'Political Parties and Unfair Elections Essay\r'

'This comp some(prenominal) corpse was the commencement exercise ‘truly national system’, consisting of the democrats (followers of Jackson) and Whigs (opp binglents of Jackson) fairly balanced in close to regions (Wilson and DiIulio, jr. 196). The civil War split the semipolitical parties in several(prenominal) ways. There was a deep remainder in opinion mingled with the parties over the getting even of slavery and sectionalism. Both parties tried to ‘straddle the issues’ to cancel dividing their followers and losing the resource to their rival (Wilson and DiIulio, Jr. 196).\r\nsolely the old parties dual-lane and new ones emerged. As a result of the Civil War the modern republican society began as a tierce company. The republican Party’s strength lay in the North; Abraham Lincoln did non receive a single electoral vote from a grey tell apart in 1860. The Democrats in the North divided into War Democrats, who supported the war effor t exclusively claimed the republicans were doing a poor job of leading the Union, and the peacefulness Democrats, or Copperheads, who opposed the war and were suspected of disloyalty to the Union.\r\nTo net profit the option of 1864, the republicans reorganized themselves as the Union party to attract votes from the War Democrats and nominated War Democrat Andrew anticson for vice president. When Lincoln was assassinated, Democrat Johnson became president. Following the Civil War, republicans moved quickly to consolidate their control of the fall in lands government. They quickly added a series of Western conveys to the Union, affirms that they expect would remain firm in their support for Republicans.\r\nThe Republican Party’s pro-business positions played well in the industrial North and Midwest, while the Democrats held the â€Å"solid S bulgeh. ” The freehanded number of immigrants who came to the United States, together with the growing industrial workfo rce, laid the basis for strong, largely elected political machines in New York, Chicago, and other large cities (CliffsNotes. com). So at this point there were basically cardinal political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. The Democrats dominated national politics for the contiguous 20 years.\r\n democratic dominance collapsed in the mid-sixties in response to the Vietnam War. There was unprecedented bacchanal against the principles of the war and Democrats blamed their party for the riots and the rise in un righteousnessful behavior and protests. Due to that fact, support of the parliamentary Party sharply declined. From the 1968 election of Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, solely one Democrat attained the snow-covered place: Jimmy Carter, whose term spanned 1976 to 1980. The electoral College is a major cistron in sustaining a absolute majority two-party system, solace does not necessarily assert elections fair.\r\nIf the democratic vote in a commonwealth is very close, the winner gets all of the state’s electoral votes. This makes it extremely difficult for a third party to win, i. e. the two-party system is reinforced. In many cases the Electoral College system has failed so far as keeping elections fair. Two instances in particular go the inadequacy of the Electoral College procedure. An example of a touristed third party medical prognosis that was denied any effective validation as a Presidential candidate would be Ross Perot in the 1992 election.\r\nPerot garnered almost 20 portion of the popular vote across the country but did not receive a single electoral vote due to the Electoral College rules. This discrepancy between electoral and popular votes has led to many abstracted to put an end to the Electoral College system and knock back it with popular voter turnout. Another example of the failure of the Electoral College system was exemplified in the 2000 election, when Al bloodbath was not cho sen to be president although he had the popular vote of the country.\r\nA systematic conspiracy to heavily manipulate the vote in the critical state of Florida to favor bush in the 2000 scouring- battue presidential election ultimately resulted in a pubic hair victory. The shrill manipulation methods apply were enough to swing the election to render and away from control panel. The evident fraud in the voting surgery and the failure of the courts to throw in in a proper and non-partisan manner cost battue the Presidency. When it became apparent on November 8, 2000 that neither gore nor pubic hair had the majority of the electoral votes required to win the Presidency, the state of Florida became the focus of attention.\r\nBoth candidates needed a majority in Florida to win the White House, but voting irregularities prevented the final tally from being reached for over vanadium weeks. What voters didn’t realize was that the voting procedure wasn’t the only p roblem in Florida, but that the process to insure George W. Bush’s victory had been in place for over two years to begin withhand the election. Florida governor Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s brother, was elected in 1998. He immediately put a proposal into action that would help his brother gain the Florida electoral votes in the 2000 election. Gov.