The backstory.

Here's my voting history, for all the world to review.

Apologies to everyone who's known me longer than I've been blogging, as this is all old news to you, besides being very long and very boring. But you are few, and my readers are, if not many, then at least more, somewhat, in number than are you. So in the interests of "the greatest good for greatest number", you get to suffer through all of this again. ;)

In 1996, the same year Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" first went on the air, I voted in my first presidential election.

I had just returned from Seattle where I had seen the tragic toll taken on the lives of my freinds and coworkers by the so-called "war on drugs" waged by both major political parties. I therefore registered, and voted, in the State of Texas, as a Libertarian.

I'd only personally known one other registered Libertarian in my life -- a convert, late in his life, to Judaism whose views on the "two-party system" struck me as so incisevely *sane* that I *knew* I could never register as a voter of *either* major party. I understood, even then, at some level, that a so-called "two party system" was essentially the same thing as a "one party system" with two "wings" in the same ruling party. You know -- the whole "11 million dead" in Germany's Holocaust thing. (Or does anyone deny that it happened? If you do, I'd be glad to debate.)

Electorally speaking, I was *born* independent, based on conversations over the dinner table with this man, a deeply respected former colleague of my father's, who had long since moved to Amish country.

This, if you can't tell, is the "short form" of my backstory.

My thinking, back in 1996, was that decriminalization of some or all Schedule 1 controlled substances would at least serve to bring black market goods under rational regulation in the public interest, while serving to channel chronic abusers into programs that might help them to recover from their various addictions. This all, of course, before the decimation of what ever existed of public healthcare in this country.

Even then, I had major problems with other aspects of the Libertarian Party. I've always hated guns. But the Libertarians were "strong" on what might be considered a "strict constructionist approach" towards reading the second amendment. I didn't like it at all. Their redeeming quality seemed to me that they were equally committed in principle to every other amendment in the Bill of Rights.

The place that Libertarian ideology inevitably broke down, in my eyes, was on abortion, where the party itself became split. But abortion was not "my issue". So I held my nose and voted for Harry Browne, who that strange year, was *not* a third, but *fourth* party Candidate, even in Texas.

Remember, Perot ran against George I and Clinton that same year. But Perot was a nutcase who ran on his own money, and anyone who grew up in a family of teachers in Texas knew what all he was really about. So he was out of the question. I had to vote my conscience. I did. (The car-safety nut was not on the ballot in Texas that year, as I recall.)

And it was not a single issue vote, either. I loved the fact that here was the only political party willing to just leave me well enough alone in my perversions, which at that point, were no more than ill-formed, isolated fantasies, if that. And if you don't know what I mean by that, you've clearly never grown up queer in Texas.

Truth be told, my ideas on taxation have changed somewhat since then.

But I admired, and still admire, any party that dared to stand on principle, even if that principle broke down and ultimately split the party fatally.

Fast forward (through some minor elections in which I voted unpredictably for candidates from *all* parties on *any* given ticket, but *never* for winning candidates in *any* given race) to California.

Los Angeles. August, 2000. The Democratic National Convention met inside the Staples Center. The Democratic Leadership Committee met the night before the Convention opened in a private fundraising party on Santa Monica Pier. Senator Lieberman was in attendance. The Los Angeles Police Department had effectively shut down all of downtown LA to daily life and traffic for the sake of this party that my family has supported solidly for many generations back as "the people's party" against the Republican "party of short-term self-interest". These broad ideals were drilled into me from long before I knew *anything* about what democracy actually looked like or stood for.

That same night the principle "one person = one vote" became "one dollar = one vote", before my very eyes.

Suddenly the trusted Democratic Party needed protection from the very "people" they dared purport to represent. This was not ideology, it was *directly* and *immediately* sensed. They would not talk with us. Neither would their donors. Their arrogance was utterly astounding. True, LAPD (besides being notoriously corrupt within its ranks -- remember Ramparts, anyone?) was ultimately under the direct command of Republican Mayor Richard Riordan; but at a single word from Gore, or Lieberman, or the DNC, or the DLC, the dogs could have been, and would have been called off.

They were not.

In my brief lived experience, direct voter suppression in the world's so-called "greatest democracy" began on 13 August, 2000.

What we experienced that week was just a foretaste of total disenfranchisement, as we saw people we had marched beside proudly silently "disappeared" off the streets, held indefinitely without charge, and sometimes beaten senselessly before our eyes. Even those of us who had wanted to support the Democratic Party found we could not, with a clear conscience. We were rendered incapable of voting for the lesser of two evils, and we spread that message far and wide, as far as word-of-mouth would let us do so.

