(Dobbs) Rigged Elections? "Stop the Steal" doesn't know the half of it.
People overseas can't stop theirs. We can. We should.
Note to the Stop the Steal crowd: Russia has rigged elections. Russia. Not us… unless your voter suppression laws survive.
Rigging the election is how Vladimir Putin’s “United Russia” party ensured last weekend that it would come out on top in the nation’s parliamentary elections. Again.
What a surprise.
And Russia’s not the only one. From China to Honduras, Uganda to Iran, Nicaragua to North Korea, Zimbabwe to Myanmar, elections are rigged. The fact is, elections are rigged in most of the countries in Asia. And most in Africa. And most in the Middle East… at least those that have elections at all.
This is the company you want to keep?
There are plenty of ways some governments rig their elections. Tried and true techniques like stuffing the ballot box, paying loyalists to vote, and throwing out ballots they don’t like.
True, we’ve also seen these kinds of things in our own nation over the years— the long-standing joke about Mayor Richard J. Daley’s devious Democratic machine in Chicago was, “Vote early and often.” But neither Daley’s regime in the 1960s nor Kansas City’s Pendergast machine in the 1930s nor New York’s Tammany Hall at the turn of the 20th Century held a candle to the more comprehensive and crushing ways that many foreign governments rig the vote.
In those nations, no one has to fool with the ballots. It’s simpler than that. They just don’t let the other side run. They disqualify the opposition— opposition candidates, opposition parties— from even appearing on the ballot. There must be some reason why, when I went in and out of Egypt as a reporter in the 1970s and ‘80s, Anwar Sadat, then his successor Hosni Mubarak, prevailed in presidential elections to the tune of 90% of the votes or more.
Which brings me back to Putin. Because as Shakespeare wrote, “What’s past is prologue.”
Back when I occasionally covered the Soviet Union, state-owned TV— effectively the only TV— delivered a dependable diet of anti-American news. One night it would run video of homeless people on the streets of America. The next night it would be about crime. The next night about joblessness. Not that we didn’t have those issues here. But the news was rigged. It was the only picture Soviets got of life in America.
In fact in 1985, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan held their first-ever superpower summit in Geneva, I was assigned to cover the Moscow angle, and right across the street from our bureau, on that miserable winter day, people lined up six deep outside a store where televisions were on display to see what Reagan looked like. It was the first time actual images of an American president had ever been shown there. Until then, Soviet citizens had been led to believe that American presidents all but breathed fire.
Then, when the Soviet Union fell apart, things really changed. The leadership of its shrunken core, Russia, allowed citizens liberties they’d only dreamt of having before. They got freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Political parties blossomed, news media proliferated. If their newfound liberties didn’t reach the bar we had long since set in the United States, they were moving in the right direction.
But then along came Putin. Slowly but surely, he carved away those freedoms and took things back in the wrong direction. His long-suffering nation hasn’t returned to the dreadful days of the Gulag, but here’s what it has returned to: opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, by all accounts Putin’s most potent threat, six months ago came back to his homeland from overseas (after being poisoned by Russian operatives) and was promptly arrested, charged with violating a probation law, and sent away for three-and-a-half years in prison.
You can’t run for Parliament from prison.
That’s how they rig elections today in Russia. That, and more.
According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, of the 174 “independent” candidates for Parliament last weekend, the Kremlin tossed all but 11 of them off the ballot. It prohibited known opposition figures from attending public proceedings. It forced some into exile. It even threatened to prosecute Russian employees of the Western social media companies that opposition groups used, which effectively forced their apps off the internet. A YouTube announcement now pops up on anti-Putin videos saying, “This content is not available on this country domain due to a legal complaint from the government.”
Meantime, the Kremlin stacks the state-run media with pro-Putin propaganda, to the point where discontent is almost hidden from the public eye. It indicts independent and overseas media as foreign agents. It’s as if in the U.S. we had only one myopic outlet to watch, whether Fox or CNN. We know what such a bubble does to people’s heads.
Ilya Yablokov, the author of “Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World,” has written of the thin line that Vladimir Putin walks every time an election comes around: “Offer too much choice, and citizens may pick the wrong candidates. Offer too little, and the underlying authoritarianism of the regime becomes grimly apparent.”
I once interviewed a close aide to Putin who might have explained the Russian president’s disregard for free elections even better: “Democracy was invented to undermine authority.” So they undermine democracy. They rig their elections.
Overseas, they do it overtly. But now here at home, with new laws in Republican-led states that make it harder instead of easier for citizens to cast their ballots, they do it insidiously.
Stop the Steal? When you read this week’s news about Trump and his team knowing full well just days after last year’s election that voting fraud was a lie but pushed it anyway, then of an actual written plan for a coup, their steal’s just starting.
If they’re not stopped by some far-sighted form of federal legislation, they will have us looking more like today’s Russia than yesterday’s America.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
It seems that our goverment is intent on completely taking over the election process in the U.S. Does that not present a danger of the same thing happening here - ala Russia, Venezula, Iran, China, North Korea, et al. I feel the hysteria over election management in the various states is more about avoiding a "Richard Daley" mode of voting (vote early, vote often) rather than preventing any part of the election process from taking place equitably and fairly and without unreasonable pressures on the way to the polls.