carter Center would never agree to monitor an election there in the first place. "We wouldn't think of it," the former president told a radio interviewer. "The American political system wouldn't measure up to any sort of international standards, for several reasons."

For the whole article, go here.

LEIGH POMEROY