Ex-Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor regrets her vote installing Bush II as Prez. Me too.

The REAL question is whether there are lessons from Bush V. gore that are relevant to the next election?

The answer is yes, regardless of whether you think Gore really won or Bush did.

That is, if you love your country more than your love your political party.

Lesson 1: Many American states--very much including Florida--mandate that elections be run by partisan politicians. I don't care whether those partisan politicians are in my party or the other--you can't have one side running elections. It delegitimizes the vote in the eyes of all the losing side and those on the winning side who have principles other than tribalism.

Lesson 2: Voting technology needs to be standardized across the states. The two parties are so evenly matched in many states that election results sometimes fall within the margin of error of the voting systems being used, leading to protracted litigation and, again, the deligitimization of election results in the eyes of many voters.

Lesson 3: The only way to resolve claims of voter fraud by one side and voter suppression by the other is to adopt nationwide voting rules based on a biometric ID database. That would nip both sides' complaints in the bud. And national suffrage rules should eliminate the lifetime bans on voting by ex-felons in some states--mainly Southern ones, mainly disenfranchising blacks.

Lesson 4: The only way to prevent special interest groups and the ultra-rich from skewing election results is strict public financing of elections, as the other rich countries do. This would save the American taxpayer many, many times the cost of publicly financing elections.

Sandra Day O'Connor was one of our best Supreme Court justices, and certainly one of our most reasonable. We all make mistakes, and it's a crying shame that this rare mistake of hers was so huge--huge not necessarily because Gore really won, but because the Supreme Court's intervention guaranteed that the issue will never be settled.

Voter fraud

From a comment on an Economist article about Republican vote suppression activities:


"Millions of US residents do not possess the franchise to vote and experience shows that, their inelligibility [sic] notwithstanding, many spurious votes will be cast either by them or in their names."


This is precisely the lying, legalistic, pseudo-rational verbosity Republican officials use to cloak their caveman "morality," i.e. "Heads I win tails you lose."

In fact, "experience" shows the exact opposite. In every state controlled by the Republican tribe, and federally when the Republican tribe has controlled the White House, many millions of dollars have been spent in an effort to find any examples of voting fraud.

They have failed--failed spectacularly. However, having learned well from Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, the fountainhead of their communications strategy, they simply claim there is widespread voter fraud through their various sock puppets--AM radio talk show hosts and the fake pundits on their fake TV "news" channels.

Instead of evidence they simply repeat it as if it were a fact, over and over, every day of every week, and the weak-minded in the millions then accept it as fact, as shown by national polls. And roughly half the nation is weak-minded enough for this to work on. It helps that a significant portion of these weak-minded people are also racists. Kind of goes with being weak-minded, after all. Since those being denied the vote by the Republican Tribe's vote-suppression campaign are first and foremost blacks and Latinos, it gives racists a chance to express their racism that gives them--in their own minds at least--plausible deniability.

The only thing their hunt for the phantom voter fraud turned up was the ACORN scandal in which paid voter registrars registered nonexistent voters so they'd get paid more. However, this was not voting fraud--nonexistent voters don't vote, in contravention of the Republican Laws of Physics. But to this day weak-minded Republicans invoke "ACORN ACORN ACORN" like primitive tribesmen chant the names of their enemies as they dance in the firelight before going off to war.

The Republican Party used to be a political party, but its gradual takeover by the closest thing America has to the Taliban has turned it into a tribe, complete with tribal beliefs like this one.

Makes them quite easy to dupe by the corporatists pulling their strings, and as no cost to the corporatists, since all their God Gays and Guns blather (plus their nudge nudge wink wink racist agenda) costs the corporatists nothing. Meanwhile the tribe's anti-illegal immigration wishes get nowhere nationally because that would cost the corporatists something.

How to prevent all that voter fraud that isn't taking place

There's an easy way to deal with the Republicans' claim that they need harsh voter ID laws to prevent the widespread voter fraud they've spent a decade looking for with no results: adopt India's biometric ID database program. If India has the technology, the infrastructure, and the money to do it, surely the USA does.

Using people's unique retinal pattern trumps photo IDs by a long shot. And there's no ID card needed--just show up with your eyes in their sockets. You can use photo IDs for the few that lack eyes.

You can automatically register everyone to vote who's elegible to vote--just enter them as "undeclared" unless they take a further step voluntarily and join a political party.