We knew and understood that Senator Gore's ties to Occidental Petroleum would render him completely impotent to paint his opponent in oil. Or else, we could not support him on the basis of the million-plus Iraqi children starved to death under UN sanctions -- a price, in Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright's words, "worth it" to cripple Hussein's Ba'athist regime the Bushes put into power, only to turn against, when it proved convenient to do so. And even those who didn't see "the broader issues" saw their freinds dragged off or beaten in the streets. All in the name of the National Democratic Party.

We may all, indeed, have been liberals once, but we were all effectively *radicalized* by the witness of our own eyes at the sheer coercive force of Republican hands under the orders of the Democratic National Convention in 2000. We went, perhaps naïvely, to excercise our first amendment rights to protest peaceably and make sure that the "second" party represented "opposition", and found ourselves betrayed at every turn.

The only opposition that showed up was from Republicrats to drive us off our own damn streets. Corporate interests ran the government at every level. We saw that. We understood that. The Pantry itself, for once, closed its doors (LA readers may understand the significance of this). We communicated all of that to the people who trusted us most.

We understood, experientially, the ultimate impotence of power-and-control games and vowed to oppose it always at all turns. We need to talk. Civilly. If you refuse there are no guarantees of what may happen. That was our stance. The Demmocratic National Convention refused to talk. The havoc's still being wrought.

*There* is your precious two percent, when you run two-and-a-half points ahead in polls with four-percent margins of error. You want it back? You'll have to *earn* it. "Least worst" doesn't win elections. Not anymore. You have *got* to prove yourselves *better* than your opponents. If you're incapable or unwilling, well, fine. Prepare to lose, and lose, and lose, and lose, and lose. Just like we all lose interest in elections when every ad, every catchphrase in each debate comes down to "Heather's a bitch" and "Patsy's a slut".

How *dare* you insult our intelligence, as voters. Why? Just because your opponents do? Play dirty all you want. Prepare to lose. So what if I've worked for (unnamed nonprofit) walking precincts and phonebanking. I want people to vote. But I still have not endorsed you, nor will I, probably, ever. I may not even vote for you myself. Your loss. I for one could not possibly care less who wins this race. We're *still* second-class citizens, at best. You've proven it. I can't even believe you're an attorney at the bar, you debate with such complete ineptitude. Multiply me times however many more-or-less unknown volunteers in whatever "swing" precincts your election depends on, and know that you've got a *lot* more to do to *win* an election than make your opponent look just a little worse than you do -- which you did, precisely *twice* this last debate. And yes, debates are more about style than substance, but at least people can vote for her lapels. You just break down in tears at a slightly tough question.

Some of us still remember when you blocked marriage rights off from us up in Sandoval County.

Make that right. We dare you. Then you will absolutely win.

At least we're better off than the civilians in Iraq whose blood is *still* on your party's hands, if not on your hands so directly. Your party has inevitably failed to capture our imaginations. You failed to even pretend to hear us. We don't exist to you, but as a vaguely perceived "threat". Your party had its opposition's party release its dogs on us, in its name, long before your party's members voted (with what, one exception in Congress?) to authorise the brutal, genocidal war against the people of Iraq. I am glad you oppose it and on that basis I may vote for you. But we got a taste of political repression at your party's hands and refused to stand for it. What more can you do to us? Suspend the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus? Go on. Try it. Oh wait, your party's members at the federal level already did. There is another thing you'll have to manage to undo.

We will remember how you vote. Prove us wrong. Please. Then, and only then, can we campaign for you wholeheartedly. In the meantime, just prove us right, and watch us all drop off the voter rolls. One at a time. We're not stewpid.

We can stand to be ignored, if only to a point. But betrayal is not lightly forgotten. Show us a candidate who makes amends for the repeated betrayals of 2000-2006 and we will gladly vote for him -- or her -- as the case may be. Wherever we may happen to live now.

Anyone urging Senators Gore or Lieberman to take positions in clear distinction to his Republican Party opponent in 2000 was held in a designated protest zone surrounded by 15-foot-high cyclone fences which, once the tear gas and pepper spray were deployed, once the five thousand cops on horseback charged into the assembly, became a battle zone, with nothing but random bits of footage from legal observers and a few artifacts (rubber bullets and the like, mostly) to prove that it had ever happened.

No one remembered it had happened who had not been there. The moment simply passed into national forgetfulness. Except that your party lost one election after another, after another.

