Mike's Election Guide (13 page)
Shouldn’t the simple fact you are a citizen be enough to be handed a ballot on election day? Sure a few will try to cheat, but I guarantee you that will be less a threat than continuing to have only half our citizens participating in their democracy.
3. Use Paper Ballots. And a #2 Pencil.
Gee, what a simple idea. Here’s how it works in nearly every other high-tech, industrialized country:
A voter shows up at the polls, she or he is handed a paper ballot, the voter then goes behind a curtain where—lo and behold!—there sits a #2 pencil! The voter takes said pencil and places a mark next to the names of the candidates she or he wishes to vote for. The voter then opens the curtain, walks over to a big box, and places his or her ballot inside it. Done. No tiny holes to try and punch, no computer screen that is harder to read than an ATM machine in Tunisia, no ballot that must then be fed into an optical reader.
An optical reader! Man, are we a bunch of lazy asses or what? We’d rather trust a machine to do our reading for us? Or some computer server a hundred miles away? What happened to our own two eyeballs?
Because “those two eyeballs” is how they do it most other places. When the polls close, the box of ballots is opened and, in the presence of a representative from each party with a candidate running for office, the ballots are placed on a big table and, in full view of everyone, the counting begins. When they are done, they often count them again. Any observer can object at any time.
How has this worked for the Canadians, the Brits, the Irish, and everyone else? Just fine. The mistake rate is practically nonexistent. Compare that to our mistake rates for electronic voting machines (2.2 percent), optical scanners (1.6 percent), or punch cards (2.6 percent). So if a hundred million Americans vote, that means that over 2.5 million of them don’t get their votes counted. There is no better way to vote and count ballots than the old school way—a piece of paper, and a pencil.
But wouldn’t this take too long? No. In Canada, a nation of over 30 million people—and with the second largest land mass in the world—their ballots are all counted within hours. I mean, these Canadians have to get to the polls by canoe, dogsled, or baby seal, from way up in the Yukon to the provinces that are half way to Iceland. Larger countries like the UK and France also use paper ballots (though there is a drive on in many of these countries to turn to computerized voting, this would be a huge mistake. They always want to copy us. Crazy).
Voting by paper ballot and pencil is a classic “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We broke something. Now we need to fix it.
4. Hold Regional Primaries.
There is a much easier and sensible way to conduct our primaries. Instead of one state or one region having undue influence over this process (yes, I mean you aliens of Iowa and New Hampshire), we should hold just four primaries, one for each region of the country, and take turns rotating which region goes first. East (from Maine to DC and over to Pennsylvania), South (all the usual suspects, including Texas), Midwest (from Ohio to Kansas and the Dakotas) and the West (from the Rockies to the Pacific).
This way, the candidates can save time and money by concentrating themselves in just one area of the country at a time. Many of these regions share similar issues (the Midwest has water it’s trying to keep clean, the West would like that water, the East desperately needs better mass transit, and the South, they’d like more NASCAR tracks). This way, everyone gets heard.
And just so we don’t have to listen to a bunch of whining from Iowa and New Hampshire, we’ll let them open their polls an hour ahead of everyone else so they can say they were “first.”
5. Limit the Election Season to Four Months for the Primaries, and Two Months for General Election.
In Great Britain, the total length of the campaign for prime minister and parliament is three to four weeks. In Canada it’s four to five weeks. In Slovakia it’s 15 days.
Here in the U.S., it lasts almost as long as the Ming Dynasty. Months upon months have now turned into years upon years. By the time of the election, the public has grown hair in suspicious places and the pundits are down to discussing the candidates’ socks.
The 2008 election officially began in 2006, and by the time we elect a new president on November 4, more than 2 million people will have died in the United States since the campaign season began. That’s a lot of citizens who went to their graves getting all worked up about who they were going to vote for and yet never had the chance to have a say. Is that fair?
We need to set limits on the length of our campaign season. I propose we take the four regional primaries I’ve suggested and, with one month per region for the candidates to campaign in, we should know who the nominees are after just four months. No campaigning can begin until this primary season has started.
Then, after the two (and someday, hopefully more) parties’ candidates are chosen, it’s 8 weeks to barnstorm the country. Hold a debate every two weeks during those 8 weeks. That should tell us all that we need to know.
If we need more time than that to decide, then we’ve got bigger problems than this one.
6. Public Financing, Free Air Time, and Spending Limits for All Politicians.
By the end of 2007, a full ten months before the election, the entire pool of U.S. presidential candidates had raised MORE THAN A HALF A BILLION DOLLARS. Barack Obama alone has now raised a record $287 million as of late June 2008; McCain had raised $119 million and borrowed another $39 million. And they still had 4 months until Election Day. These guys are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get elected to a job in which they make $400,000 a year.
Compare this to Slovakia, where presidential candidates are limited to spending 4 million Slovak crowns (about $210,000). Or Britain, where parties can’t spend more than a total of £19.38 million ($38.5 million) but usually spend far less. Or France, where spending is capped at $13.7 million ($21.6 million) for candidates in the first ballot and $18.3 million ($28.9 million) for those in the second ballot. Same goes for Ireland. And Canada. And . . . well, you get the idea. They don’t turn their elections into financial free-for-alls like we do.
And in many of these countries, the public foots the bill for a big chunk of the limited amount of money they do spend. For instance, in Canada if a candidate gets at least 10 percent of the entire vote, he or she is reimbursed for 60 percent of expenses. In France, if a candidate receives more than 5 percent of the vote in the first ballot, they are reimbursed for 50 percent of their spending.
