BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—

BY encouraging (for electoral reasons) the liberation of the four international terrorists serving prison terms in Panama, George W. Bush has just added death, grief and terror to all those elements that have already ensured that the elections in Florida will be the dirtiest and most underhand in the nation’s history.
 
Managed by his brother, rigged with faulty machinery, maintained under profoundly racist legislation which denies voting rights to hundreds of thousands of people, the elections are now acquiring the singular feature that some of those votes are being bought with blood. With the blood of the victims of hunreds of acts of sabotage, murders and armed attacks unleashed against Cuba by individuals such as Luis Posada Carriles, Guillermo Novo Sampoll, Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo, and Pedro Crispin Remón,

An interesting coincidence: Anne Louise Bardch - the well-known reporter who, in the July 12, 1998 edition of The New York Times, published a confession by Luis Posada Carriles in which he admitted being the author of the campaign of terror carried out in 1997 in Cuba - has just written a very interesting analysis of the elections in Florida. And has denounced the disgusting methods employed by the Republicans to achieve their objectives at whatever price.

Entitled "Unlike the elections in Venezuela: Why is Florida’s voting system so corrupt?", the article, published by on-line magazine Slate (slate.msn.com), states that, following the scandalous 2000 elections, the majority of U.S. citizens believed that the state of Florida and the federal authorities would take measures to ensure that the country would never experience such a disastrous situation again. "But in truth very few changes have been made, and those that have been implemented have raised new concerns," she wrote.

Amongst other issues, Bardach indicates how Jeb Bush and his new Secretary of State Glenda Hood firmly supported the legal proposal – subsequently voted on by the Republican majority in Florida state – to outlaw a vote recount. That is to say that if the new and controversial technology used for voting in several of the counties should fail for some reason, as it has done on other occasions, there will be no alternative means of counting the votes.

"Unlike the recent elections in Venezuela, where the new touch-screen voting machine provided every voter with a receipt, Floridians will have to take the word of Hood and Bush that their vote was counted."

Bush and Hood have also outlawed the rule that obliges absentee ballots to be countersigned by a witness. This adds many more possibilities for fraud to be committed. More than 5,000 of these votes were revealed to be fraudulent in the 1998 mayoral elections in Florida.

Bardach explains that the fraud in northern Florida – where the ballot boxes mysteriously disappeared – is different from the system in the south where, according to a long-standing tradition, dead people have voted…sometimes on several different occasions.

After reviewing the scandalous subject of former prisoners who have been excluded and of fraudulent lists of excluded people presented by Hood and Bush, Bardach presents her own proposals to ensure credible elections in Florida this November.

"About the only thing that could restore confidence in Florida electoral procedures would be Hood's immediate resignation; her successor should then be chosen by a bipartisan commission. And as Gov. Bush cannot possibly be an impartial observer in his brother's quest for another term, he should recuse himself from every aspect involving the vote count in Florida."

"WE’LL KICK THEM ALL OUT!"

Theresa LePore, elections supervisor in Palm Beach County – who invented the butterfly ballot that awarded thousands of Jewish votes to Pat Buchanan, the only anti-Semitic candidate – recently revealed the exact nature of the level of democracy that exists in the country that always wants to teach others just that.

In Florida, the law states that no one can come within 50 feet of the polling stations. Period. Whilst in Venezuela, the television cameras showed dozens of international observers freely entering those places, without any obstruction whatsoever, and carefully investigating the quality of the vote count, Florida flatly prohibits such a practice.

Asked whether observers will be present to check the process on November 2, LePore stated:"Let them come down! We’ll kick them all out, (Michael) Moore included!"

She has clearly demonstrated the level of arrogance of the dominant mafia that hasn’t hesitated to buy votes with the takings from criminal activities. Insolently freeing notorious assassins.