26th November 2000

Florida fiasco bares US democratic hypocrisy

“Election Stolen”, “Presidency Hijacked”, “Voters Defrauded.” These were some of the catchy headlines from newspapers across the country.

Last week, an organisation called NewsMax.Com even ran an ad in the New York Times captioned “Vote Fraud”.

The ad said that millions of Americans are outraged that “one of our most sacred rights — the right to vote — has been desecrated by voter fraud.”

Since election day November 7, the world’s model democracy has remained deadlocked over a growing constitutional crisis: Who should be the next president of the United States?.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who is routinely assailed by rightwing American politicians for perpetuating a one-party, one-man dictatorship in the island neighbouring Florida, is perhaps having the last laugh.

In a fictitious quote attributed to him, Castro is supposed to have told a visiting US politician:

“You Americans could have avoided all this confusion if you had just one name on the ballot”.

Perhaps it is a quote that could also be attributed to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak who, every six years, is religiously “elected” to office by 99.9 percent of voters in a presidential election described either as a “yes-or-no referendum” or a farce.

A former leader of the much-despised American Communist Party was once asked why he wanted America to take the insidious path towards totalitarianism.

“If we had a Communist nation,” he declared, “we wouldn’t have elections any more.”

Nor would the US have been embroiled in the current political brouhaha which is also splitting the country on party lines.

But humour aside — Americans are made of sterner stuff. The US has always claimed to be the last bastion of multi-party democracy. The rest of the world is expected to look up to it.

In several African countries, US aid has either been cut or drastically reduced as a punishment against rigged ballots, stolen elections and, as Secretary-General Kofi Annan would say, “fig-leaf democracies”.

But that same yardstick — for “free and fair elections” and multi-party democracy — has not been used to measure the political worthiness or unworthiness of some of America’s strongest allies in the Gulf.

These are countries, mostly family-run hereditary regimes, or they are oil companies “with a nameplate and a seat at the United Nations”.

But these countries assure uninterrupted supplies of cheap oil, and in return, buy billions of dollars worth of sophisticated US weapons systems, much of it remaining unopened in warehouses, as was evidenced during the 1991 Gulf War.

In his recently-released book titled “From Third World to First”, the former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who himself ran one of Asia’s most authoritarian regimes, couldn’t resist the temptation of taking a swing at the United States.

“After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans have become as dogmatic and evangelical as the Communists were,” he says.

“They want to promote democracy and human rights everywhere, except where it would hurt themselves — as in the oil-rich Arabian peninsula,” he adds.

In a tongue-in-cheek piece last week, the Washington Post reported that “the indomitable Voice of America (VOA) editorialized sharply against the fraudulent election in Kyrgyzstan.”

Then on November 16, the Post said the VOA blasted the recent parliamentary elections in Azerbaijan, where international election observers called the vote-counting process “completely flawed.”

“The US calls on Azerbaijani authorities to investigate and correct violations of election procedures. Results have already been cancelled in at least one election district where serious violations took place. The US is ready to assist Azerbaijan in this process,” the VOA is quoted as saying.

Until now, the flaws in the US democratic electoral system have never been exposed.

And no one is even certain which is more reliable in the presidential electoral process: the hand-count or the machine-count.

Outside most American cities are signs that give the name of the city and the number of people living there.

Late night comedian Jay Leno, who is having a ball crucifying politicians, joked that a new sign has come up at the entrance to the capital of Florida.

The sign reads: Welcome to Florida. Population: 15.9 million (machine-count) 16.2 million (hand-count).