Election battle exposes fraudulent system
By Fred
Goldstein
The accidental deadlock between George W. Bush and Al Gore
has brought to the surface the ugly underside of capitalist
election politics. It should be a good beginning lesson to
the masses of people about how fraudulent the whole process
is.
To begin with, Bush lost the popular vote by 300,000 and
won the presidency.
Second, he won the vote in Florida, and perhaps elsewhere,
by a racist Republican conspiracy to exclude thousands and
thousands of votes by African Americans. This conspiracy also
affected Jewish voters and other poor and working-class
voters who lived in heavily Black districts in Florida.
Third, he won by the timely intervention of a one-vote
reactionary majority of a reactionary institution, the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Fourth, the saintly high court, which is supposed to be
above getting involved in partisan capitalist politics, was
rolling around in the political mud fighting a tooth-and-nail
partisan battle.
Fifth, the people just found out that state legislatures
have the power to override any popular vote by simply
choosing their own electors to the Electoral College.
What the struggle was really about
These are only some of the more glaring surface problems
that appeared. While various pundits were describing the
struggle as a battle over great legal principles or precepts
of democracy, the real character of the struggle was
described by Business Week in its Dec. 11 issue.
"Let's be honest here," wrote this mouthpiece of big
business. "The dispute over whether George W. Bush or Al Gore
won Florida, and thus the presidency, is not about great
Constitutional issues. It's not about federalism, or the
separation of powers between the courts and the legislatures,
or even a correct reading of the Florida Election code. At
this late state of the game, it's about just one thing: who
can best manipulate the levers of power to win...And once
again, wrapped up in this naked power struggle is the U.S.
Supreme Court.
"Gore is at a great disadvantage in this," continued
Business Week. "He has the support of some local election
officials and a few Florida judges. But Bush has hooks
everywhere. He has Florida Secretary of State Katherine
Harris, who certified his election two weeks ago and who just
happened to be his state campaign co-chairman. He has his
brother, the governor of Florida, to certify a slate of Bush
electors... He has both houses of the Florida legislature and
the U.S. House of Representatives...And, it seems, he has
five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, all of whom were
either appointed by his daddy or by Ronald Reagan, his
daddy's old boss."
So much for all the legal niceties. Justice Antonin Scalia
and his grouping stopped the recount ordered by the Florida
Supreme Court on the grounds of "irreparable harm" to Bush.
Losing the vote by counting is "irreparable harm" to be sure.
But then again elections do involve counting votes and
winners and losers.
Both sides of the court agonized over "equal protection
under the law" and "due process" without ever bringing up the
publicly known and thoroughly documented massive
disqualification of voters in African American precincts.
This has been a non-subject in the court proceedings, in the
campaigns of both Bush and Gore and in the mainstream
capitalist media.
Gore refused to challenge disenfranchisement
The Gore forces rallied under the slogans "count every
vote" and "every vote should count." But they steadfastly
refused to challenge the disenfranchisement of voters in
majority Black districts, whose ballots were rejected at a
rate of one in five, compared to voters in majority white
districts whose ballots were rejected at a rate of one in 14.
This is prima facie evidence of discrimination on a massive
scale.
To the Gore forces, as part of the ruling-class
establishment, the prospect of opening up a struggle against
racism was worse than the prospect of losing the
election.
It is pure hypocrisy for the Bush forces to talk about
"equal protection under the law" when this racist governor of
Texas has sent people to death whose lawyers slept through
their trials; who executed Shaka Sankofa (Gary Graham), whose
innocence was virtually proven on television and in the print
media; and whose brother outlawed affirmative action in
Florida.
Nor did Clinton and Gore care much for the "due process"
or "equal protection under the law" of millions of women and
children, the majority African American and Latina, who were
driven off welfare while hundreds of billions of dollars were
doled out in corporate welfare to the rich. And the hundreds
of thousands of African American youths rounded up under
Clinton and Gore's so-called "war on drugs" got racial
profiling instead of "due process."
Capitalist institutions
This entire process should show that the elections and the
law are both capitalist institutions that can be manipulated
at will by the big-business candidates. They are both
saturated with lies and hypocrisy meant to deceive the
masses.
To be sure, reactionary Bush stole the election. But he
stole the election from slightly less reactionary Gore, who
is also an enemy of the workers and oppressed. He stole the
vote by the massive disqualification of mainly African
American voters in Florida. And there is justifiable rage and
discontent over this racist disenfranchisement, not just in
Florida but all across the country; and not just in the Black
community but in the entire progressive and revolutionary
movement. There can be absolutely no tolerance for racist
discrimination at the polls.
But it must also be clear that Bush and Gore were fighting
over votes that each could use for the purpose of becoming
the oppressor of the people for four years. Both have a
proven track record on that score and both belong to parties
under the domination of big business which have been
enforcing exploitation, racism and war for well over a
century.
In the coming period, the only road to progress will be to
open up a militant mass struggle against the Bush
administration, while retaining complete independence and
following a program that is irreconcilably opposed to the
Democratic Party leadership. This leadership has dramatically
shown its fundamental subservience to the racist ruling
class, not only in the last eight years, but also in the past
weeks of this post-election struggle.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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