The latest trends in vote suppression

Yesterday Matt Drudge's Drudge Report carried a story about how ABC (the American Broadcasting Company, not the one from Australia) was sitting on a story: an al-Qaida terrorist with an American accent had submitted a videotape threatening to make the streets of America run red with American blood - on Election Day. ABC, instead of running the story, had turned the tape over to the CIA. Drudge seemed to be implying that this was an irresponsible act on ABC's part...as though the more responsible course of action would be to create a panic with an unverified piece of information. Has he forgotten Dan Rather's embarrassing lack of typographical skepticism so soon? Does he not trust the CIA?

Many right-wing commentators have picked up on this and twisted it around to state that terrorists support the Presidential incumbent's opponent. (Sorry for the skewed syntax, but I don't want to create another Google hit for that particular phrase.) I first saw this sentiment expressed in graffiti on the support pillar of an overpass on the way in to work this morning - and then heard it echoed by two co-workers who start their day with right-wing radio shows.* It's odd, though, to associate terrorist political support with the other guy. After all, if Bush does win a second term, he will owe the victory in a large part to the likes of Usama** bin Laden, Musab al-Zarqawi, this new videotape guy, and of course the nineteen September 11th hijackers, who created a theme for Bush's campaign.

And creating fear about the safety of Election Day does not benefit Kerry. Low voter turnout tends to benefit the incumbent, and the Democrats and non-Democrat anti-Bush forces have been putting an enormous effort into registering new voters and encouraging people to get out and vote. If people stay home on Election Day, out of fear or for any other reason, Bush will benefit. It's almost enough to make you wonder if this is a legitimate terrorist threat at all. Almost.

Vote suppression is taking many forms in this campaign. From priests railing against Kerry supporters in Sunday sermons to Republican operatives threatening to cause delays and disruptions in the line for the voting booth, from vanishing ballots in Florida to destroyed voter registration applications in Nevada, it seems that there is a unified effort to prevent people who have decided to vote for John Kerry from actually getting the chance to do so. This latest threat - real or hoax - fits the pattern quite well. Will it succeed? Not if I can help it.

Vote for John Kerry on November 2nd. It's important.

*These radio shows are very effective in passing on information that people embrace intimately and repeat endlessly. If they were to just squeeze in a tidbit of actual, true, nonpolitical information every once in a while - like, "the square of the hypotenuse of any right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides" - they would do wonders for education in the U.S.

**The Department of Defense's preferred spelling. Don't ask me why.