Harold Pinter acknowledgement speech

[kandrathe]

I think we here in Europe had a fairly good chance to judge the legitimacy of this election, based on huge media coverage due to its importance. True, we may not have seen everything, but neither did the U.S. citizens. I don't really want to elaborate on this, just let me drop a few goodies for you:
- The insufficiently comprehensible ballots
- The exertion of influence on certain groups (liberal blacks, for example)
- The discrepancies in the counting of the votes, that lead to a re-counting in the first place
- The re-recounting, which was controversially truncated by the jurisdiction
Now, do you really think it's mere coincidence that the U.N. sent election observers the next time the election took place (2004)? Similarly to a third-world-nation after a coup d'état, really.

The ballots and election equipment were the same or improved over prior elections, and still however simple they were, it resulted in some people not being able to comprehend them. I'm not sure what you mean by "The exertion of influence on certain groups", but there is a struggle in every part of the US relating to gerrymandering, and trying to rig and influence elections with "get out the vote", or negative ads meant to get some people from voting. There was a pretty outrageous case near me where 95 people were charged with with forgery, and another in Iowa I recall where a person lied their way into being a delegate for the Iowa republican convention. Both cases were prosecuted and the people convicted. The laws are clear on manipulations that you describe, and they are prosecuted locally. The election laws automatically call for a recount when the margin of victory is small. What became obvious was that in many past elections there was a small precentage of votes that never did get counted (because statistically they would not change the outcome). In Florida, due to the punched cards, the disposed of ballots were a larger percentage. The democrats made great political hay with "Every Vote Will Be Counted" in the next election, as if they were not a part of the problem in past years. As for " truncated by the jurisdiction", the recount of the recount was stopped, because the Florida law stated that the election results needed to be posted within a certain time after the election. The courts stopped the "recounts" from becoming a statewide recount and the fishing for votes to end. Do you think if had gone the other way, and the Gore camp had been allowed to selectively recount juridictions until they found a victory that the Republican losers would have called the election fair? As for the UN election observers in 2004... Was it more political hay, holding the US up for ridicule, waste of time and money, or all of the above? I noticed also how much fraud was discovered in subsequent European elections once people started scrutinizing them closely.

Sorry, but that is for them to know and for us to speculate. To state this is easy, to prove it  - not. And they haven't produced enough convincing evidence that this step was actually justifiable, yet. So far, that you call this 'qualified' makes me laugh bitterly.  In how far that holds true, I don't know. I lack the knowledge. And you? Or are you telling me the wisdoms from the regulars' table that you know to be true, and that surely don't have their origin in the (dis-)information campaign of the bush (to be fair, that's not a feature of the Bush government exclusively. But since that's what we're talking about...) administration, right?

And see, that is why we have elections every two to four years. If enough people are disillusioned with the current leadership of the nation, we can put different people into the seat. There is a bitter majority in Europe that loves the Clintons and hates the Bush's, but in this country there was just barely the numbers to get him elected, and re-elected. After 9/11, the world was behind the US in getting pay back, however there was little backwards Afghanistan, and... what? Saudi Arabia? Iraq was the target, way back to the first Bush administration and that should have been clear to those that voted for him in 2000, and certainly crystal clear for those who reelected him in 2004. But, let's refocus on the "Axis of Evil" and review what has been done tangibly to improve that problem. Anything? I don't see anything, do you? In fact, it might just be a little worse off now. Maybe it's the Casto strategy, to isolate them as best we can and let them rot until their despots die.