You Call That Democracy?

The USA, a nation which calls itself the world's greatest Democracy and even presumes to "export" Democracy worldwide, is in danger of becoming a laughing stock. Unable to provide free and fair elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, it cannot even guarantee a fair vote to its own citizens.

Last week saw the start of early voting in Florida and a clutch of other states, and with it came a plethora of problems. In three heavily populated counties - around Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale - the network connection used to verify voter identifications broke down on the first day, creating hours of delay. In Jacksonville, where poor ballot design in 2000 knocked out the votes of 27,000 poor, predominantly black, predominantly Democratic voters, the county elections supervisor chose the first day of polling to resign, citing ill health. He had come under fire for failing to make early voting available in the city's African-American neighbourhoods - something his interim successor is now going some way to remedy.

Elsewhere, there were computer breakdowns during early voting in Memphis. Pre-election testing of electronic machines in Riverside County, California, and in Palm Beach County, Florida, led to multiple computer crashes. Elsewhere, machines have manifested problems handling basic addition - especially when asked to display instructions in a language other than English. Several county administrators have chosen simply to skip the non-English language part of the test.

In Nebraska, dead people were found to have applied for absentee ballots. In Ohio, a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was found to have offered crack cocaine to a known drug addict in exchange for completed voter registration forms, which he duly submitted in the names of Mary Poppins, Janet Jackson and Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious cannibal serial killer.

Given the chaos of the 2000 elections, the Bush administration's failure to ensure proper elections this time around is quite simply unforgiveable. Hanging chads have been replaced by dodgy, bug-ridden computer systems that leave no paper trail. Delayed funding for new electoral laws means "most states won't have their electoral procedures fully updated and coordinated until the next presidential election in 2008." And the ferocity of partisan politican battles has accelarated to a point where the whole country could soon be in the hands of lawyers.

The Independent examines a worst-case scenario where the Supreme Court could again decide the election:

The most disconcerting possibility is that the highest court in the land could remove the electoral process from the voters altogether and turn it over to the state legislatures... who would promptly hand the election to George Bush.