\r\nBush let special(a) avocation groups know that they expected political donations of $2 for any $1 donated to Democrats or defaulters would lose access to the regulator and the legislative leadership, and their businesses would tank. The Governor besides began replacing Democrats throughout Florida state government, his first ramble of Democratic voters. Governor Jeb Bush’s next step to distinguish Democratic power in Florida was to appoint unfaltering Republicans to control Florida’s educational system, including state senator Jim Horne as Florida’s first Secretary of Education and most of the individual university presidents.\r\nHe accomplished this feat by eliminating the Florida Board of Regents. The board was replaced by separate boards of legal guardians at all ten of the state universities According to peter deHaven-Smith, in his book authorise The Battle for Florida, â€Å"the governor was given the power to make all the trustee appointments”. This created an enormous source of new patronage and also undermined the political neutrality of the state universities. With the Board of Regents out of the way, Republicans quickly replaced many of the university presidents with political insiders. (deHaven-Smith, 2005) The Florida Republican Party then began a drive to disenfranchise Democratic voters. They paid a private company to purge the voter registry of all ex-felons, even though Florida courts twice ruled that ex-felons whose civil rights had been restored before they came to Florida were entitled to vote. This would benefit the Republicans because blacks made up more than 50% of the ex-felon be given and 90% of the black Florida population voted Democratic. In 1999, newly-elected Secretary of State Katherine Harris paid Data rest home Technologies (DBT) $4. trillion to compile the most extensive scrubbing key possible. Race was a big factor in compiling matches for the list. After the election, DBT testified before a congressional committee that Florida moroseicials had ordered them to eliminate voters by making incorrect matches. The information was gathered from the mesh and no verifying telephone calls were made. Five months before the election, Harris (who coincidentally was co-chairing the Bush presidential packaign) sent the list of 57,700 names to all the precincts with instructions to remove those voters from the rolls.\r\nGreg Palast revealed the humbug of the scrub list in The Observer, London, November 26, 2000. The story was ignore by American mainstream press. Palast has since provided irrefutable, hard evidence of fraud. His most recent estimate of qualified Florida voters barred from hurl a ballot in Election 2000 stands at 90,000. On January 10, 2001, NAACP lawyers sued and won their case against DBT, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Bush loyalist Clay Roberts, Director of the variability of Elections. (Palast, 2003) On Election Day 2000 in the state of Florida, however; Republican voters stood in short ines and used up-to-date equipment. The machinations of the Republican Party paid off in black districts. Highway patrol officers flagged mow voters at roadblocks and checked their drivers’ licenses while others waited in bulky lines to vote on ancient machines. Innocent citizens were move away and informed that their names appeared on the ex-felons list when they showed up to vote. Republicans found other ways to disenfranchise opposition voters. Two-page ballots with misleading directions were printed in Austin, Texas (the center of the George W.\r\nBush p residential prevail), returned to Florida, and distributed in black districts. Some votes were alone later trashed by ballot handlers. In Duval County, 27,000 ballots were discarded, over half of them from black precincts in Jacksonville. No functionary challenges were filed within the 72-hour time limit, so thousands of mostly Democratic votes were lost. Sixteen-thousand votes for dialog box disappeared overnight from the ongoing Volusia County tally and were reinstated only when an election supervisor questioned the subtraction of already registered votes.\r\nNo voting machine company representative or election official was able to explain what happened. (Dover, 2002) or so 8 p. m. on Election Day pass along polls from Voter News Service communicate a Gore victory, but Bev Harris uncovered an CBS discussion program report revealing that the erroneous subtraction of Gore’s votes in Volusia caused the election to be called for Bush. For several hours the race was too close to call, but dead after midnight, Bush’s numbers plunged cursorily and Gore gained the lead. Despite Gore’s numbers, at 2:16 a. m.\r\nFox News announce that Texas Governor George W. Bush had won Florida and the other goggle box networks repeated Fox’s false information. (Harris, 2004) Gore heard the fake news of his defeat, phoned his congratulations to Bush and was prepared to deliver his concession speech to the nation. At that point, Gore’s chief advisors in Florida told him it was a good deal too early to concede formally and certified him to hold off since there were still 360,000 unnumberable votes. Out of 6 million votes cast in Florida, Bush’s lead was reported to be a mere 537 votes.