Greg Palast has some thoughts on that here. Basically, the Democrats don't want to make waves. They don't comprehend the total ruthlessness of what the Republicans are doing in hijacking elections in this country. Disturbing excerpts:
In Florida [2000], 179,855 ballots supposedly showed no vote for President. A closer look by the US Civil Rights Commission statisticians showed that 54% of those Florida "votos nulos" were cast by African-Americans. Did Black folk forget to vote for President, couldn't make up their minds or, as one TV network implied, were too dumb to figure out the ballot? Not at all. Machines can't count some ballots. But people can. For example, several voters wrote in, "Al Gore," which the machines rejected as his name was already printed on the ballot. The write-in could fool a machine but a human has no problem figuring out that voter's intent.
The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reviewed all 179,855 "uncountable" votes and found the majority attempted to choose Gore. And they would have been counted -- but Florida's Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, ordered a halt.
So Bush was elected not by counting the votes but by preventing their count. And he was reelected the same way in 2004 when a quarter million votes were nullified in Ohio.
But why fixate on Florida and Ohio? Here's a nasty little fact about voting in the Land of the Free not reported in your newspapers: 3,600,380 ballots were cast in the November 2004 presidential election that were never counted. In 2000, the uncounted ballots totaled just under two million.
And where were the Democrats? In 2004, behind the huge jump in uncounted votes was a mass challenge campaign aimed at poor, Black and Hispanic voters by the Republican Party -- pushing these voters, mostly Democrats, to "provisional ballots." They could have been counted, if someone had fought for it. Hundreds of lawyers were on stand-by but the head of the biggest legal team told me in confidence -- and in frustration -- that the Kerry campaign told them to stand down.
Recently, Al Gore was asked if the election of 2000 was stolen. "There may come a time when I speak on that, but it's not now," said the beta dog. (I suspect that if Al Gore were found bleeding in an alley, he'd answer the question, Who shot you? with "There may come a time when I speak on that...").
What is happening in this country needs to be shouted from the rooftops: Right-wing Republican criminals have seized control of the electoral machinery. In Florida in 2000, the ultimate state authority in running the election was Bush's campaign manager. In Ohio in 2004 the ultimate state authority in running the election was Bush's campaign manager. WTF?? What is it going to take to get the Democrats to call fraud what it is? The new Republican Gestapo tactics are vote suppression, mass voter challenges, purging voter rolls, and nullifying actual votes cast. These tactics have been successful because the Democrats don't have the cojones to fight back. The results of this failure to resist Republican election theft have been tragic in the extreme: the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-DeLay running of our government and a multitude of rightwing fanatics appointed to the federal bench. What more motivation do the Democrats need? A federal law banning the Democratic Party from being on the ballot at all?
The 2006 election coming up may be our last chance. We have to fight Republican election theft with all our might. Ohio's election is being run by all-out right wing lunatic and crook Kenneth Blackwell, who engineered the theft of Ohio in 2004. Hillary Clinton had the guts to call him on this a few days ago. When will the rest of us jump in the game?
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