Kerry Claims US Elections Are Corrupt

the title may be an exaggeration, but it conveys the point properly.
Yahoo! News - Kerry Accuses GOP of Suppressing Voting

Republicans have been trying to suppress voting in states where the presidential race is too close to call, Democratic nominee John Kerry said Sunday at one of the city's largest predominantly black churches.
"In battleground states across the country, we're hearing stories of how people are trying to make it harder to file for additional time, or how they're making it harder to even register," Kerry told an enthusiastic congregation at East Mt. Zion Baptist Church.
"We're not going to let that happen because the memories of 2000 are too strong. We're not going to allow 1 million African Americans to be disenfranchised."
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"We're seeing efforts by the Republicans, unfortunately, in various parts of the country to suppress votes and intimidate people, to do things that bring back memories that are pretty bitter in the American mind from the year 2000."
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"Like so much of his campaign, John Kerry's false charges of voter intimidation are baseless," said [Bush-Cheney] spokesman Steve Schmidt. He said Democrats rejected a GOP offer to put a lawyer from each party in every voting district across the nation on Election Day.
Kerry said he has his own team of lawyers "of all color and all mix" examining possible voting problems to try to prevent a repeat of the 2000 election disputes. He also has said he has thousands of lawyers around the country prepared to monitor the polls on Nov. 2.

AFL-CIO has also claimed that its members will try to monitor elections. The conduct of AFL-CIO has been noted on this blog at least once, and you can scroll down to find an article about AFL-CIO members raiding a Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters.

What Kerry has said is against just about everything that I, and this blog, stands for. There was no racial disenfranchisement in Florida. The closest thing to disenfranchisement was the Clinton administration's ignorance of military ballots, resulting in thousands of them entering Florida after the election, but during the recount. Somewhere between 65% and 70% of the military voted for Bush, and even more are expected to vote for him in the 2004 election. Gore ended the recounts before these military ballots were included, because it would result in an obvious defeat for him.
There were not a million disenfranchised black voters in Florida. It is possible that there was one black woman turned away from the polls, at closing time, due to her ethnicity. Her complaint is based on the possibility that a white male was allowed to vote when she was turned down. Notice, this was at closing time for the polls.
This is according to the actual authorities in Florida who analyzed the speculated discrimination in a legal, and accurate, fashion. While some blacks were also excluded because their names matched those on a list of convicted felons, twice as many whites were excluded for the same reason. However, many felons on the list actually did vote (they are not supposed to), and the majority of them voted for Gore.

Now, back to the main point. Claiming that the US elections are corrupt will destroy the entire democratic process if enough people believe it. Some studies show that 4 in 10 blacks believe that their votes are not counted. They think that, somehow, their ballots are excluded from the counting machines or destroyed entirely. Allow me to illustrate the threat of this in a similar, but more common, issue.
Ballots work a bit like currency. At one time, the US currency was only gold and silver coins, and their dollar value was equal to (and backed by) the value of the metal in the coins. It took a very long time for the US to finally print paper money, which does not have its value in the cost of the materials, but the US still collected enough gold and silver to back the currency (Fort Knox, which is loaded with gold, is a modern artifact of this era). In modern times, the US currency has barely any backing in precious metals (I think 1 out of every 10,000 dollars is covered by the US’s gold reserves). I do not know of a modern currency that is based on any real item of value.
As a result, currencies are subject to fluctuations based on perception of the value of money. While gold coins have a clear value (based on the gold in the coin), the actual value of a dollar is determined by what it can buy. If the American public starts to believe that the dollar has no value, then inflation will skyrocket and the dollar will become useless, because no one would accept it as payment for anything. After all, why should a store accept money that has no value? It would be no different than accepting bad checks or maxed-out credit cards.
This phenomenon is illustrated in Germany’s rampant inflation after WWI. The inflation got so bad that money, literally, wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. People were using money as wallpaper, fuel for fires, and toilet paper because it was cheaper than normal wallpaper, wood, and toilet paper. The money required to buy bread actually weighed more than the loaf of bread, regardless of the denomination of the currency (denominations are like $1, $5, $20, ect. They are the units in which currency is counted) All this was caused by a complete disbelief that the German currency actually had a value.

Similar can happen with votes. If enough people think their votes are not counted, then the US will be threatened with a revolution, just like a currency crashes when people don’t think it has a value. Once enough people think the election system has no value, the system will crash, and American democracy will suffer terribly as a result.


John Kerry is exploiting the fear that votes will not be counted to get a few more people to the polls. This is reckless, dangerous, immoral, and incredibly irresponsible. As a senator, Kerry should know that American stability lies in the strength and reliability of our election system. America was founded on the belief of popular representation, and has worked very hard to equalize that representation. If America losses sight of its founding principles, this nation is condemned to rampant corruption and failure.

Though I have gone on quite enough tangents already, I wish to end this post with one more, a quote from Cicero, Rome’s greatest orator:

It is by our own moral failure, and not some accident of fate or chance, that, while we retain the name, we have lost the reality of a republic.

Around the year Cicero said this, every person elected to the Senate used a violent mob to ensure that they were elected. Leaders of Rome’s two greatest families were killed when their mobs clashed. Julius Caesar had no difficulty controlling the republic, because the Senate made itself impotent with its own corruption and moral decay.