Another Stolen Election? Time for Serious Resistance!

Editor's Note: The following article was issued by Carl just before the 2004 elections; it has been published on ChickenBones: A Journal, the Mobile (AL) Beacon, the New York Beacon among others.
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Black people have had to fight fiercely for every gain. From slave revolts down through people being killed just for trying to register to vote, every step of the way has been marked by struggle to force the authorities to grant basic rights. Now today the right to vote is being snatched back from many Black and Latino people.

Am I exaggerating? Not one bit. Earlier this year, Florida's Secretary of State issued a list of 47,000 "felons" who would be ineligible to vote. Most of them were Black. Florida was forced to make the list public, and it was found to contain thousands of errors, including having hundreds of people who were listed as being convicted in the future. This is on top of the 94,000 people, again mostly Black, who were stricken from the voting rolls by a similarly error filled list in 2000, most of whom have not still not been put back on the voting lists!

Ohio is using an old state law about the kind of paper voter registrations must be on to invalidate newly registered Black voters. The Republican Party has lined up thousands of "poll watchers," who are really political thugs, to challenge Latinos and Blacks to present proof that they are citizens or that they live in the precinct they're voting in on election day. This is another rerun of 2000 when some "poll watchers" wore shirts that falsely implied they were federal police to intimidate people from even trying to vote. Additionally, corporations tied to the Republicans have made electronic voting machines that leave no way to check the accuracy of their count that will be used in states across the country.

All this is on top of the way the criminal injustice system works to criminalize Black and Latino people. Youth of color are routinely jacked up by the cops, beaten down and arrested for nothing more than being the wrong color or having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is part of the reason why half of the 2 million people in jail in the US are Black.

Bush and company are out to disenfranchise millions of Black and other minority voters. THIS POINTS TO THE PROSPECT OF A STOLEN ELECTION IN 2004.

This is what the Republicans did in 2000, and the Democrats let them get away with it. They didn't build a fight to stop it and stood in the way of others who wanted to fight it. Things must be different this time. There must be massive resistance to any and all attempts by Bush and company to steal the presidency again!

Much is at stake. Bush and company have set the country on a dangerous course--a "War On Terror" (WOT), which is really a power move aimed at keeping the US the dominant imperialist power in the world. It includes the illegitimate, immoral and illegal occupation of Iraq, an intensifying repressive clamp down in the US and the promise of more wars and more repression for generations to come. The attempts to steal the election through thuggery and manipulating the vote count are an extension of the fascist direction they have the country on. Many, many people are agonizing over what can and must be done to stop all this.

As a revolutionary communist, I have to say that voting Bush out isn't going to reverse this direction. Kerry and the Democrats provide no answer to this. The terms on which this election is being fought out don't include should the US occupy Iraq or not, or should the repressive laws and policies be reversed. Instead the terms for this election come down to who would be the better commander in chief for the WOT! People who want to vote against the occupation, can't do that. People who want to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act in this election can't do that either. That's why I say the will of the people cannot and will not be exercised in this election.

We can't rely on the Democrats to lead the fight to stop Bush and his crew from stealing this election. We have to take the initiative into our hands and rely on ourselves to win this fight. The Republican Party will have its thousands of poll watching thugs at voting sites nationwide. They must be met by thousands of determined people in the streets declaring that they will not sit by while Bush steals another election. There must be massive resistance to this and to the whole agenda Bush and company have set in motion.

And we need to go beyond resistance. It's going to take revolution, millions of people rising up to overthrow this imperialist ruling class and going on to build a whole new societies in place of this one to solve all the problems this system forces countless millions in the US and millions more worldwide to endure once and for all. There is leadership that exists to lead the masses in doing just that. Bob Avakian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, has analyzed the accomplishments and shortcomings of previous revolutionary societies and developed a vision of how to make revolution and how to involve the masses of people in building a new society after seizing power.

A society that is no longer dominated by a rich capitalist class, where whites no longer lord it over people of color and men no longer dominate women. Avakian is addressing all the questions that would confront us in preparing for and making revolution here in the belly of the beast, as we used to put it in the 1960'S. (Interested readers can find writings by Avakian at www.bobavakian.net.)

The ballot box has never been where the direction of the country has been decided. Nor has it been where issues of major concern for the people have been decided. But it is intolerable that Bush and company are trying to steal this election. It is a reflection of how serious things are in the US that they can't even allow the election to go down without the group in power trying to rig the result. This can't be allowed to happen. It must be met with determined resistance.