No muss, no fuss. The Republicans get the positive voter identification they say is required "for the integrity of the system" though, wink wink, we all know what they really want.

And the Democrats have all their complaints answered about difficulty of registering and money/time required to get a photo ID. India is doing it sending workers out into the communities to ID everyone.

As a plus, it makes it really, really hard for illegals to cheat the system and use fake IDs to work. Another plus for Republicans.

So why isn't the Republican party demanding this? It would cost far less than the bureaucracies they're building state by state.

Oh yeah. Adopting a universal biometric ID database would defeat their real goal: to win elections by hook or by crook.

That's why.

EDIT ADD: I just read an article about this in The Economist. You can see it here. You need to register but it's free.

The comment thread for this article had lots of comments by American Republicans justifying the GOP's voter suppression program and villifying the Democrats, accusing them of whining about the GOP preventing their massive conspiracy to commit vote fraud.

Here's what I couldn't figure out: do they really believe their malarkey? Are they so far gone into their alternate-universe haze that they believe, absent any actual evidence, that the Democrats are the fraudsters and not their own party carrying on the century-long fine old Southern White tradition of preventing blacks from voting? Or do they want to win so badly that they believe their party's immoral behavior is justified by the end: getting the Negro out of office.

That's it, isn't it? The bone in their throat. The bone that the Southern Republicans are fully aware of, but that other Republicans probably only "feel" in an unverbalized sort of way--just a general revulsion at Barack Hussein Obama's Otherness--his name, his skin color, his international upbringing, his non-Fundamentalist values...even his slightly Black speech patterns (probably acquired as an adult, given his having grown up outside any Black community). And of course his old pastor, Rev. Wright, whose grievances at the White America of his youth are completely dismissed as having any validity--as if America never wronged Blacks. As if he should have instantly forgotten it all the instant the Supreme Court banned school segregation (which persisted unchanged for over a decade after the first ruling, mind you).

Today's racism takes the form of denial of racism and vilification of anyone who dares mention it. I know, liberals have played the race card about everything under the sun--most egregiously about illegal immigration. Truth is, both sides play the race card constantly, each in their own vile way. Doesn't mean it ain't there.

The latest evidence: turns out Wells Fargo Bank and other big banks charged black home buyers higher rates than white buyers with identical credit ratings.

But no racism here, bro.

ID theft's biggest villains: illegal aliens, Russian mafia, Republican Party

We all know that illegal aliens commonly "buy" fake Social Security numbers in order to get work. This isn't a victimless crime, because it creates two audit trails of work data for the real owner, and when that real owner applies to the SSA to go on Social Security, it can be blocked for months or even years while the person and that SSA try to figure out what happened--and the real owner has to prove that he isn't committing fraud by applying.

And of course the Russian (and Ukranian etc.) Mafia constantly phishes for American ID data and then uses it to empty bank accounts and for other nefarious schemes.

What isn't common knowledge is the fact that the Republican Party is also engaged in ID theft, in the form of taking voters off the voting roles who are legal voters. This, too, is stealing someone's identity for gain. Part is trying to prevent the 10% of Americans who lack photo IDs that the Republican state governments have deemed are lawful. Part is disenfranchising minorities through an elaborate system of differential legal processes that throw blacks in jail for crimes that either shouldn't be crimes or that are defined differently for whites and blacks (not in so many words of course--but it's how it pans out), and then removes their right to vote for life or makes it so hard to get back the right to vote that most don't even try, or give up after hitting one roadblock after another.

And it's not just the right to vote that can get stolen. Today I saw an interview with a lady in Florida who'd been taken off the voter rolls for being dead (she had the same first and last name and birthdate as another Floridian in another city who had indeed died). But then the state of Florida also took away her driver's license and notified Social Security that she was dead. The lady spent months of her life getting back her rights. Mind you she had a different Social Security number from the dead lady, a different middle name, and a different city of residence.

But the GOP's vote suppression conspiracy prefers to disenfranchise valid voters rather than risk not disenfranchising one single invalid potential voter.

The irony is that when you talk to rank and file Republicans they usually express a fear of the State invading the lives of individuals, invading their privacy and robbing them of their freedoms. And then they claim it's the Democrats who they have to fear of doing this! Yet at the same time the leaders of their own party are the ones actually doing to citizens the very thing that Republicans give as their main reason for voting Republican.