Reply #13: There's also a big difference between voter suppression and fraud [View All]

[ohioan]

The vast majority of the problems with this election occurred through voter suppression, not fraud. If voter suppression is done well enough, fraud is not necessary - if you can suppress the opposition vote turnout effectively, you can win through an honest count. My belief is that, in this election, voter suppression was rampant and may or may not have made the difference in Bush's victory - we'll never know if enough votes were suppressed to make the difference.

Voter suppression is a long-term, nuanced and complicated effort that takes much more difficult to root out and address and takes considerably more time. It involves years of creating an atmosphere in which you control the levers of the voting process (stacking state offices - particularly the top state elections officers' seats - with partisans, gradually taking control of state legislatures, filling the federal district and circuit courts with eager ideologues, etc.), combined with clever and effective voter intimidation tactics. As long as we obsess over after-the-fact voter fraud - which occurred, but not nearly in the volume that some seem to believe - while ignoring the more serious, complex and pervasive problem of voter suppression, we're missing the big picture and will never catch up.