A Cure for America's Corruptible Voting System

By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK

04 November 12

hen I went to vote last week in New York City, using an absentee ballot (because I will be out of the country on election day), I had a surreal experience that was also very ordinary: I marked my ballot – put it, as advised by the nice man behind the counter, into a sealed envelope, handed it to him and … nothing.

That is, he looked at me quizzically as I waited. For what? I realized that in every transaction I ever had with the government, I get some kind of receipt or documentation. But I had just handed over my most precious possession, my vote, and I had nothing to show for it. No scrap of paper noting for the record what I had done, and no way to verify that what I wished to do got recorded accurately.

The fellow offered, when I expressed some wish for something like this, to use my phone camera to take a picture of me holding the sealed envelope – for proof I had voted. Seriously.

We treat the black hole where our votes vanish as if we don't dare to validate them partly because the process is so highly mystified. One aspect of this mystification, which gatekeepers use effectively against us, is the glamour around the secret ballot. That noble "secrecy" is what keeps citizen groups from observing the vote count, demanding verification slips, and so on.

The secret vote was, in its time, a great idea. Before the secret ballot was popularized, it was standard practice to intimidate and threaten voters. But few know that America hasn't always had secret ballots. Indeed, the secret ballot didn't even originate in the US – the system we use is known, actually, as the "Australian ballot".

The majority of US states did not move to that system – in which publicly-provided, printed ballots with the names of the candidates are marked in secret – until after 1884. Until 1891, indeed, Kentucky still held an "oral ballot"; and it wasn't till the election of President Grover Cleveland in 1892 that the first US president was elected entirely via secret ballot.

Why do I point this out? Because our mystification of the secret ballot is one of the strange ways in which we treat our nation's voting system with truly weird magical thinking – much like the magical thinking (about which I have written here) that often attends global warming: a defiant, seven-year-old's refusal to connect point A and point B. By now, reams of solid reporting have documented the aberrations, high jinks, missing hard drives, voting machines that weirdly revert to one candidate, voting machines owned by friends of the candidate of one party, and other aspects of systematic corruption that attend America's voting.

The dogged and deeply patriotic Mark Crispin Miller has meticulously documented masses more of these examples – notably in the last election in Ohio – in his masterful Harper's essay last month, "None Dare Call It Stolen."

But this is what is weird about the way we are asked to think about the vote: as if nothing could ever ever ever go wrong with it, and as if it is crazy to entertain the notion that it might. To even raise the issue, with solid documentation, as many reporters and citizens have found out, is to risk immediate mockery – as Miller notes, citing 2004 headlines: "Election Paranoia Surfaces: Conspiracy Theorists Call Results Rigged," chuckled the Baltimore Sun on 5 November; "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud is Dismissed," proclaimed the Boston Globe on 10 November; "Latest Conspiracy Theory – Kerry Won – Hits the Ether," the Washington Post chortled on 11 November.

Meanwhile, solid reporting on the war on voting, and on the corruption of the voting infrastructure, continues to mount, as in the Rolling Stone piece this summer on the GOP's "war on voting". and the Huffington Post notes the eyebrows raised when a pro-Romney company buys a stake in the company that makes the machines that count our votes.

Well, as a student of closing societies, I can tell you that it is crazy to ask Americans to have pure faith that the system is incorruptible, and to ask them to just drop their votes into a black hole and trust in the Lord – or Diebold. If you look at weak democracies, the oligarchies that have taken undue control of them always seek to tamper with the vote. It is important for oligarchs to have elections to give their guy a veneer of legitimacy – and important for the vote always to turn out "their way". Indeed, something that is never reported in major news media here is that former President Carter's voting accountability organization sees America's system as relatively flawed and corrupted compared with the systems of many other nations. That is a situation that would typically bring observers from aid organizations like his to our polling places to help us count our vote. (See what happened to foreign poll observers in Miller's Harpers story who tried to watch the vote in America.)

