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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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THE ORDER OF THE PURPLE FINGER Following the Iraqi election on January 30 th we saw photos of jubilant voters from that brand-new republic holding up a finger whose tip was dyed purple. The purple finger indicated that the bearer had voted. (It also prevented him or her from voting more than once.) Reflecting on this leap forward for freedom, I found it remarkable that a country only recently delivered from the grip of tyranny could so quickly grasp the importance of keeping fraud from soiling that freedom. An ancient country, whose people had rarely voted in their long history – dating from Mesopotamia and the very Cradle of Civilization – already understood that elections needed to be untainted. The purple finger was a small but important part of that assurance. For most of the six months preceding this historic (one might almost say “hysteric”) election, the American public – nay, the entire world – heard most loathsome mockery of it from the grand poobahs of liberalism. All uniformly scoffed at the ‘preposterous notion’ that Iraqis could actually conduct a meaningful election on January 30, 2005. A ‘waste and a frenzy’ was the collective judgment of everyone from Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry down to hip New Yorkers sipping espresso (with a lime twist) in Greenwich Village. First of all, said the Wise Ones, the election is a worthless charade because Iraqis actually prefer authoritarian government. Evoking Saddam Hussein as a kindly, FDR-like figure firmly guiding his good, but ignorant people through the vicissitudes of 21 st century life, critics contrasted the “peace and stability” of Saddam’s reign to the chaos and violence in the land since his capture. Airily ignored were Saddam’s brutal executions and mutilations, the hundreds of thousands of bodies found in mass graves, and the palpable climate of fear generated by Saddam’s murderous sons, Uday and Qusay, during their depraved reign of terror. Saddam’s “peace” was the peace of the grave. The experts also assured us that the “middle-eastern mind” was intellectually unsuited for republican democracy. Followers of Islam, they said, could not tolerate ideas outside their own frame of reference. They would react violently to differing points of view instead of seeking compromise and accommodation within orderly government. Legislators would most assuredly come armed to the legislature. Bullets, not rhetoric, would fly in the halls of governance. People fashioned by a thousand generations of tents, camels, desert, and violence could not possibly govern themselves. Why, the very idea was absurd. (Klan Wizards, call your offices!) Finally, various famous personages said the political and military climate in Iraq was simply ‘too violent and unstable’ for an election to be held. Even that international election gadfly, former President Jimmy Carter, took a powder on the Iraqi elections. His Carter Centre, which has monitored elections around the world for a decade or more, refused to participate in Iraq, saying the Iraqi election met none of their four criteria for legitimacy: i.e.,
Mr. Carter reportedly sat out the election in a neighboring country, listening for the explosions that would signal the end of the futile Iraqi experiment in democracy. (Call me cynical, but I think he’d have been in the Amen Corner, had all this happened under a Democratic president.) Despite this chorus of nay-saying, the scheduled election proceeded as planned, drawing out some 60% of all registered voters (and dyeing 6% of all eligible fingers purple). It was a most courageous and convincing demonstration of the lure of freedom. Although terrorists did attempt to disrupt voting by targeting polling places with suicide bombers – killing some 30 people – the election was successful in every important respect. A thundering silence has been the liberal response to this audacious disobedience of liberal pronumciamentos. “Sputtering with rage” aptly describes these pessimistic toadies whose election predictions were shown, for the second time in three months, to be completely wrong. All this brought me back to our own, far more experienced republic whose people have been electing their governments for more than two centuries. In recent years, however, our elections have somehow degenerated into protracted post-election brawls – reminiscent of an Arab street riot (with apologies to honest practitioners thereof) – in which leaders from the losing party typically charge that the election was most likely fraudulent. Often they charge the opposing party with having prevented the losing party’s voters from getting to the polls or filling out their ballots correctly. The latter charges typically emanate from counties and/or precincts whose election machinery is actually controlled by the losing party. Following our 2004 presidential election, the losing Democratic candidate, John Kerry, has made something of a fool of himself by publicly repeating charges that minority voters in certain counties of Ohio actually waited on line as much as ten hours at their polling places. The counties cited were heavily Democratic, and all of their voting apparatus and organization were controlled by Democrats. So if there actually was a snafu that made voters wait that long, it must have been the fault of Democratic officials. But whatever the case on that score, no voter was actually found who waited that long – only individuals who said they “had heard” of such experiences. The sensational charges turned out to be baseless. Mr. Kerry had been snookered. More serious election irregularities have occurred elsewhere, however. In Washington state, a disputed result emerged from a close governor’s race between Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi. Initially, Mr. Rossi led by 261 votes, of 2.9 million cast. This result was close enough to trigger an automatic recount which reduced his advantage to only 42 votes. Citing the narrowness of the margin, Miss Gregoire refused to concede. The state Democratic Party then put up a $730,000 deposit to pay for a statewide hand recount, which put her into the lead for the first time, by ten votes. Republicans protested that the hand recount was known to be less accurate than the previous machine-recount, but the results were allowed to stand. In the midst of the hand recount, election officials in King County announced “discovery” of 735 absentee ballots, of which 566 were ruled “valid”, These increased Miss Gregoire’s lead by a net of 120 votes. Republicans sued to exclude them, saying they should not be included since they were not in the original count and their late emergence was “suspicious”. But the Washington Supreme Court ruled, 7-0, that they should be added. Subsequent investigations have revealed that King County counted 3748 more ballots than the number of registered voters on its rolls. Although Miss Gregoire was sworn in as the state’s new governor, in January, Mr. Rossi continues to contest the election in the courts. His desired remedy of a revote is unlikely to be granted, but the court might conceivably invalidate the hand recount. If this occurs, experts say, Miss Gregoire would be removed from office and replaced by Lieutenant Governor Brad Owen (also a Democrat). Mr. Owen would remain in office until a special election is held in 2006. Why Mr. Rossi would not replace Miss Gregoire, in such eventuality, is not clear to this writer. Perhaps some provision in the Washington State Constitution requires political decisions to be as convoluted as possible. All of this, it is worth recalling, is happening not in the brand-new democratic republic of Iraq, but in the good old US of A. Should we really be showing new republics how to hold elections? Maybe we should import some purple dye from Iraq for our next elections. It’s worth a try.
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