by Aparna Patankar
September 21, 2006
American voters need to unify themselves to bring power back to the electoral
process, NYU media studies professor Mark Crispin Miller said during a talk about
his latest book.
Miller signed copies of his book “Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004
Election and Why They”ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)” and
lectured on problems with the electoral system yesterday at Revolution Books. “We need three things: election reform, campaign reform and media reform,” he said.
The timing of Miller’s appearance coincides with the “World Can’t Wait” march on
Oct. 5. Protesters will meet at noon across from the United Nations building on
East 47th Street between First and Second Avenues and march down to Union Square to demonstrate against the Bush regime.
Miller spoke about the 2004 presidential election and cited evidence for why he
believes Bush did not rightfully win. He said that to prevent the same injustice
from happening in the next election, Americans must be aware of corruption within
the electoral process and demand that true reforms be made.
Bush did not win the election because of his emphasis on moral values, Miller
said, but actually through the use of fraud, vote suppression, theft and
manipulation of the electoral process. “Bush’s regime is marked by a particular brazenness that we”ve never seen before,”
he said.
The new Republican electoral strategy, according to his book, is to manipulate
elections at a local level by polling-booth tampering. The results of this
manipulation would be virtually undetectable, he said. In order to prevent what
Miller calls “mini-frauds,” poll workers need to be trained and the job must be
standardized.
During part of the discussion, an audience member exclaimed “elections are
meaningless.” Miller disagreed, saying that all we need is an electoral system
that the average American can understand, so that we do not depend on a select few to tell us who won the election.
“We cannot have a system where certain individuals can tell us who won,” he said.
“In a democracy, even the dumbest Americans need to be able to understand how the system works.”