Like most members of the media, we here at Jossip firmly believe Barack Obama is going to win the Democratic primaries, and then usher in an era of change, unicorns, and free beer and candy for all Americans.
Shockingly, some people do not share this belief. One of them is Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at NYU, and author of The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, and Fooled Again to The Real Case for Electoral Reform. He is also the editor of an upcoming anthology on election fraud, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy 2000-2008, which comes out next week, conveniently.
Since we haven’t written books on election fraud, and he has, we dispatched intern Anastasia to get the scoop on his zany ideas. The professor also shared his thoughts on the media's coverage of the election and why even Heidi Montag can't get him to vote for John McCain.
Full disclosure: Miller's also Anastasia's professor at some flea bag school called New York University. She'd like point out that she does not necessarily agree with his assertions and doesn't want the Republican party to kill her in her sleep.
Anastasia Friscia: You've said in class that the Republicans would rather run against Hillary than Obama. What makes Hillary a more attractive opponent?
Mark Crispin Miller: She has very high negatives, in part because of the Republicans' long propaganda drive against her (and, of course, against Bill Clinton, too). While Obama would appear to be a unifying figure, Hillary Clinton tends to polarize.
In any case, a contest between Clinton and McCain would suit the propaganda purposes of the Republicans, who would cast him as Rambo and her as "Hanoi Jane."
Throughout the GOP's campaign against the Clintons, there was, predictably, a lot of stuff about the Sixties: Bill's opposition to the war in Vietnam, Hillary's early work, as a lawyer, on the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and so on. So it would be a natural propaganda move to contrast McCain's months in a North Vietnamese prison camp with Hillary's (alleged) ties to the student left.
AF: You've also mentioned election fraud. What are the exact connections between Diebold voting machines and the Republican Party? What is the evidence that they've tampered with machines in the Democratic primaries?
MCM: It's not just Diebold. It's Diebold, ES&S and Hart InterCivic–the three biggest of such companies. Their ties to the GOP are many. In 2004, Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, which is headquartered in Canton, Ohio, sent out a fundraising letter in which he pledged to do all in his power to deliver Ohio's electoral vote to Bush.
For four years back in the Nineties, the CEO of ES&S was Chuck Hagel of Nebraska - who stepped down to run for the Senate from that state. (They used ES&S machines to count the vote in his two elections; and in both he did far better than expected!) And one of the main investors in Hart InterCivic is Tom Hicks, a top fundraiser for, and old friend of, George W. Bush.
All that is the least of it, however. The fact is that Republicans started all three companies, and hold the major management positions; and it's been the Republicans primarily (although not exclusively) who have pushed to get the e-voting machines used nationwide.
As far as the Democratic primaries are concerned, there's been a marked discrepancy between the unadjusted exit poll results and the official vote-counts in most of the big-state races, which have seen Hillary consistently do better than the exit polls predicted by some 7 percentage points. And there also was the weird outcome in the New Hampshire primary, in which she won where they counted ballots by machine by a little over 4 points, while Obama won where they counted ballots manually by over 6 points. Although the pundits trotted out all sorts of theories to account for the discrepancy, none of them hold up under close scrutiny.
AF: What is the larger Republican strategy for winning this election?
MCM: They're less concerned with really winning a majority of votes than they are with generating a convincing rationale that will "explain" their "victory." In other words, their strategy is actually to steal the race, not win it. If you take a look at what the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice have been doing, and also what the GOP in many states has been up to, you'll find there's been a major effort to eliminate as many Democratic votes as possible, whether by pre-emption or manipulation of the e-voting machinery.
AF: The media seem to love Obama. If election fraud has affected his chances of winning, why wouldn't they cover it more thoroughly?
MCM: Well, they did begin to mention it after New Hampshire, but that was as far as they would go. They haven't covered it because they never do, in any case–and it's the same with him. He won't talk about it either; although he did file a complaint against the Clintons over their egregious vote-suppression tactics in Nevada. The press, however, didn't mention that complaint. [ed note: a Lexis-Nexis search for “obama AND clinton AND nevada AND suppression†from the past six months turns up four relevant articles—three from the Washington Post and one from an Australian paper] So it doesn't matter whether or how much they like Obama. The fact is that they're deep in denial over this whole problem, which by and large they simply can't perceive.
AF: Can you elaborate on that? Why is there a denial of the problem? Has there been any coverage in alt-weeklies or blogs?
MCM: This has been the central problem from the start–the inability/refusal to face the awful truth, i.e., that the US today is not a democratic country, and that its ruling party is authoritarian: much closer to fascism than conservatism. Conservatism is about limited government, fiscal prudence and a refusal, or reluctance, to interfere in the affairs of other nations. The Bush regime is obviously not at all conservative in that sense: on the contrary. While true conservatives believe deeply in our Constitutional ideals, this government has deprived Americans of their inalienable rights–not the least of which is the right to vote, as Tom Paine once noted.