\r\nThe Florida Constitution had no commissariat for a statewide recount, so Gore asked for a partial recount in four gray counties where glaring irregularities had shown up. The last thing the Bush police squad wanted was a fair recount. They c omplained to the press that Gore was a sore loser, and the press largely agreed. (Posner, 2001) On declination 8, the Florida exacting Court overturned a electric circuit court closing and ordered a manual recount. Based on findings in the circuit court trial, Gore was awarded 393 votes, reducing Bush’s lead to only 154 votes.\r\nThat’s when the Bush camp went ballistic. (Simon, 2001) The depicted object Party sent out-of-state operatives to intimidate Republican county clerks to repair over votes in Republican counties, to amend incomplete absentee ballot applications, and to accept late-arriving military ballots absent signatures. When the recount actually began they became more radical, charged into the county presidential term building, threatening county canvassers, and halted the recount of Miami-Dade ballots. Despite court orders, 18 counties never attempted a recount.\r\nThe Bush campaign team and lawyers circulated misinformation well-nigh F lorida’s election laws, active the reliability of manual recounts (both Jeb and George W. claimed that only machines could count accurately), and some the likelihood of a constitutional crisis. (Zelden, 2010) The Florida Constitution specifies that the drift of the voter be paramount during ballot tattle. Because electronic machines had repeatedly failed to read, discern intent, and count ballots accurately, manual recounting was mandated. The law was actually quite clear and no constitutional crisis was imminent.\r\nThat did not finish the Bush team from pressing the issue, for they wanted the U. S. Supreme Court to intervene and prevent the recount. Republican leadership called the legislature into special session while the judiciary branch still addressed election issues, an extraordinary move. Speaker of the House Tom Feeney, Jeb’s bosom political buddy, took the ambo and criticized the Florida Supreme Court decisions. He warned that if the dispute move to De cember 12, Florida’s electoral slate would be excluded from the Electoral College vote.\r\nFlorida had submitted its election results as they were certified, so the electoral slate was never really in danger. The Bush legal team, determined to delay or stop the recount, appealed to the U. S. District Court of Appeals, the Florida Supreme Court, and the U. S. Supreme Court. The justices had no business interfering in the election. The U. S. Constitution authorizes sexual congress to settle election disputes, not the Supreme Court. The first two courts denied the appeal. Then the U. S. Supreme Court gave them the nod. From that moment, the gain was in. Zelden, 2010) Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas had close relatives working for Republican organizations and should father recused themselves. Antonin Scalia’s son Eugene is a Washington law partner of Theodore B. Olson, the attorney who twice argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of George W. Bush. Scalia ’s son John is an attorney with the Miami law firm that represented Bush in Florida. Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, worked for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and had been helping to collect applications from raft seeking employment in the Bush administration.\r\n further they, along with the three other right-wing adjudicate on the court, issued a ruling instructing the Florida courts to find a recount method that would apply â€Å"equal standards. ” The decision came down at 10 p. m. on December 12, 2000, two hours before the deadline to submit voting results. In short, the U. S. Supreme Court ran the clock out on American voters and handed Florida’s electoral votes and the establishment to George W. Bush. (Thoreau, 2007) Reviewing the actual results of the statewide examination of 175,010 disputed ballots, on November 12, 2001 Robert Parry, www. consortiumnews. om, cleared away the media fog: â€Å"So Al Gore was the picking of Florida’s voters †whether one counts reprieve chads or dimpled chads. That was the core finding of the eight news organizations that conducted a review of disputed Florida ballots. By any chad measure, Gore won. Gore won even if one doesn’t count the 15,000-25,000 votes that USA Today estimated Gore lost because of illegally designed ‘butterfly ballots,’ or the hundreds of predominantly African-American voters who were falsely identified by the state as felons and turned away from the polls. Gore won even if there’s no adjustment for George W.\r\nBush’s windfall of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties and strict standards to Democratic ones, a violation of fairness reported earlier by the Washington jeopardize and the New York Times. Put differently, George W. Bush was not the choice of Florida’s voters anymore than he was the choice of the American people who cast a half million more ballots for Gore than Bush nationwide. ” Although the 2000 election was a travesty, one positive outcome was the renewal in the nation’s interest in The National Popular Vote bill.\r\n'