With all these caps and limitations, how do candidates get the word out? What with advertising so darn expensive, how can they actually pay for all their ads? After all, during a one-month period in the spring of 2008, Obama spent $11 million on campaign commercials alone. Total ad spending during the primaries was $200 million. And the Campaign Media Analysis Group estimates that total ad spending could push past $800 million (up from $650 million in 2004) by the time this election circus finally dismantles its tents and loads the elephants and donkeys on the train headed for Election Year 2012.
According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, in 72 countries around the world, including 14 Western European countries (Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), political parties are entitled to FREE MEDIA ACCESS. Same goes for Canada. It’s actually
against the law
for candidates in some of these countries to purchase air time. In France, TV stations are
required
to help the candidates produce their free and equal commercial spots. In Ireland, political parties are entitled to free three-minute broadcasts aired every evening after the nightly news.
Just three minutes? Wow, sounds like the rest of the day’s 1,440 minutes can then be spent in peace and quiet, candidate-free.
Any takers?
One Last Job to Do When the Election Is Over
On January 20, 2009, there should be a perp walk coming out from the West Wing of the White House.
So much negligence, so many crimes, so hard to list all the war profiteers, so little regard for the law or the Constitution—what do we do with George W. Bush and his gang of charlatans and criminals come high noon on January 20, 2009?
For more than five years, I have maintained that impeachment would be too kind a punishment for Bush and Cheney. Instead, I have advocated for a perp walk out of the West Wing of the White House, a line of men—and one woman—handcuffed and chained and being led out the door by the FBI, just like they do when they arrest a drug dealer or child abuser or Wall Street embezzler. The perpetrators attempt to shield their faces from the TV cameras by holding their windbreakers over their heads or, if they have no windbreaker, then they try to hang their head down so low you can’t see the look of shame and fear in their eyes.
The purpose of the typical perp walk is to make an example of the accused, to send a simple but powerful message to the people watching at home: if you break the law, we are coming after you, we are going to get you, and you are going to be led away just like this from your good life and into a cell with bars so that we can separate you from the rest of us decent folk.
Misters Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Wolfowitz, Abrams, et al.—and Ms. Rice—must not be allowed to get away scot-free. Too much money is missing, too many families have been destroyed, too much blood is on their hands. Their misdeeds are not the stuff of impeachment. That’s reserved for presidents who lie about their sex lives and who try to switch secretaries of war during Reconstruction.
No, this group of leaders did much worse. They took the public’s trust (which was given to them not by the public, but rather by the Supreme Court) and ran with it. They covered up the facts in order to start a war of aggression, not one of defense. They invaded a sovereign nation and removed its leader without the request or consent of that nation’s people. They handed no-bid contracts to the companies they used to run and from which they still profited. They arrested people—including American citizens—and imprisoned them without a trial, without a chance to talk to a lawyer, without even knowing what the charges were against them. Some of these prisoners were tortured, not by some rogue soldiers but at the suggestion of the Secretary of Defense with the consent of the President of the United States.
Billions of American dollars were “misplaced” in Iraq, and never found. American citizens who committed no crimes were spied upon. Telephone companies were cajoled into turning over private records of innocent people.
All of this was done in response to a shocking attack on the seat of American capitalism and the seat of American military might. These were attacks that perhaps could have been prevented had anyone, especially the president himself, bothered to read the intelligence reports that said,
right up at the top of the page
:
Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the U.S.
Further down it referred to the possibility of hijackings. If I am asleep at the wheel of my car and that causes the death of innocents, then I am liable, and I can guarantee you that I AM GOING TO JAIL. Forget for a moment the premeditated crimes of this administration. Just the outright negligence and incompetence of this band of C students has caused so much suffering from New Orleans to every classroom of every school in this once-great nation where nearly every child was left behind. Now a half-generation has been done in and sent down the road to social, civic, and cultural stupidity.
And if I were to, right now, right here in this book, list the name or names of covert CIA agents—an action that could lead to their death or disappearance—I can guarantee you that there will be search warrants issued, and calls will be made to try me for treason.
I say all of this with no desire for vengeance or one ounce of vindictiveness in my heart toward George W. Bush. Contrary to what many of you may assume, I harbor no hatred of him. I have never uttered the words, “I hate George Bush.” Hatred of another person is a vile place to exist, and it does more damage to you than to the object of your hatred. You can hate what he does—and I do—but to hate him as a human being is useless and often sinks you to his level.
So, my desire for his arrest this coming January 20 at 12:01pm is only about this one thing: are we a nation of laws, or not? If we are, then we will have committed a crime ourselves if we allow Bush & Co. to escape without being brought to justice. The point is not so much to imprison them because they will remain a threat to the public at large or to imprison them in order to rehabilitate them. Let’s all agree on this one point: there is NO WAY to rehabilitate Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld. They will go to their deathbeds unrepentant and unchanged. Their fate is best left in the hands of a Higher Power.
The reason they must stand trial is to prevent high crimes such as theirs from ever occurring again. If we let them go without having to answer for their actions, trust me, we will relive this horror show with some other administration somewhere else down the line. THAT is why we must pursue indictments against them and their list of crimes. Imagine the message the perp walk will send to future presidents if they even consider starting an illegal war or raiding the people’s treasury to line the pockets of their friends. I’m not talking so much about punishment of the current president as I am about prevention of the next rogue commander in chief. Is that not worth it? Is it not our duty to insist that such trials take place? Are we a nation of laws—or not?
If the answer is “not,” do we leave it to someone else to set us straight? To clean up the neighborhood and rid the government of an out-of-control criminal element? How would this be done? Do we even want to consider the ramifications?