That's an enormous pill to swallow; and while a lot of people, at the grass-roots level, can perceive, or intuit, that this has happened, the Establishment can't do it. By "Establishment" I mean, basically, the government, the two parties and the mainstream media (and, for that matter, much of the left/liberal press as well). While the media can, and often does, deal with important scandals, they always shy away from those that, if allowed to resonate, would shake the very basis of our system. The Bush Republicans' subversion of our voting system–and the Democrats' general acquiescence in that crime–is certainly the most important scandal of them all, and therefore one that the media will not even acknowledge, much less investigate.
AF: Who do you support?
MCM: I'll support whichever Democrat ends up facing John McCain, because I think the GOP today is an extremely dangerous party, dominated by an extremist fringe; and I think McCain is, frankly, nuts, with a pathological appetite for war, and, on the economy, about as smart as Herbert Hoover. He's also thrown himself into the arms of the most toxic theocratic clerics on the scene today, which only makes him even riskier.
Having said that, I must say also that I'm not a fervent follower of Clinton or Obama. As he appears to be the choice of grass-roots Democrats, however, and as his campaign is entirely innocent of fraud or any sort of vote suppression, I would certainly support him more enthusiastically than I could her. But he and she are centrists, who have each to some degree enabled the long crime spree of the Bush regime; and so I'm basically lukewarm about the two of them, and about the Democratic Party overall.
For now, however, we must do all we can do to bust the Bush regime; and that won't happen under Pres. McCain. (It probably won't happen under either of the Democrats, either, but we don't know that yet.)
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WHAT!!!! Obama "entirely innocent of fraud or any other vote suppression"??? You got to be kidding!!!!
By way of disclosure, I should note that I am chairman of the Electoral Board in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we have been using the eSlate voting machines manufactured by Hart InterCivic since May 2002. We proactively chose the Hart system when it became apparent that punch-card voting machines were going the way of the dinosaurs, and before the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) assured their obsolescence.
Over the course of some 10 elections using the eSlate, our voters have been extremely satisfied by the ease of use, the level of security, and the accuracy of the voting system. We look forward to using the eSlate for many elections in the future.
In addition — just to make things clear — I have testified on voting technology issues before several committees of the Virginia General Assembly.
Those points made, I must ask Mr. Miller how he knows "that Republicans started all three companies" (including Hart)? My reason for asking is that Hart was founded more than 75 years ago (it may have been as long ago as 1917, if you include its predecessor companies) and it is probably difficult to determine the political affiliations of long-dead company founders.
Whatever the case may be, we in Charlottesville chose Hart InterCivic after reviewing all the products on the market, and made the choice based upon our judgment that Hart could best meet the needs of our community, our voters, our candidates, and our election officials. Any (alleged or actual) political ties of Hart's executives or investors were entirely irrelevant to our decisionmaking process, and remain irrelevant today.
Um, eloquent, well-reasoned rebuttal there, Shirley.
The Learned Professor seems to be mired in a Sci-Fi conspiracy theory. I do hope he doesn't have tenure…I'd hate to think that my grandchildren might have him in a class. He's way off the scale of rational thinking…..
Shirley's "rebuttal" was just fine. Just look at what's going on. Obama is part and parcel of the disenfranchisement of millions of voters in Florida and Michigan.
Google Wayne Barrett and check out his article, "could the republicans pick the democratic nominee?" It's an eye opener about this whole mess in Florida and Michigan. If you're open minded enough to do some research, you'll see why Shirley was incredulous.
Like always, where you can't provide proofs, it's hard to say, where the reality ends and where the ficiton begins.
With all due respect to Shirley and Erica Leigh, there is no evidence of any systematic vote suppression or election fraud by the Obama campaign. The latter's stand re: Michigan and Florida is quite beside the point; and Erica's reference to it as "disenfranchisement" is a propaganda line used by the Clinton camp—which, for its part, HAS used vote suppression tactics nationwide.
Sparky, on the other hand, deploys a different line of propaganda, the one routinely used by pro-Bush types to laugh off the abundant evidence of BushCo's vast election fraud: "It's all conspiracy theory!" The only sound response to that is to suggest that people check out all the evidence themselves, and make their own decisions as to whether or not it's "way off the scale of rational thinking" (which I don't think Sparky wants the readers of this interview to do).
Finally, I thank Rick Sincere for his email, but have to make a few points in response. First of all, the fact that Hart began 96 years ago (it started up in 1912) bears no relation to its ownership _since it got into electronic voting_. THAT move came in the Nineties; and THAT move did indeed entail investment by big-time pro-Bush Republicans like Tom Hicks—a friend and major donor to George W. Bush, who owns a big chunk of the company through his investment firm, Stratford Capital.
Now, Rick may deem such ownership acceptable, but I sure don't—and I am sure that many folks in Charlottesville would readily agree with me, if, say, their local press would clue them in about it.
