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• Saturday, June 3, 2006 11:53 AM

  Here's what people don't seem to get:

  ...elections in the US are local and are carried out locally. They are NOT conducted from above by sinister forces.

  There are thousands and thousands of election precincts in this country. Elections in those precincts are monitored by local citizens in local parties, usually Democrats and Republicans. For widespread conspiracy to occur, you not only have to not only have the connivence of local Republicans, but also that of local Democrats. You are now talking about 100's of thousands of people involved in a deep conspiracy, many of them simply ordinary citizens who've volunteered their time for local democracy.

  The problem is that we have so thoroughly demonized politics and democracy itself in this country that many of us are no longer able to trust our fellow citizens. (And this is true of both Democrats and Republicans.) We are so isolated and ignorant of local affairs (God knows that we can't trust our local tv news stations to actually cover our local news) that many of us are able to imagine all sorts of dire and stupid conspiracies that we would never dream of if we had any actual knowledge of the actual local people who run our elections.

  In this country, election fraud has historically been committed in counties that were overwhelmingly for one party or the other: election fraud apparently did occur in heavily Democratic Chicago in 1960, but fraud also apparently occurred in majority Republican counties in rural Illinois as well. THAT'S why Nixon didn't contest the vote in 1960--the fraud pretty much balanced out.

  As I stated earlier, we don't live in one party nation; we live in a divided nation, a 50/50 nation. Elections are hotly contested in places like Ohio and Florida; if real fraud occurred, it would be damn difficult to get away with it.

  The real problem is that we simply don't have an accurate notion of how our own country and our own democracy works.

  —nerdnam Read nerdnam's other letters
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