By Sean Wilentz
First published by the Los Angeles Times, Nov 7, 2004

“It’s the secular coasts versus the religious heartland,” CNN’s Tucker Carlson says of this year’s election results. That sums up the conventional wisdom that right-wing Republicans would prefer that you believe and that too many of the rest of us do believe. The effete liberal coasts against the Real America. Situational morality against real morality. Relativism against Standards. Metrosexuals against the God-fearing.

Wrong. The real electoral division isn’t between the coasts and the heartland. It’s between cities all over the United States and the rest of the country.

In every state in the Union, red states included, Sen. John F. Kerry performed disproportionately well in urban areas. Kerry actually carried, sometimes convincingly, cities in some of the deepest-red red states that are about as far from coastal secularism as you can imagine.

Missouri, for example, broke 54% to 46% for Bush – except the city of St. Louis, which voted overwhelmingly for Kerry.

Nobody ever really took seriously Kerry’s chances of carrying Texas. But in El Paso, he won 56% of the vote. What is so “secular,” so bicoastal, so effete about El Paso?

Alabama is supposed to be the buckle of the pro-GOP Bible Belt. But don’t say that too loudly in Montgomery County, eponymous home to the state capital, which came in with a Kerry majority, as did Dallas County, home to the city of Selma, which voted for Kerry by a 60% to 40% margin.

From Richmond, Va., to Jackson, Miss., from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Columbia, S.C., the Democratic ticket either won outright or ran well ahead of statewide totals.

Now let us reverse the terms. New York is a huge blue state. On Tuesday, though, it was a sea of red, except for some tiny blue dots around New York City, Albany, bits of Long Island and a few other places. California, the quintessence of Carlson’s secular coast, was also pretty solidly red, except for L.A., San Francisco and San Diego.

The California pattern may seem, at first glance, to suit the stereotype. Everybody knows about “San Francisco Democrats” and the fleshpots of L.A. But Memphis, Tenn.? Selma, Ala.?

The reasons for the city-country divide are obvious. Cities are home, disproportionately, to wage earners, civil service employees, racial minorities and immigrants – and those people are overwhelmingly Democrats. The cities are where those who are still hoping to cash in on the American dream pray and work – except for those domestic servants who commute to the suburbs to clean the houses of those who have already cashed in on the American dream.

The cities are also, of course, the homes to all of those artsy intellectuals, entertainment industry elitists and limousine liberals whom the GOP and its backers like to demonize. But these liberal elite enclaves are tiny even within the cities where they are located. The minority and immigrant vote in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Harlem dwarfs the numbers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and Greenwich Village. The same holds true, to say the least, of the secular liberal elite’s grip on Montgomery, Ala.

The urban-rural split has been a perennial feature our political history. In 1896, the last time the national election map closely resembled that of today – with the Northeast and the West Coast seeming to go one way, and most of the rest of the country another – the Democrats were the party of the countryside and the Republicans the party of the city. Unlike today, the clash was explicit, pitting the agrarian values of populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan against the pro-business industrialism of Republican, William McKinley.

“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country,” Bryan proclaimed in the famous speech that gained him the nomination.

In 2004, there is a harder and even more inflammatory aspect to the split, usually mentioned only in code: divisions of race. Although most black Americans live in the South, and in non-metropolitan regions, the fact remains that our cities, in every area of the country, are as a rule more heavily African American than they were in Bryan’s and McKinley’s time. Not surprisingly, because blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic, many of the bluest cities in the red states are those with the largest black voting presence. Richmond (58.1%), Memphis (61.4%) and Jackson (71.1%) rank among the top 10 cities with large and concentrated black populations.

By perpetuating the easy impression of a nation divided into coastal liberals and heartland conservatives, reporters and commentators are misleading themselves and their audiences about the actual political state of the Union. Without realizing it, they are also advancing the picture of the nation advanced by the GOP culture warriors, feeding the despair and paranoia of coastal liberals and writing off millions of Americans in every part of the country.

Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University.

© 2004 LA Times

By Jeff Milchen
Published by the Pacific News Service, Sept 29, 2004

George W. Bush’s father, a five-time participant in events staged by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), described them this way: “…it’s too much show business and too much prompting, too much artificiality, and not really debates. They’re rehearsed appearances.”

The problems began in 1988, when the League of Women Voters halted its long-time sponsorship of the debates over bi-partisan attempts to turn them into glorified infomercials. The League officially stated, “We have no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American people.”

After the League’s withdrawal, the Republican and Democratic parties immediately seized the opportunity to control the debates with their own bi-partisan group, the CPD. Chaired by former heads of the respective parties, the CPD simply executes agreements made by the major party candidates and shields them from accountability for actions such as choosing sound-bite exchanges over real debate and excluding viable candidates from outside the dominant parties. The 32-page Kerry/Bush agreement forbids direct exchanges between candidates, limits follow-up questions and controls details right down to podium and camera angles.

Though few citizens’ know the full story, millions apparently recognize the events have ceased to be genuinely informative. From 1976 to 1984, 60-80 million viewers watched each debate hosted by the non-partisan League. But since then, Americans have tuned out the CPD’s staged events in droves. CPD events have averaged just 40 million viewers in the past two elections. Sixty percent of households tuned in to watch the Carter-Reagan debate in 1980 (in which candidates had a respectable 4 minutes per answer) compared to 30 percent of households dialing into the last Bush-Gore battle of 2 minute (maximum) sound bites in 2000. Though the numbers rebounded in the first 2004 debate, even with 60 million more potential U.S. viewers since 1984, viewership still is down.

