The first presidential election I voted in was 1959, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. I had watched the debates on television, in black and white. Does that make me old, you bet it does? I considered my vote very carefully, in my father's house there was no question who to vote for, Kennedy of course. All my friends were certainly for Kennedy. But the more pressure they all put on me, the more I resisted. When I stepped inside the voting booth, I hesitated, then I pulled down the lever of my choice.
Back then, in Chicago, voting was done by mechanical means. You stepped inside a box-like booth, and pushed a large lever, the lever closed the curtain behind you and you faced a board with many small levers. There was a lever for a straight party ticket on the left side, and a row of levers running from left to right for each of the candidates on the ballot. There were several rows of these levers, one for each party which had qualified candidates. The Democratic and Republican rows were the longest, but there candidates in the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the Libertarian Party, all of whom were eligible to be on the ballot in Illinois.
To register your vote, you pushed down on the lever next to your favorite candidate's name, when you had pushed all the levers for your selections, you pulled the large lever towards you and your votes were tabulated, the levers all popped up and the curtain was drawn back. A seemingly foolproof method of counting votes. When the voting was over for the day, two people plus two election judges, Republican and Democrat, opened the back of the machine and wrote down the totals that were mechanically recorded. Simple right?
But never was there a machine that could not be finagled with, and these machines were ripe for tampering with. At the beginning of the day, the same four officials who recorded the totals at the end of the day, certified that the machine totals were all set to zero before voting began. But mechanics break down, remember the cars of the 1950s? Levers jam, they refuse to stay down or refuse to pop up, curtains refuse to open or close, any number of things could go wrong.
And then there was the tabulation of all the precincts at City Hall. Joseph Stalin famously said; "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes" Chicago's mayor at that time was Richard J. Daley, and nobody could count votes like he could. Most cities wanted to be first to announce their tally for the candidate of choice, not Mr. Daley, he always held back the vote count until the bitter end. It was said he waited to see how many votes were needed to seal the victory and that is how many votes Chicago announced. It was also said that it was the case in November 1959, when Chicago put John Kennedy, an Irish Catholic, into the White House.
That was not the worst decision, not when you consider Bush v Gore. After Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ put through the greatest piece of civil rights legislation that ever was - Kennedy was too reticent to propose it - Johnson did escalate the Viet Nam war and by the end of his first term 14,000 Americans were killed in Nam. The war eventually broke Johnson and he refused to run again.
There have been some shaky elections in the interim. I mentioned the 2000 debacle where the Supreme Court selected the president against the wishes of the electorate. But never have I seen an election like this one. In just under three weeks those people who haven't already voted with an absentee ballot or voted early, will go to their polling place and cast a ballot in the most contested election in my lifetime. And I will be there, as I work the polls.
I have seen elections where there have been mud-slinging, - on both side. Accusations of everything from infidelity to perversion, maleficence to out and out bribery, but never have I seen such a concerted effort to manipulate the election to the advantage of only one party. I make no secret that Donald Trump was not my choice for president. But when I write these reflections, I try to do it in an unperturbed manner, no unproven allegations, no rants or name calling. But the time has come to stop the equivocating. I can no longer say that both sides are equally guilty of electioneering.
The Republican Party has pulled out all the stops to win this election, and it is not just the usual gerrymandering and name calling:
* The president has overtly called for physical altercations at polling places.
* He has said he will not concede the election under any circumstances, calling upon groups to take up arms in his defense.
* The president has called upon his Justice Department to indict his opponent on false charges of treason.
* He has repeated lie after lie against his opponent, statements that he knows are not true.
* He has called for no deals on the stimulus funds the country desperately needs to avoid slipping further into a financial quagmire, promising voters a much larger stimulus after he is elected.
* He is forcing a vote on his judicial nominee to be seated on the Supreme Court before the election, in hopes that when he forces the election results into court, she will rule his way.
And the Republican Party is complicit in this charade, it appears they will do anything to assure that they stay in power. Beginning over twenty years ago the Republicans began ceasing power at the state level, and now it is paying off. They have effectively gerrymandered voting districts and once in power have enacted stringent voter laws which are aimed at people of color and those with limited means. Now they are tampering with the census to under-count those same people. In addition:
* The Republican governor of Texas has limited the number of Ballot Boxes for absentee ballots, to one per county, even though some of those counties are over one hundred square miles.
* The Republican legislatures have refused extending the date that a ballot can be considered valid past the election date, even though mail service has been deliberately slowed.
* The GOP in California have placed 'so called' official Ballot Boxes in many areas to collect absentee ballots. To what end?
* The Republican legislatures have refused in some states to allow the absentee ballots to even be opened before the start of voting on election day, meaning elections workers will be working well into the night.
All of this after the Supreme Court has said there is no longer a need for the Voters Rights Act to protect everyone's right to vote.
Donald Trump said he was running to 'drain the swamp', what he didn't say was that he was replacing it with a cesspool. VOTE, like your country depends on it, because it does!
I'm just sayin'
