Postpone the Inauguration

In light of the many lawsuits and the sea of complaints and protests surrounding the November 2nd presidential election, I believe the inauguration planned for January 2005 should be postponed until, at a minimum, all the votes cast are counted. There is nothing more basic than the votes of our citizens. Thousands of votes still remain uncounted. Yet we are expected to "move on." "Get over it!," the annoyed Republicans shout. Why are the Republicans so angry? They are the "winners." They seem to feel that the election was fair and well-run. Either that or they really don't care if it was fair as long as George Bush is declared the winner. But have you ever heard of declaring a winner before the votes are all counted? (Oh, yes! There was Florida in 2000.) Are we to be satisfied with an estimate of votes? And whose estimate will it be?

How can we know which candidate actually won? There are a multitude of serious questions about the election: voter suppression, voter intimidation, voter registration failures, voting machine malfunctions and lack of paper trail, provisional ballot issues, and many other problems, not just in Ohio, but in many states. In Virginia, Rep. Bobby Scott, 2nd District, reported this week that there were 500 complaints about the election. In his own district, some voters were given ballots that did not have his name on them! Imagine.

Wednesday, December 8th, Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, convened a hearing in Room 2237 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, D.C. The purpose was to discuss the very future of participatory democracy in America and the serious problems that the future holds if the allegations of vote fraud in Ohio and elsewhere are true.

One of the speakers on Wednesday was Rep. Watt who remarked that in Afghanistan, ballots were delivered to rural voters by donkey. He said that we should be capable of having fair elections in America, too. Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, reported that, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, there were fewer voting machines available to the voters during the Presidential election than there were during the primary election. He said, "Secretary of State Blackwell, he of the paper-weight obstructionism, wins the Katherine Harris Award this time around. There should be prosecutions over all this, and people should go to jail." Cliff Arnebeck, Chair of Common Cause Ohio, said with indignation in his voice,

How can we, with a straight face, talk about democracy in Iraq when we cannot guarantee democracy here at home?

Jesse Jackson insisted, "The 2004 election is not past-tense. We are not whining. It is time to take this struggle to the streets and fully legitimatize this struggle." He spoke of the long line that reached from Selma, Alabama, to Ohio, and into the room where they were meeting.

Rep. Conyers intimated Wednesday that he might object to the seating of the Ohio Electors when the certification process begins. I hope he will do just that. Do you recall the moment in Michael Moore's film, "Fahrenheit 911," when we saw the macabre scene in the Senate, presided over by Vice President Al Gore in 2000? Twelve African-American Democrats and Rep. Peter Deutsch raised a formal objection to the certification of the results. The objection could not stop the Bush victory because the objectors needed support from at least one U. S. senator, and, of course, Gore had conceded. Not one senator stood up to object. Not one. Why? Because the Democratic senators had apparently decided to support the "power-sharing" agreement mandating equal representation on Senate committees. I believe Al Gore was in agreement with this, too. In Moore's film, the scene was agonizing to watch. Why hadn't we heard about this when it happened? The media didn't cover it I guess. But what a defining moment it was in history! The whole future of America was at stake, and no one stood up to challenge the Florida votes EVEN THOUGH MANY THOUSANDS OF VOTES WERE LEFT UNCOUNTED! Here we are in 2004, and it is deja vu! Our worst nightmare come true- again.

Those courageous, patriotic objectors believed that Gore was the true Electoral College winner and thus should rightfully have been installed as our 43rd president. And a subsequent recount initiated by journalists like Greg Palast proved that in fact Gore did win Florida in 2000. We found out the truth too late. A real tragedy.

Now we find ourselves in the same exact predicament. This time the state of Ohio has replaced Florida as the crucial state. There is no need to rush to inaugurate George Bush in January 2005. The votes have not all been counted yet. Even if the recount does not change the result, it is still vitally important to count all the votes. Otherwise, millions of Americans will remain in a state of suspicion. We can never really know if Bush won. If it had been a fair election, perhaps we could have accepted the results. As it is now, there is no way. The 2004 election will be remembered as a stolen election.

Here's the deal: Our Constitution says the states have to tally the votes of their citizens before they can send their electors to the Electoral College. If Ohio doesn't finish its recount before the College votes, or before the vote is unsealed before Congress on January 6th, shouldn't a member of Congress raise a formal objection to those Ohio electors' votes?

I say yes!

Hear what Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University had to say recently:

"Though the Electoral College votes on November 13th, there is a subsequent window, and a process, for challenging whether voters from a state, pledged to one candidate and not the other, should be allowed to vote. If there are controversies, such as some disclosure that a state actually went for Kerry (instead of Bush), there is the ability of members of Congress to challenge. It requires a written objection from one House member and one Senator.

Once that objection is raised, the joint meeting of the two houses, convened to formally count the Electoral College votes and certify the winner of the presidential election, would be immediately discontinued. Then both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state." (Of course, should that happen, with the Republican majorities in both House and Senate, we all know how the vote would go. I still think it should be done.)

The threat was raised in 2000, but Al Gore insisted no Democratic representative or senator should object. (I think this situation had last come up in 1876.) Now in 2004, should Congress do something? Yes, it should. If the Ohio vote was rotten, even if by some legitimate error, one representative and one senator should raise an objection. A loud one! Of course, for a formal challenge to get anything but token support in the Senate and the House, it would take a miracle. We know that. In all likelihood, the election results will not be reversed. However, "the challenge itself would be a powerful protest," said Keith Olbermann of MSNBC on Wednesday. It could further energize those who are determined to mount and complete a full investigation of what happened in Ohio and could even be relevant in terms of the impounding of voting machines and records to serve as the basis for some later examination. We do not want this to ever happen again.