What’s made the events so unappealing? The restrictive rules and shorter response times have enabled many scripted and evasive answers. Even the “town hall” debate is largely a facade, with CPD moderators screening questions from the pre-selected audience and forbidding any follow-up. The Kerry and Bush campaigns specified that the microphone must be cut if any participants deviate from the question approved by the moderator.

The lack of direct exchanges and moderators who stick tightly to standard stump speech topics may be the greatest injury to voters. Among key issues that never were mentioned in any 2000 presidential debate were: corporate power or corporate crime, the “drug war,” population growth, immigration and “free trade.” The only mention of labor referred to banning their soft money contributions. Will any moderator challenge the candidates about corporate power over elections or scandals like Halliburton and Enron this year? It will take exceptional courage as long as CPD events are staged for their owners’ benefit, not voters’.

And while more money than ever is being spent on youth voter registration, the CPD events send the message that their concerns don’t matter. While seniors and social security each were referenced more than 60 times during three debates in 2000, neither teenagers nor college students were mentioned at all — and every debate occurred on a college campus!

The narrow range of topics is linked to shutting out viable independent and “third party” candidates (except when both are convinced the outsider will help them, as with Ross Perot in 1992). For 2004, the major parties decreed that 15 percent of the public must indicate plans to vote for a candidate for him to be invited to the debate club. That’s an impossibly high bar, given that most news outlets never have mentioned that three candidates other than Bush, Kerry and Ralph Nader all have earned ballot positions in enough states to win an Electoral College majority (David Cobb, Green Party; Michael Badnarik, Libertarian Party; and Michael Peroutka, Constitution Party). Voters of every ideology lose when our choices are dictated by the two dominant parties.

This year, the organization I direct, Reclaim Democracy!, was proud to help launch a new and truly non-partisan Citizens’ Debate Commission (CDC) to challenge the CPD’s control and provide real debates, rather than sound-bite volleys. These debates would feature direct exchanges between candidates, set fair candidate participation criteria and address a wide range of pressing issues.

The CDC is supported by more than 60 civic groups as diverse as the American electorate, including leaders of the Free Congress Foundation, Judicial Watch, Youth Vote Coalition, Common Cause, the TransAfrica Forum and, tellingly, the former producer of the CPD debates. Yet most major media (with notable exceptions like the L.A. Times) have ignored the challenge entirely, much like the major parties deny voters’ rights to know their full options.

Simply exposing the CPD’s illegitimacy and directly challenging its control has forced it to adopt some of our plan, like varying moderators, lengthening rebuttal time, and allowing some follow-up questions and surrebuttals. It also led to the Memorandum of Understanding between candidates being released for the first time, which in turn produced more critical media coverage than ever before.

But that’s not enough when it comes to the single most influential forum for Americans trying to decide whether to vote and who to vote for. We all deserve debates that serve democracy, not two political parties. The Citizens’ Debate Commission is ready to serve that role and could well succeed by the next presidential election — if, that is, Americans step up and demand the change.

At the time of writing, Jeff Milchen directed Reclaim Democracy!, a non-profit organization working to revitalize American democracy. 

See our overview of the presidential debates and the need for reform.

“Spoilage” Rates Determined by Technology, Not Voters

In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. “Spoiled votes” is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them — half of the rejected ballots — were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate.

This year, it could get worse.

These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-’round.

How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It’s easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost.

While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played — with black voters the predetermined losers.

Florida’s Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state — and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in “Al Gore.” Optical reading machines rejected these because “Al” is a “stray mark.”

By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee’s white-majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it.

In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed.

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter.

But let’s not get smug about Florida’s Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation.

Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, “It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. — about 1 million votes — were cast by nonwhite voters.”

This “no count,” as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush’s office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures.

Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the “spoiled” votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It’s not surprising that the First Brother’s team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled.

The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation’s worst spoilage rates. That’s not surprising. Boss Daley’s Democratic machine, now his son’s, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago’s black vote.

How can we fix it? First, let’s shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida’s black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote.

This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county’s procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage.

In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking.

It is about to get worse. The ill-named “Help America Vote Act,” signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box.

California decertified some of Diebold Corp.’s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to low-tech spoilage games: polls opening late, locked-in votes, votes lost in the ether.

And once again, the history of computer-voting glitches has a decidedly racial bias. Florida’s Broward County grandly shifted to touch-screen voting in 2002. In white precincts, all seemed to go well. In black precincts, hundreds of African Americans showed up at polls with machines down and votes that simply disappeared.

Going digital won’t fix the problem. Canada and Sweden vote on paper ballots with little spoilage and without suspicious counts.

In America, a simple fix based on paper balloting is resisted because, unfortunately, too many politicians who understand the racial bias in the vote-spoilage game are its beneficiaries, with little incentive to find those missing 1 million black voters’ ballots.

Greg Palast is the author of ‘The Best Democracy Money Can Buy – the New Expanded Election Edition ,” from which this article is taken.

© 2004 Greg Palast