Supervision to ensure fairness

The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE), which received the request, said it would send a team to the US this September to determine whether it would accept the invitation. Previously, it had sent ten observers to the 2002 mid-term elections in Florida and two observers to California during the gubernatorial recall election won by body-builder turned movie actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Alan Ereli, deputy spokesman for the US State Department, which made the request, said, "If we're going to do it for emerging democracies, we also need to do it for ourselves." I can't recall truer words coming from a Bush administration spokesman.

November 2, the date for one of the most important elections ever, not just for my country but for the global community, is fast approaching. But many Americans are wondering will we have a voting fiasco similar to the one we experienced in 2000 when the drawn out and embarrassing recount in Florida ended up before a sharply divided Supreme Court. Amidst much confusion, Bush, Jr. was finally declared the winner in a 5-4 decision. Doubting Americans including yours truly believe the Republicans stole the election. Last July, Representative Corrine Brown (D-Florida) called Bush's victory as it was: a "United States coup d'etat. We need to make sure that it doesn't happen again," Brown said.

In a challenge to the Bush administration, Brown said, "Over and over again, after the election, when you stole the election, you came back here (Florida) and said, 'get over it'. No, we're not going to 'get over it' and we want verification from the world." Brown and 12 of her congressional colleagues called for UN supervision of the November elections. The US House subsequently censured Brown, and her remarks were stricken from the Congressional Record. But while the historical record can be altered, Bush officials and supporters can't hide the fact that many Floridians, particularly African-Americans, are still outraged by the way their votes were counted in Florida in 2000.

A poll conducted last July by the Florida Sun Sentinel and the Florida-Times Union newspaper found that two-thirds of African-Americans had no confidence in the voting system as compared to one-third of whites. In the 2000 election, more than one million blacks voted, but many of the votes were nullified by tossed ballots and purged voters' rolls. Last August in a speech in Washington DC, before the Unity Conference, the largest gathering of journalists of colour in UShistory, President George Bush, Jr., in his typically clumsy and weird manner, tried to reassure African- Americans that their vote will count this November. "Just don't focus on Florida," Bush advised the conference. "I'll talk to the governor down there to make sure it works."

The governor "down there," of course, Jeb Bush, the president's brother. African-Americans will need more of a guarantee than the assurance of a politician, whose policies have made him one of the most unpopular presidents among African-Americans in the country's post-apartheid era. Moreover, African-Americans in Florida don't trust Jeb Bush and with good reason. Looking at recent developments in Florida, it's easy to conclude that the Bush administration in Florida is making moves that look deliberately designed to frustrate Blacks who might want to vote and perhaps might even be designed to disenfranchise them.

Most states allow felons to vote, but not Florida. In 2000, the state of Florida hired a firm to purge supposed felons from a list of registered voters. On Election Day, those peoplemost of them Democratic leaning African-Americanswere turned away from the polls. In the uproar that followed, Florida newspapers investigated and found that 8,000 of the purged voters had committed mere misdemeanours and not felonies and so were eligible to vote. With Bush winning by 537 votes, the conclusion is easy to draw. This year, Florida again hired a private company to prepare a list of 47,000 ex-felons. Investigations by the Miami Herald and Tampa Tribune newspapers found that the new list contained Democrats by a three-to-one margin and contained no Hispanics, an ethnic group that tends to vote Republican in Florida.

This past August 12, Florida election officials mailed to Florida counties the names of nearly 1,000 voters they now say never should have been purged from voter records during the 2000 election. The move was the result of mediation for a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups. Many blacksas well as whitesin Florida are suspicious of the new electronic voting system that has been brought in to replace the so-called "hanging chads," the small pieces of paper that jammed the punch card machines during the 2000 election. And well they should be. Election officials have no paper records to back up the system, if the new touch-screen machines go haywire, meaning that they have no way to recount the vote.

The Bush administration in Florida has refused numerous requests to put in place a paper backup system. And get thisthe Republican led state legislature has exempted the machines from any kind of recount as required for other voting methods.

Florida election officials have assured the public that the new system will work. Yet, when Florida had its first major test of touch-screen voting in March 2002, the computers failed to start properly, and the bureaucrats overseeing the technology acted like they didn't know what they were doing. The loser in the election, Janet Reno, Bill's Clinton's former Attorney General, lost by just 4,794 votes.

This August, Florida officials found archival data from the 2002 gubernatorial primary election in Miami Dade County courthouse, adding another example to the growing list of cases electronic voting opponents cite when criticising touch screen voting machines. Will Doherty, Executive Director of Voting.org. Inc., a group advocating a paper trail for electronic records, said, "It's not acceptable for electronic records to be lost, even if temporarily."

Election-related developments in Florida has led the New York Times to comment: "Florida's election system was an total disgrace in 2000 and it's well on its way to being one again."

Florida is the biggest voting swing state, and it could well decide the election this November as it did in 2000. Recent polls show Kerry is widening his lead over Bush in the state, but given the spectre of electoral corruption in Florida, it could be a different story on Election Day when the votes count.

Public confidence that the electoral system will work to make each vote count is essential to a well-functioning democracy. But African-American leaders say that they are meeting many young blacks who don't plan to register to vote because they feel their vote won't count. Other blacks who distrust the new electronic voting system plan to stay away as well. The failure of the Bush family and its Republican machine to ensure fair elections threatens to make the US the laughing stock of the world democracies come November. Sad to say, achieving victory at any cost seems more important to the Bush administration than does ensuring the health and viability of the American system.

Daily Star columnist Ron Chepesiuk is a Visiting Professor of Journalism at Chittagong University and a Research Associate with the National Defence College.