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Jonathan Simon welcomes us to write letters to Carter supporting the requests he makes in this great letter.
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April 12, 2005
President Jimmy Carter
Cochairman, Blue Ribbon Commission on Election Reform
The Carter Center
One Copenhill
453 Freedom Parkway
Atlanta, GA 30307
Dear President Carter,
I write with great appreciation for your many deeds of service to our American nation and to the nations of the world. I write with hope that the mission upon which you are about to embark will become the signature service of your political career, transcending all that have come before.
The situation is dire and it is this: nothing less than the subversion of the vote counting process, the bedrock protocol of our American democracy. We who perceive that the “it could never happen here” is nonetheless happening, ask for an unblinking examination of the evidence supporting this gravest of charges. We ask you specifically to use your powers and your stature to the utmost to ensure that such an examination indeed takes place.
I suspect that you have been and will continue to be bombarded with analyses, reports, and fragments of evidence that the capacity for large-scale outcome-determinative election rigging exists and was put into practice in our most recent election (at least). As “creator” of at least some of that evidence (I am the fellow who downloaded and analyzed the undistorted exit poll data on election night), I will venture to add the three enclosed documents to the pile. It is not my purpose here though to talk up the evidence, from which I am sure you will draw your own conclusions, but rather to address the more difficult issue of the prevailing sociopolitical reality and to establish a context for what we who seek the restoration of fair and honorable elections are asking of you. For if you are to do justice to the investigation, you must be willing to countenance what America as a whole has so far been unwilling to face: the wholesale corruption of a privatized and partisan-operated computerized vote casting and counting process.
There are, to be sure, numerous reasons not to go there: the dollar is one, and more broadly the short-term impact on the corporate well-being of our “ownership” society, the earthquake that would strike near the heart of the American socioeconomic structure. The American mainstream media, in ignoring or dismissing both charges and evidence, has apparently taken these reasons to heart, as have most in the corridors of power. For many more the “it could never happen here” mindset, so entrenched in our venerable beacon of a democracy, clouds the vision and rules out further inquiry. One can only wonder how far out of step with the prevailing moderate opinions of the American mainstream this ruling regime has to get before it begins to strike observers as odd that every election illogically augments rather than checks their hold on power?
Please understand that all these factors have most certainly been cynically taken into account by those who have sought to bypass the democratic process in order to establish and maintain their rule. Their safety has been guaranteed by congealed assumptions of American democratic infallibility and by the fear of upheaval-and they have taken full advantage. If this galls you half as much as it galls me, perhaps you will indeed be driven to step up and issue the wake-up call.
You co-chair a commission that, to put it bluntly, has been stacked in favor of those whose mission it is to maintain (or worsen) the status quo. Having reviewed the commission membership-beginning of course with your cochairman James Baker, but extending significantly through the ranks-and the list of chosen speakers, it is impossible not to conclude that the charge of the commission will be to provide political cover and still more ineffectual reform, rather than a probing examination of the underlying realities.
Supporters of DREs and toothless verification protocols abound, while proponents of paper ballots and loophole-closing reforms are nowhere to be found. Focus will almost surely be on such “safe” topics as disenfranchisement and machines for the disabled, while the implications of detailed scientific study of the exit polls and the vulnerabilities of DREs and central tabulators to wholesale rigging and hacking will not even be addressed, to say nothing of the extreme right-wing ownership and control of the vast majority of the vote counting equipment.
If you come to share this perception of the commission's purpose and effect, we respectfully request that you disassociate yourself from its work, either a priori through resignation along with a public citation of the commission's structural shortcomings or upon conclusion by the issuing of a strong and uncompromising dissenting report.
Mr. President, the movement to restore American democracy has many heroes, some like Representatives John Conyers and Cynthia McKinney more prominent than others, but none so eminent as yourself. Most of us have been drawn in by our personal commitment to our democracy and by our dreadful conviction that it is on life support. Each document I have attached examines the evidence for what, to most, remains an unimaginable charge of massive outcome-determinative mistabulation of the votes of the American people. The evidence is solid; to paraphrase your colleague Mr. Baker, “it has been vetted, and re-vetted, and re-vetted again.”
The evidence now needs eminence, it needs a hero, it needs an honest and courageous and revered man to carry it before the American public with the credibility it merits. Will you take this task upon yourself? Will you be that hero?
With deepest respect and appreciation.
Yours sincerely,
Jonathan D. Simon, JD
Alliance for Democracy
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