Reply #63: I disagree that Americans are still self-determined, due to the fact that [View All]

[Zorra]

we vote under circumstances where substantial numbers of people are dissuaded and/or prevented, and have been prevented, from voting by members of the republican party, in order to get their candidate selected to office. For example, approximately 58,000 voters were deliberately deleted from voter roles in Florida prior to the 2000 Presidential Election by the obviously very partisan Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris:

In November the U.S. media, lost in patriotic reverie, dressed up the Florida recount as a victory for President Bush. But however one reads the ballots, Bush's win would certainly have been jeopardized had not some Floridians been barred from casting ballots at all. Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

In the process, however, the list invariably targets a minority population in Florida, where 31 percent of all black men cannot vote because of a ban on felons. In compiling a list by looking at felons from other states, Florida could, in the process, single out citizens who committed felons in other states but, after serving their time or successfully petitioning the courts, had their voting rights returned to them. According to Florida law, felons can vote once their voting rights have been reinstated.

And if this unfairly singled out minorities, it unfairly handicapped Gore: In Florida, 93 percent of African-Americans voted for the vice president.

In the 10 counties contacted by Salon, use of the central voter file seemed to vary wildly. Some found the list too unreliable and didn't use it at all. But most counties appear to have used the file as a resource to purge names from their voter rolls, with some counties making little -- or no -- effort at all to alert the "purged" voters. Counties that did their best to vet the file discovered a high level of errors, with as many as 15 percent of names incorrectly identified as felons.

http://dir.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/index.html

This is just one of the numerous dirty tricks used by the republican party to insure the selection of republican candidates, particularly Bu*h, to office.

These widely assorted problems are well documented and some have been addressed, unsuccessfully, by members of Congress, because republican legislators refuse to address these issues.

Also, approximately one-third of registered voters in the US are forced to vote on electronic voting machines, that are manufactured almost exclusively by companies owned and run members of the republican party, are documentably open to the manipulation of vote count, and produce no verifiable physical evidence to the voter that her/his vote was counted or counted correctly.

So I must disagree with you that we are still self-determined, and that the international community has no reason to believe that Americans are capable of self-determination. Bu*h would not have been selected pResident without the help of the Machiavellian tactics used by republicans in the 2000, and if you ever have the opportunity to discuss the 2000 election, (as I have, at length), you will find that the majority of informed persons in many other countries look at our voting process as a joke, and view the US as nothing more than a very powerful and dangerous "banana republic".

And the international community is, for the most part, not equipped ideologically or militarily to impose their type of political system on others. Few countries, have the desire, ideology, and resources to engage in the overthrow a sovereign nation.