Fight Back: Vote dammit!

Commentary by D.K. Roberts

To recap: you’ve got a teenaged, right-wing apparatchik running for Leon County Commission Seat Five on a Drain-It-Pave-It-Teach-Nature-a-Sharp-Lesson Ticket; and in District Four a couple of bidness-friendly dudes running in the White Townships of Killearn, land of the mighty Hummer and the “W: Still the president” sticker.

For the Tallahassee City Commission, there’s a reformed environmentalist who has seen the Error of her Tree-Hugging Ways and has embraced the burning of carbonized plant matter to help us run our ACs and our DVDs, our PCs and our LCDs (God made mercury, so it can’t be that bad for you), running against a guy with a great resume, but a name unpronounceable by any local reporter.

Then in the gubernatorial campaign you’ve got a man who, in his youth, was tragically mistaken for an alligator hide and tanned to within an inch of his life versus a man who has sometimes been tragically mistaken for a bucket of beige paint.

Finally, a fellow who has been in space and isn’t ashamed to say so is running for the U.S. Senate against a woman who all decent Americans would like to be sent to space but is instead stalking the Republican Party (and they used to totally dig her show).
Election 2006: what are you going to do?

It may be an unedifying spectacle, our democracy, but hell, if we here in the Magic Kingdom of the Dangling Chad and the Dubious Touchscreen don’t get that our votes really do count – every one of the little buggers – then what hope for the nation? On second thought, don’t answer that. There were counties in Florida where turnout for the primary was 16 or 17 percent. More Americans watch “Survivor: Cook Islands” than bother to exercise the franchise.

Maybe it’s the devil’s fault. According to the well-known performance artist and president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez, George Bush, our soi-disant commander-in-chief, is in fact Satan himself. I don’t know about the eschatological implications of this: I always thought Satan would be smarter, cooler, able to pronounce “nuclear,” adept at using actual verbs in sentences – James Bond in command of a legion of dinner-jacketed demons with a Deadly Plague in one hand in and a martini in the other. But maybe we’ve got it all wrong; maybe the devil is just an empty suit, a dim frat boy who talks with his mouth full and doesn’t really get that the demons, pasty nerds named Karl and gun freaks named Dick, are really running the show.

Whether or not the Republicans have literally traded their small, shrunken souls for a piece of infernal real estate, one thing is certain: they don’t want you to vote in November. Not unless you are one of them. They’ve moved beyond the screwed-up felon lists (my favorite was the guy who, according to ChoicePoint, was due to commit his crime in 2007), the mysterious road-blocks in selective parts of town, and the dirty-tricks phone calls telling people they could vote the day after the election. Now they rely on neo-Jim Crow tactics such as demanding a photo ID (many elderly, poor and rural voters don’t have the wallet-full of cards the middle classes have), making it harder to register to vote, long lines at polling places (often in minority communities) because somehow these neighborhoods just don’t rate as many machines as whiter, more affluent suburbs.

As if this ain’t enough, new rules adopted by the Florida Legislature ensure that there will probably never be a recount again. And even if the election is as close as our 50-50 state suggests it could be – if not this year, then in 2008 – votes in our largest population areas are exempt from a recount because there’s no paper record. The Secretary of State, the constitutional officer charged with ensuring that Florida runs free and fair elections, tells us not to worry. Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. Of course, she isn’t accountable to us, the voters of Florida: she’s beholden to Jeb Bush, and Jeb, you may have noticed, has a dog in this fight.

Don’t reach for the Xanax, now: it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

The answer isn’t to abjure the political system, say “the hell with it, they’re all venal, corrupt weasels who’ll do anything for power.” If you’re breathing, you’ve got a stake in society. Feel alienated all you want, but sooner or later you’ll want to drink the water and breathe the air, maybe even have some trees and green fields to look at. With the wrong people on the city and county commissions in Leon, Wakulla, Jefferson, and Franklin counties, we could be stuck with bad groundwater, springs destroyed by nitrates, and a population suffering from an upswing in respiratory diseases, all in the name of “growth” and “progress.”

It’s true that many candidates are hardly impressive human beings. But then, they bank on us being stupid or oblivious. Frank Mayernick, the slick fellow with the fresh-faced look of a young Newt Gingrich, actually thinks you’ll believe that Bob Rackleff, his opponent in the county commission race, has some nefarious control over gas prices. The guy running for county judge, the one whose name is alarmingly one letter off being “Fury,” thinks that you’d prefer the Leon County Jail to be full up. He says he’s “tough.” What about smart? What about wise?

And then there’s Katherine Harris. She wants you to forget her performance in the presidential imbroglio of 2000, forget that she made up a terrorist plot in Indiana, forget that she’s been skirting way close to the Abramoff lobbying scandal for months, forget that her campaign staff keep resigning (to spend more time with their therapists), forget that even the Bushes (who owe the woman big time, for God’s sake) shun her, and forget that she’s crazy as a cut snake and put her in the United States Senate.

So can you do anything about it? Try voting. Sometimes it even works.