Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [123]
In our country, there is a certain ruling class that won’t give up the power. Who they are exactly, I’m not sure. I can call them the Democrats and Republicans, but I don’t know for sure if it’s them or the corporate powers: is it actually the Carlyle Group that controls things? There was a ripple of fright that what happened in Minnesota could be a trend. Maybe the fact that I inspired voters to turn out was something the two parties do not necessarily want to have happen.
Our federal electoral system is bankrupt. I see Florida as having been stolen by the Bush people in the 2000 election. I feel the same way as a friend of mine, whom I admire as being one of the best attorneys in America. That’s a gentleman named Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson. Vince has tried 106 felony cases and gotten convictions on 105 and, like he says, that other guy was probably innocent. After the 2000 election debacle, Vince came out and said: “The Supreme Court should all be put in prison for what they did.”
When Congress needed only one United States senator to sign on, in order to mount an investigation into what happened in Florida, nobody would do it. Why? Who got to them? I always wondered why Paul Wellstone, who many times would be the lone dissenter on a 99-to-1 vote, wouldn’t have been eager to do it—rather than have this stigma hanging over our elections from then on.
My biggest beef about the 2000 election, though, was this: Half a million more Americans voted for Al Gore to be President. In any other election in America, if you get the most votes, you win. How can we continue to justify a concept that, when it comes to presidential elections, you can win the popular vote and lose? This shows that the electoral college is a controlled, elitist system. It was set up when the elected officials were still riding on horseback to Washington. Today, when you can communicate on the Internet with someone in Beijing, China, why still hang onto something that’s completely irrelevant?
What I wanted to see happen in 2004 was the exact opposite result of 2000. I wanted Bush to win the popular election and John Kerry to have the most votes in the electoral college. Then maybe these two groups of elitists would get together and say, it’s time to get rid of the electoral college. If I ever became president, that would be one of my top priorities. The Maryland Legislature has already voted to bypass the electoral college—providing enough other states do the same.
The electronic voting machines are a disaster, too. There is strong evidence that Ohio and possibly some other states went for Bush in 2004 only because somebody tampered with these machines. What astounds me is that they don’t provide any paper trail. You wouldn’t go to an ATM machine that didn’t offer you a receipt. Whether you want to keep it or not is your choice, but you still have a right to push the button and get one. But not with these new voting machines. No receipts! How can you have an election where there is no mechanism for a recount? All you hear about today are computer viruses, but we’re basing more and more of our entire election system on computers that can be hacked into—with no means of detecting it!
The results of our first two presidential elections in this century have been, to say the least, questionable. I laugh when I hear the United States accuse other countries of voter fraud. Shouldn’t we clean up our backyard before we point fingers at anyone else? I mean, look what happened in Ohio, where a federal judge had ordered all the ballots preserved from the questionable 2004 election. Well, the boards of elections in fifty-six of Ohio’s eighty-eight counties either lost, shredded, or dumped nearly 1.6 million ballot and election records. Gee, they fell victim to spilled coffee, a flooded storage area, little things like that.