Six years ago when the US presidential election hung on chad, Mary and I were at a business meeting in Berlin. The morning after election day, the doorman at the hotel asked us – obvious Americans – what was happening in America. We didn’t know, of course.
Tonight we’re in Barcelona having voted ourselves over a week ago. We’ll start watching the coverage here at sometime after 1AM local time. What I hope for the most is an election that’s fair and that’s perceived as fair. That’s more important than who wins each of the many races happening tonight, more important even than which party controls Congress.
For the last thirty years I’ve voted mostly (but certainly not exclusively) for people who are Republicans. I did vote twice for each George Bush. I’ve been appalled at what seems like gross incompetence in this administration. I think that congressional Republicans have proven themselves ever bit as enamored and corrupted by power as the Democrats who were routed in Clinton’s first mid-term election. They don’t deserve a renewal of their lease on power. The best that we had was Newt Gingrich and he let power go to his head.
On the other hand, there’s nothing I’ve seen from either Al Gore or John Kerry since which makes me wish either were our President. Democrats have not presented a strategy to combat terror let alone the real enemy, Islamic fascism. Neither party has gone beyond posturing on either environmental issues or freeing us from our dangerous dependence on oil. The two issues overlap but they’re not the same.
Many incumbents are going to win because they’re bribing us with our own money in the form of earmarked appropriations for the folks at home. That’s appalling. This election, I’m afraid, will continue to reward that behavior. Exposing earmarks for the Ponzi scheme that they are may be a future very important role for citizen journalism.
In this election, I hope citizen journalism will help shine a bright light on any abuses of process. There will certainly be horror stories about voting machine malfunctions. They have to be fixed; votes have to be counted fairly; but we also have to remember that people and vote counters alike made plenty of mistakes with the old machines and the old paper ballots. We’ve probably made this election more vulnerable to malfunction with a rush to technology designed to avoid another chad fiasco.
The website African American (Black) Opinion includes Fractal of Change on a list titled “Visit any of these progressive bloggers and websites to see what they are doing to make sure Bush fails in his efforts to steal the election.” Teddy Roosevelt might think of me as a Progressive but I doubt that I am in the sense they mean. I don’t think George Bush is trying to “steal” the election. They are absolutely right that I’ll do anything I can to stop anyone from stealing any of the many elections we’re having across the country today.
I hope to see the good news that most elections were perceived as fair. If not, I’ll do my best to help fix whatever went wrong.
But it’s strange to be watching from afar. Good luck to us