Here is a story about American elections from the United Arab Emirates. It reads like some bizarre radio signal bounce from a distant star, unclear, filled with static, hazy and skewed. (This was a plot in a movie, Contact??, where audio of Hitler radio transmissions returned to Earth in a retransmission that took light years).
The article’s strange start:
“Imagine a country without an election commission, where the state makes no effort to prepare an electoral register at national, regional, or provincial level, where it is left to citizens get themselves on the register, and where the ruling party in every province writes the rules and procedures for registration and then conducts the poll and the count. Imagine a country where a federal court decision has been necessary to bar voter intimidation by party supporters who demand to see voters’ identification at polling stations, challenge voters’ credentials, film them as they vote, distribute leaflets stating the penalties for voting fraud, and bombard selected neighbourhoods with junk mail, which is often returned undelivered and then used by party zealots to claim that the voters concerned do not live at the addresses shown on the electoral roll.”
Game on. I’ll imagine it. But it isn’t the United States of America.
“Voter intimidation in the US is hardly new, and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law has published several reports on the Republicans’ methods for interfering with citizens’ freedom to vote.”
My heavens, the Soros funded Brennan Center has cred in the Gulf States? It seems so:
“Voter fraud minimal: The fact is, however, that there is almost no voter fraud in the US.”
The lecture from the mideast continues:
“Yet the Republican allegations of voter fraud, however devoid of proof, divert the media from a deadly serious threat to American democracy, namely the bewildering variety of electoral registration processes which Republican-held states in particular have created.”
The only thing bewildering is whether this slop was run through a Google translator or if people somewhere in the United Arab Emirates really wrote this in English.
And now the signal skip from a distant star, about 2.5 light years away: “The lawyer, David Iglesias, who is in fact a Republican supporter, added that his political seniors were looking for ‘improperly politicised US attorneys’ to file bogus cases. The Bush administration then sacked him and six of his colleagues for refusing to bring illegal prosecutions in ‘baseless cases against innocent citizens.’”
David Iglesias?! Doesn’t he have a book? I believe so, but I have forgotten the title.