CWA 1180 - Political Action

Election analysis
2004 election spells bad news for workers, minorities and the rest of the world
January 2005

Protest the inauguration!

On January 20, George Bush will be sworn in as president. There are protests planned everywhere, ranging from rallies in Washington to student walk-outs in New York. For more information, you an visit the following websites:

Counter-inaugural 2005,
www.counter-inaugural.org

United for Peace and Justice,
www.unitedforpeace.org

"How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" asked the London Daily Mirror after the November 2 presidential election in the United States. Germany's daily Tageszeitung ran an English headline that said "Oops—they did it again," summing up the American electorate's inadvertent tribute to Britney Spears's political consciousness. The singer of the pop hit "Oops, I did it again" told CNN in 2003, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." In the end, post-election polling reveals, more people trusted George Bush to job a better job on the so-called "war on terrorism" than John Kerry.

Despite evidence of widespread efforts to suppress the vote, especially in low-income and minority areas, and evidence of voting irregularities and fraud, the painful reality is that George Bush did actually win the election this time. Four more years of Bush, Bush policies and Bush appointees spell very bad news for working people like Local 1180 members, and indeed for most of the people in the U.S. and around the world.

But in an effort to see the glass half full instead of half empty, or more realistically perhaps, a quarter full, it is worth noting that the election brought thousands and thousands of new activists into politics. Labor unions across the country (among others) mobilized like never before; and despite the disappointing result in the end, that mobilization can be the start of a permanent corps of politically engaged citizens and residents fighting for social and economic justice.

Local 1180 members certainly did their part. Dozens of union members gave up weekend days to travel to Pennsylvania, the closest "swing state," to talk to voters there about the election; 1180 was part of three separate trips to Pennsylvania during the campaign. The union's phonebanking operation this year targeted another swing state, Florida; members manned the phones nightly calling retirees in Florida to make a difference in that state.

While the national election results were a setback, the news from New York State elections was overwhelmingly positive for 1180 members. All of the state senate candidates that the union endorsed and supported won; these include Diane Savino, Jose Serrano, Liz Kreuger and Jeff Klein.

The Working Families Party (WFP) also did very well in the Empire State. The party, which 1180 helped found and build and in which many 1180 members are very active, got 120,000 votes on its ballot line in the presidential race (where it cross-endorsed Kerry) and 150,000 votes in the Senate race (where it cross-endorsed Charles Schumer). Most significantly, a WFP candidate, David Soares, won the district attorney election in Albany, defeating a longtime incumbent. This put the party firmly on the map as a statewide force to be reckoned with, and equally put the issue of reforming the Rockefeller drug laws on the political agenda.

Playing on voters' fears

Nationally, much has been made out of the difference between the "red states" and the "blue states" and the role that "moral values" supposedly played in Bush's election. Voters in 11 states voted to institutionalize discrimination against gays and lesbians by banning marriage, civil unions and domestic partnership for same-sex couples. President Bush, through his support of a federal constitutional amendment that would codify this kind of discrimination and his general appeal to religious conservatives, helped fuel this shocking display of bigotry. The consequence has been not just legal discrimination but a rise in violence against lesbians and gays. Since the introduction of the federal anti-gay amendment, violence against gays and lesbians has risen 27% nationally, and in New York City it is up an unprecedented 43%.

The initial analysis of the election results was that the concern for "moral values," evident in anti-gay and also anti-abortion issues, gave Bush the winning edge. Subsequent examination of polling data show, however, that the percentage of people basing their vote on "moral values" did not increase from the last election, and that concerns about terrorism provided the real explanation for the Bush vote. The Republican effort to make the election a referendum on the "war on terrorism," in other words, worked. Given that the "war on terror" includes the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, the Red Cross findings that the U.S. systematically uses torture in Guantanamo Bay, the estimated 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed by the U.S. since the "liberation" of Iraq and the Bush Administration's insistence on detaining both immigrants and citizens without access to counsel or the evidence against them, the sobering truth is that Americans voted to endorse crimes against humanity and the destruction of their own civil liberties. As with the homophobia that drove the anti-gay ballot initiatives, people voted from fear.

A part of the explanation for this outcome lies in John Kerry's failure to shine a light on the moral outrages of the Bush Administration. Kerry criticized the war as poorly managed, but pledged to fight it better rather than end it. He refused to ever mention the administration's human rights violations. He satisfied neither gays nor homophobes by saying he supported gay rights but not gay marriage. He did campaign on some important economic issues that distinguished him from Bush, but even there, he managed to obscure the clear moral principles at stake in opposing a regime that took endlessly from the poor and gave to the rich.

Vote suppression and vote fraud were also a factor in this election. The efforts to keep people, especially minorities and low-income people, who are more likely to vote Democratic, from voting were widespread and have been well documented. They range from election officials tearing up voter registration cards (in Nevada) to officials holding back additional voting machines in poor neighborhoods where long lines of voters were told their cars would be towed (in Ohio) to wrongfully purged voters having to seek clemency for crimes they did not commit in order to be reinstated on the rolls (in Florida), and much, much more.

Concern over the possibility of fraud came from several sources. One was individual examples of voting irregularies, such as the precinct in Franklin County, Ohio, where the voting machines gave Bush an extra 3,893 votes out of a total of 638 votes. A larger concern was the unverified electronic voting machines with no paper trail—in other words, no way to recount or check the votes. The electronic machines made by Diebold were considered so vulnerable to computer hackers that California banned them. Meanwhile, 30% of all U.S. votes are now unverified touch-screen votes with no paper trail. Lastly, the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official vote counts in Ohio (4%), Pennsylvania (5%) and Florida (7%), as well as other states, in every single case favoring Bush, are an unexplained mystery. One expert calculated the statistical chance of such errors occurring by chance in those three states alone at 600,000 to one.

None of this is hard evidence of fraud, but it does raise alarm bells about the integrity of the U.S. election process. Shortly after the election, six Congressional representatives sent a letter to the government's General Accounting Office (GAO) demanding an immediate investigation into the election. That investigation is now underway.

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