Red State / Blue State: Election Fraud

[WritersBlock]

There's a post over on GD: Politics about red-state bashing. I posted this in response, and thought it would be relevant to this forum. It's a LTE I sent to the Buzzflash mailbag a couple of weeks after the election. With everything that's come out in the past few weeks, I believe the sentiment is even more timely today.

A good friend just forwarded me a colorfully-worded tirade about "red states." I had seen it before, and felt exactly in tune with it when I first read it. I think I'd even forwarded it on once or twice.

But I've since thought about it a lot, and now I feel differently. Because if I believe all those states really went red, then I'm believing exactly what the Republicans want me to believe - that the majority of Americans voted for Bush.

And I just don't believe that. There were so many people standing in line for so many hours; I am unable to seriously entertain the notion that most of them endured that wait in order to cast a ballot reflecting satisfaction with the incumbent. There are too many patterns - very obvious patterns - in the discrepancies between the exit polls and the final results. Patterns of almost exact mirror-image reversals cannot logically be of random origin. There were too many reports of difficulties in registering and voting; I could go on and on.

So I figure that I can believe one of two things. I can believe that most people voted for Bush and all those states actually went red, or I can believe that there was election fraud. I can't believe both of those things, because they contradict each other. I have no real choice but to believe the latter; not merely because I'm disappointed with the outcome, but because there is so much evidence pointing toward it, and so little evidence pointing toward the former.

Which brings me back again to the "red state/blue state" issue. If I believe there was fraud, then it follows that I must also believe those states (or at least most of them) weren't actually red. But if I continue the red-state bashing, even in jest, it plays right into the Republicans' hands because it indicates that I accept their doctored version of the results.

And I damn sure don't do that.

[Hekate]

1. Quite right. When it comes to divisiveness, it helps to ask...

...who does it serve? As you noticed, it serves Bush-Cheney-Rove to have the country be divided against itself. The only thing they want us united in is fear.

Hekate

[xchrom]

2. i feel different ways on different days

but what i do know -- is that there is a huge gap and it's growing between the citizens of this country.
i do not have anything in common with free marketers, fundies, militia types, etc beyond breathing air.
there is something seriously wrong with the way tens of millions of americans are thinking and acting and it's not benign.

[tngledwebb]

3. There are too many dangerous right-wingers, true enough.

But still would like to believe that most Americans, even a good half of the Republicans, are not that far apart on the key issues.

Most of us want real democracy, want honest elections, want to keep the social safety net, do not want to be in Iraq, or to continue invading other countries illegally, do not want to privatize Social Security, or destroy the environment, or act in total isolation from the rest of the world.

And most, but certainly not all, are still not fascistic, fundie religious, and are not, at least not irredeemably, racist, homophobic, or sexist.

Or so I would like to believe.