Electoral Cheats, The U.S.A. Way

It’s a time for elections, voters, and candidates on both sides of the Florida coast, also of a tenacious conceptual battle between this thing the Cubans do with their small town ways, and that which their neighbors upstairs try to sell with the stench of money traps. A few reminders are worthwhile, because the old dust from up there brought with it certain sludge that in the end, no-one believes in.

When the thirteen English immigrant colonies started a new nation, the world attended the birth of The United States Of North America, named out of a stupendous delusion of grandeur and a few eccentricities which, aside from it’s natives, perhaps nobody else understands or approves of.

Their first and up to now only Constitution was written in 1787, a little more than a decade after their Declaration Of Independence was adopted on the 4th of July 1776, and during the course of 221 years this modern empire has only dedicated itself to hanging appendixes which serve as corrections to the original rudimentary guideline.

To cement the intention of filling in gaps, the first ten amendments were names The Bill Of Rights. Others then appeared, until number 17, but between all of them they haven’t quite managed to eliminate a few distinct oddities.

We know, for example, in accordance with what could be called remote design, the North American electoral system was not conceived so that ordinary people could directly vote for their leaders.

They have always made use of this formal right, arranged like a labyrinth, that is understood less the more it is explained.

The real election is an affair belonging to the Electoral Colleges, something the International Agency of Latin News Press called “a constitutional relic from the 18th century, taken advantage of very well in the interests of the great capital.” It concerns itself with an exclusivity as malleable as lead, as well as being slippery, because it has escaped unharmed by 27 possibly well-intentioned constitutional amendments.

North Americans give the name Electoral Colleges to groups of voters with special characteristics, proposed by the traditional Parties at the level of the States, elected by popular vote but with such power that in more than a few occasions it has given rise to real nightmares.

In November 2008 there will be presidential elections in the United States. Ordinary people will go to the ballots. But in December, that is to say, much later than the “popular” voting, the Electoral Colleges will get together by States to vote for the President and Vice president. Therefore one asks himself, what are the November elections for? Are they a farce or a tease? Are 221 years not enough to change something the whole world criticizes, amongst other reasons because they do not understand it?

And speaking of electoral nightmares, none more eloquent than that of the year 2000, led by cheats, who, thanks to those mechanisms impassable even by Satan, somehow managed, with a scandalous fraud, to place Bush as president.

Without Mr. Republican Candidate having the largest number of real votes, those of the population, which are recognized by the Universal Suffrage independent of race, sex or beliefs, a cheat in Florida, with the obscure difference of barely 537 votes and the support of reactionary congressmen of Cuban origin, gave him an unprecedented triumph. This is the way things are…of what democracy do they speak of? What advice can they give?

In the first 50 years of it’s history, the northern country only allowed white men to vote, and only those with sufficient properties. Power could only be legitimized by the other power, money. After the 15th amendment, the vote was given to black people, while women had to wait until 1920 to achieve this goal.

But to be truthful, neither black people nor women have had anything to gain when the power of hard white men is at stake. For example, in 2004 the black vote in Florida should have favored John Kerry, according to statistics, but it was brutally blocked. Bush had to stay as the symbol as grandeur, and that was that.

In accordance with this, Democrats could find themselves in a tight squeeze for the next elections, for they must overcome a traditional white man who advocates the hard line, and they must do it with something that no-one has ever won with in the United States: a woman or a black man.

Meanwhile, in Cuba, the demands of Bush Jr. are met with jeers. When he says there must be “free and transparent” elections, one asks, how is it possible to reference what he has never seen in his own country? He throws stones at a neighbor’s roof without realizing that his own, out of sheer weakness, can be broken with a mere laugh.