Imagine making enough noise to attract world attention and support for the cause.

Hat’s Off To the Ukrainians

My hat is off to the brave Ukrainian citizens, fighting, as they are to uphold our War president’s commitment to democracy through honest elections.  This enormous show of liberation deserves my utmost respect.

            Imagine having the freedom and gumption to stand up to the government and refuse to accept a final outcome as long as questions surround the integrity of the election.  Imagine a candidate who doesn’t concede amid doubt, and lends credibility to the voices of the voters willing to protest on his behalf.  Imagine making enough noise to attract world attention and support for the cause.

            What I have trouble imagining is that the world isn’t laughing at us.  Our Warmonger president has publicly demanded that the Ukrainian government delve into election complaints when he failed to do the same in his own country.  He calls them on the carpet while he brags to the world that he fully intends to go forward with a sham of an election in Iraq, the country his troops occupy, a country where thousands of citizens are displaced, where there is no electricity, and no way for the candidates to campaign or get information to the citizens.  He does all of this on the heels of Whitewashing the election in Afghanistan.

            While the Ukrainians protest the presidential election they believe was stolen by their current regime, our White elephant winks and wriggles past an investigation that indicates the crisis of democracy in Kiev isn’t any worse than the one taking place in Washington, D.C.  Perhaps, if American citizens had poured into the streets protesting, threatening to boycott, and hinting there would be a civil war if the problems weren’t resolved, our election results would still be pending investigation and we wouldn’t look like hypocrites to the world.

If American citizens had the benefit of a mainstream media brave enough to defy their own current regime and focus on our questionable election instead of the election in Ukraine, the world might demand a full investigation here as well.  They might know that Wyoming had 106% voter turnout, and that counties in Ohio and Florida also reported greater than 100% turnout.  They would know that poll workers in Maryland found scattered problems with electronic voting machines, including computer crashes, incorrect ballots, shortages of ballots, and touch screens that failed to work.

They might know about the strange lockdown in Warren County, and that there were three and four hour waits in many places.  They would have heard how the Republican party instructed hired workers to destroy registrations of people who marked a preference for the Democratic party on their registration forms, and suspect those were the people required to cast provisional ballots on election day.  They might question why many of those provisional ballots were never counted, and ask how Republican registrations were filed in Florida without knowledge of the people who had supposedly registered.  They might be disgusted to hear about the threatening and misleading letters and phone calls the Republican Party delivered to voters before the election. 

They would know that Cuyahoga County rejected one of three provisional ballots because they couldn’t find registrations for people who had stood an hour in the pouring rain to cast their provisional votes.  They would know the Florida felon list was as unreliable this time as it was in 2000, and that Florida officials knew but chose to use those lists anyway.

Since we involve ourselves in the democracy and elections of the world, they deserve to know about the shady findings surrounding Sequoia Pacific, one of America’s two major election companies.  Everyone deserves to know about previous charges of blatant bribery of public officials made against this company, and their numerous felony convictions for crimes related to illegal vote tampering, and their connections to Abe Fortas, the only Supreme Court Justice ever asked to resign after a scandal involving an election.  Wait.  The rest of the world probably does know these things.  We are the ones who have to search for this information.

Maybe the world knows about the University of California Berkeley’s announcement of findings of irregularities in three Florida counties that have resulted in 260,000 unexplainable votes for the War president (so far).  They might know that several times during voting machine testing, votes Susan Barnecker cast for herself were electronically recorded for her opponent, that Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of front companies in which executives have been convicted on election bribery charges, and that in counties where their name never surfaced, Sequoia supplied both computer and punch card systems.

While my hat is off, I don’t want to forget the citizens of Peru and Chile.  I celebrate their demonstration of free speech, and look forward to the day we are allowed to speak as openly to the War president.  Isn’t that one of the freedoms our military is killing and being killed to protect?

 Sandy Knauer, author of six published novels, bringing politics and social issues to fiction, and heart to political and social issue articles.  http://www.geocities.com/sandyknauer