Here is my modest proposal: let us end the secret ballot, because we have reached a point, with the internet, in which transparency and accountability is more important than absolute secrecy. Don't panic, because this is what I mean: your vote won't be publicly available, but why can't I get a number when I hand in my ballot, or when I vote in a machine – just as I do with bloodwork, or computer passwords, or other transactions in which I get accountability, but not disclosure of my actual name? Then, the votes get tallied and posted – with their corresponding numbers – online on a public site, and major media reproduce the lists. And I can check my number (unidentifiable to anyone else) to check whether my vote was correctly registered.

This would allow, in one sweep, all citizens to watch the watchers. It does not compel anyone to reveal his or her vote – but gives him or her the option of challenging a discrepancy, and the means to verify what he or she had actually intended to do. And in one easy, inexpensive, technically feasible gesture, it takes the power away from the Diebold-type private corporations and the various parties and the officials, and allows actual verification that cannot be spun or falsified. Most importantly, it removes a psychological blinder, which the American people are asked to wear every two and four years – the blinder that infantilizes us, that has highly interested individuals and groups say to us, "we are impartial, this is a magically noble and incorruptible process: trust us."

As President Ronald Reagan put it in another context: sure – trust, but verify.

Why America and the World Still Need Barack Obama

By Jesse Jackson, Guardian UK

04 November 12

ow much has the extraordinary wave of hope that swept the world four years ago, when President Obama was inaugurated, been borne out by his first term in office?

Why do I think it is so vital that he wins again this week, for America and for the world?

Let's remember President Obama inherited a very deep hole, a hole most Americans did not imagine existed. When he came in, we had lost four million jobs in four years – 800,000 jobs evaporated in January 2009 alone. Since that time, we have created five and a half million new jobs. That's more than 30 straight months of job growth in tough economic times. In addition, he had to confront banks that, through their greed, had forced record-breaking home foreclosures. The global economy – from the US to Europe and around the world – was at the point of total collapse. The banks were bailed out.

The automotive industry had collapsed. Now, because of the Obama administration's policies to rescue the auto industry, we're the number one auto-producing nation again. Autoworkers are once more working three shifts and producing high yields. The auto industry is back, though Romney said: "Let them go bankrupt."

Furthermore, when President Obama came into office, we were caught in a war of choice – an immoral, bad choice – in Iraq. President Bush and Tony Blair dealt us a severe blow. The whole world was telling them not to wage war – I was speaking in London at Hyde Park on the day of the big protest. We told them there was no basis for going into Iraq. Since then, we have lost British and American lives, resources and honour, and they have not been humble enough to apologise. That war cost us trillions of dollars, which took us from a budget surplus to a budget deficit.

Now we have left Iraq and the administration has implemented a plan to wind down the war in Afghanistan, which is coming to a close in terms of American involvement. Billions of dollars spent on war can now be redirected to jobs, investment and economic development at home.

There's a lot more we must do to be seen as leading the world by right. We have become addicted to leading by might and it takes some time to restore confidence and credibility. We're not there yet but we're moving in the right direction.

So yes, when President Obama took office, the US and the world were in a deep, dark economic (and political) hole. But now we are moving through fields towards the mountaintop. Though we've yet to reach that point, the arrows are pointing in the right direction – jobs, industry, healthcare cover all on the rise, wars on the decline.

Romney and the conservatives have derided the comprehensive health care plan as "Obamacare." But the truth is that Obama does care. People would be dead without health insurance. And young people benefit as they can stay on their parents' health plans into their 20s. The insurance companies were charging higher and higher fees for ever lower cover and they claimed the right not to insure people. Obama broke up that kind of exploitative behaviour and today 30 million more Americans are covered. Obama's historic healthcare legislation will stand the test of time.

And all of this achieved despite the attempt by the Republicans to demean the president. They called him a liar. They said that he's not an American, he's not a Christian, he's illegitimate.

Romney offers no positive alternative for America. We are currently in the throes of a weather crisis, hurricane Sandy, which has wreaked havoc on the east coast. Railroads, subways, roads, bridges, houses, banks, whole communities have been devastated. Romney once said we don't need Fema, the federal government agency now co-ordinating the rescue and recovery programme related to these disasters. He says "state authorities" (not the federal government) should handle that devastation – and private investors.