And while Rick also feels entirely sure that the machines he helped to buy can do no wrong, I have to say that he's too confident there, too. The fact is that such gadgets CAN be hacked with ease, and often are; and, again, if the folks in Charlottesville knew more about it, they would very likely make a choice quite different from the one made by Rick et al. on that Election Board.
Well Obama just purged hundreds of progressive delegates in California from his delegation so there ya' go….
As long as there are computer chips running proprietary computer code between people casting their votes and the vote totals in an election, we can never be sure that the totals reported by those machines are accurate.
For me, the "smoking gun" event was when I heard about NEGATIVE vote totals in several places. Negative numbers have no legitimate use in a machine used for counting votes, so why program the machines to deal with them? Why not simply use only positive whole numbers? I can think of only one reason to include handling negative numbers in a voting machine, and that reason is rigging an election. If you can think of an honest use of negative numbers in an election, I would be interested in hearing or reading your description of it.
A simple piece of paper used as a ballot, which is counted (and recounted) by human beings should be sufficient. If we use machines at all, those machines should be made in an open and public manner, both in their hardware design and their software design. There is no place for "proprietary" code or "Corporate Secret" designs that can be used to "distort" our elections.
Beside using paper ballots, if we are going to use machines to count the paper ballots, we should also do random checks on the counting accuracy by hand recounting. There are techniques that I will not detail here that can be used to verify the accuracy of the vote totals produced by a ballot scanning system.
But I think we should also be looking at voter disenfranchisement and many other vote suppression techniques, because election theft and rigging seems to be happening on many levels. Electronic rigging is just one of many techniques. "Caging" is another.
I don't know who I should credit for the following line, but I recall hearing it said that "Sunshine is the best disinfectant." It looks to me like we need a little sunshine applied to our voting and election processes to disinfect them.
I am a student of Professor Miller's and a legal resident of the state of Florida. And I am troubled by the idea that the "disenfranchisement" of Florida and Michigan voters would be seen as tantamount to the genuine abuses reportedly committed by or on behalf of the Clinton campaign this primary season — including voter intimidation, the pitting of "white" unions against "black" unions, and a curious approach to tabulation that allegedly garnered Obama NO votes in precincts where his support should have been among the strongest.
In contrast, the fate awaiting Florida and Michigan voters (especially if Senator Clinton gets her way) is SELECTIVE ENFRANCHISEMENT of voters who went to the polls with the full understanding that the results of the contest had already been voided. I was one of them — I voted Edwards, by absentee ballot. And I will be extremely upset if votes like mine are counted at the expense of folks who instead chose to stay home and sit out a primary they had already been informed was illict.
The real disenfranchisement is long past: It happened when the parties moved up those primaries, with a full understanding that the penalty would be the loss of the relevant delegates. To seat those delegates now, whether according to the actual results of the two primaries or some juggling act of a "compromise," would privilege certain citizens over others — especially, I would presume, the lower-income voters who decided that staying at work that day was more personally advantageous than participating in a primary they had been told was meaningless.
The time for cries of "disenfranchisement" was back when the primary dates were changed, not now; any "solution" that henceforth could be arrived at would be baldly undemocratic. And it would further embolden the state parties to flout the rules while elongating our already painfully extended election seasons — in which a party can and does sustain serious political damage if it hasn't settled on a candidate as early as MARCH.
This should have been put into a YouTube or streaming video segment. I personally believe that you get more from listening to such a cogent discussion than reading it as dialog in text format. The mass of American voters cannot get their minds around a stunning revelation like “… the awful truth, i.e., that the US today is not a democratic country, and that its ruling party is authoritarian: much closer to fascism than conservatism.†But it resonates with me. Maybe because I read from a wide range of sources which document items like the systematic DOJ support of voter intimidation, the fact that in 2007 a new Secretary of State in California decertified existing DRE voting systems, the perversion of legal procedure with the Don Siegelman matter, etc. These events point up a real conspiracy. But the sad state of affairs is such that many US citizens who will actually vote — also do not get adequate exposure to this information. But I think this type of dialog on YouTube will reach opinion leaders quicker — and it is also more readily available to a wide audience.
The stolen-election theories weren't even accepted by such left-wing rags like Mother Jones or The Nation. Almost equally laughable is the dark conspiracy theory about how conservatives want to establish a theocracy in America, despite the fact that the only theocracies in the world are operated in countries like Iran and that the only real theocrats in America are people like Gerald Rushdoony, who died several years ago. And he never, ever had any real influence in America.
One extra note: Miller, who teaches media ethics, thinks that Keith Olbermann is under no journalistic obligation to debate anybody who fundamentally disagrees with him on "Countdown". Media ethics, huh?
So the crux of the professor's argument is that when a Republican wins an election it is most likely fraud, which he is qualified to point out as he will be voting for whoever the Democratic candidate? Sounds perfectly objective and reasonable. Like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.