The fact is a state alone cannot handle such problems. And private investors should not be profiting out of such misery. It's the role of central government to be a part of the emergency repair and to be a part of the clean-up and reconstruction. Because of an act of nature, there must now be a massive investment in infrastructure. It will create jobs and contracts, new technology as well as other scientific advances.

President Obama had made the case for that before the disaster – for the need to invest in infrastructure, in roads, buildings and bridges, to reinvest in America to put Americans back to work. Now that he's leading us in this crisis, even his adversaries are saying he's doing a good job.  The president's leadership during hurricane Sandy is steady and confident.

I said in an article in the Observer four years ago that Barack Obama's inauguration was a magnificent moment in a five-decades-long race for civil rights in America and in the world as a whole. Has his first term stood up to the extraordinary hope he inspired? For black Americans, a ceiling has been removed. An African American, a woman or a Latino can now believe that their path through life will carry them as far as their dreams can imagine. If Obama can do it, it inspires women to think they can do it and Latinos to think they can do it. So the barrier to our dreams has been removed.

But you cannot have racial reconciliation unless you have racial justice. Our Rainbow friends in the UK call it Equanomics – racial equality and economic justice. Black people are still facing tremendous racial injustice; we're number one in home foreclosure; the banks target us. We're number one in infant mortality. Number one in short life expectancy. Number one in unemployment. We're still very much on the margins.

A few have done well enough to become symbolic examples. You look at Colin Powell, you look at Oprah and you look at some great athletes. But you can't measure the progress of the masses of black Americans by the symbolic value of extraordinary achievers. It's like swimming the English Channel. It's not the distance that makes it difficult to swim – it's the undercurrent. That's what we're struggling against – an undercurrent based on centuries of enslavement, institutional race inequalities and unfounded fears.

I look at America embracing Olympic medallists, black and white; embracing the impact of black music upon the culture. You'd think those achievements would have brought more reconciliation. But we seem to be cherry-picking – selectively recognising black success while still disregarding racial injustice.

The scar on America's soul is racial injustice. It is the key to equality, workers' rights, children's rights, environmental security and ending war. So how this issue is handled is the key to the salvation of our nation. Martin Luther King would say that the pursuit of racial justice is the way to redeem the soul of America. President Obama's achievement can only be seen as part of a long battle for civil rights. What one must appreciate is that his ascendancy is a long journey that can be traced in modern history He did not come to us unilaterally. He came out of a 64-year process. In 1948, President Truman ended military racial segregation. The Supreme Court knocked down decades of legal segregation in the Brown v Board of Education decision. We won a big victory in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycott, after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, leading to the end of segregation by 1964. We won the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, ending discrimination at elections. We staged the anti-Vietnam war protests. From 1948 to 2008, there were 60 years of victories: overcoming obstacles, removing walls, pulling down barriers. Obama comes out of that process.  He's a result of the  years of struggle. He is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He ran a fast, able leg of the race we're in. He is a member of a team.

So has the issue of race in American politics been transformed for all time?  Absolutely not. The forces of hostility have in a strange way been reinvigorated, their fears have been revived, their anger has been rekindled, the mean spirits have resurged. America has a deep-seated commitment to unfounded racial fears and, win or lose, those fears will not go away.

There are attempts to take the civil rights victories back. Our opponents are fighting the civil war of 1865. They're trying to pit states' rights against a more perfect union, the federal government. If Obama loses, they'll be empowered to undermine years of work.  If Romney wins and puts right-wingers on the Supreme Court, the courts could rule to undermine the entire movement made by Dr King. Who appoints the next Supreme Court justices will determine the next 50 years of America.

The scale of the president's achievement is not just a matter of his complexion, but the direction in which he has tried to take the country. He has done a huge amount, but a unified America could have achieved twice as much. Instead, the Republicans have been planning how to make him a one-term president since the time of his inauguration in January 2009. Their mission was not about job creation, bank reconstruction or to revive manufacturing. Their mission was not to rebuild. Their mission was at all costs to undermine his authority.

If the president wins, conservative right-wingers will not stop fighting ideologically.  We must maintain our struggle to prevail. We need to keep taking the nation forward by hope and never backward by fear. We need to keep hope alive.