From 13-17 August that year, being freshly out of work, and armed only with a hideous green hat (identifying me as an NLG legal observer), a clipboard, and a minitape recorder, I volunteered 16 hours each day for the National Lawyers' Guild. I'm proud that transcripts from one or two of those tapes has had some small role bringing LAPD into line (for now). But I have audiotapes of all that time spent on the ground, from my bored and embarassing confusion between "Israeli" and "Iraqi" children on a "quiet" afternoon, to second-by-second documentation of being "swept" from Pershing Square the first night of the protests in LA. I was there on the Santa Monica Pier the night the DLC met there, and called in cops on horseback onto the boardwalk to block us from speaking with our elected representatives and their fat-cat corporate donors. I was there when the single largest arrest in the history of the City of Los Angeles took place, after LAPD *forced* a "Critical Mass" bicycle rally to go the wrong way down a one-way street.

Any wonder I worry when I hear Democratic Mayor Chavez of Albuquerque copy, word for word, the vapid rationalizations of Republican Mayor Riordan of LA whenever fifty or a hundred people here dare gather to protest an illegal Republican war?

(I put the "NADER 2000!" bumper sticker on my car the first night of those protests in LA: 13 August, 2000. On the day I can no longer drive that car with that sticker, though the bumper holding the sticker was splintered so badly it's now held on by a plastic handcuff I found in my backseat after a Firestone tyre blew out on a backroad in Texas, I shall simply stop driving.)

Come day-after-election-day 2000, 8 November, 2000, I had no fewer than five people try and run me off the roads, both going to and returning from work. Never mind that California was a "safe" state that went to Gore regardless of my worthless vote where both the electoral college and my candidate's party's qualification for federal matching campaign funds was concerned. But until that election was finally decided -- illegally, in the Supreme Court, by *one* vote, in Bush II's favour, I was subjected to similar behaviour each day for weeks on end. Fun stuff, indeed, when you work the LaMarzocco Linea 4AV at a busy Starbucks.

I'll leave the story of October 22nd for another time.

Fast forward: Albuquerque, 2004. I'm working graveyard shift at Frontier Restaurant, turning out half a million tortillas in nine months. The papers announce that Ralph Nader is visiting tomorrow. My tyres -- all of them -- get slashed as I work. Gary (the inscrutable Frontier veteran everyone respects even if no one pretends to understand him) is kind enough to follow me home as I drive home that morning at about five miles an hour. But to meet Mr. Nader, I have to take the bus out to the aeroport and then walk for miles. And then get back to work at 10 PM. Somehow.

Mr. Nader inscribes my copy of his latest book in just a certain way that *means* something to me.

He looks at me, and listens to me, even as I'm in complete despair. I don't know whether to thank him for running or ask him what the hell he is thinking by daring to run. But he's against the war in Iraq. Neither major party candidate is. I know who's earned my vote.

He's the only presidential candidate who meets with me, though both major party candidates also had multiple engagements in Albuquerque in a so-called "swing state" before the election.

I vote for him again.

Not that doing so was easy. See, I'd requested an absentee ballot from the Bernalillo County Clerk the day they said was the last day to ask for 'em and get 'em before election. I wouldn't have requested it that late, except I questioned whether it was wiser to show up election day or have a paper trail of how I'd voted.

Day before election, my absentee ballot still had not come in the mail. (I got it a full MONTH after the election, making me wonder why the County Clerk had wasted the postage.)

I wouldn't have known all these deadlines if KUNM's local news department hadn't covered *every* important deadline as it came up.

So the day before the election I run down to the County Clerk's office. I don't know how I'm going to vote. I don't want to do a provisional ballot if I can avoid it. They send me down to the Voting Machine Warehouse on South Broadway.

There's a huge room with electronic voting machines.

There's another huge room with big buckets of outgoing but unmailed mail.

My absentee ballot is somewhere in the unsorted stack.

It is not even ready to mail, even though it's got less than 24 hours at this point to go through the mail and reach me and get sent back and received.

I stand around for hours until I figure out for sure who is in charge and go right up to her and ask (politely of course) where is my ballot and how can I vote.

She says 'just show up at the poll tomorrow".

I ask, "so I'll need to fill out a provisional ballot?"

She says, "nah, just vote regular. You'll be fine."

The next day, I do just exactly that.

On an electronic voting machine.

I think it was a Sequoia.

Maybe it was a Diebold.

I forget.

It was extremely confusing.

I changed my vote "downticket" on a couple of things I knew would win or lose regardless how I voted just to see how the thing worked.

I chose my upticket candidates. Double-checked. Triple-checked. Quadruple-checked. And left.

I have no confidence whatever that my votes actually counted.

The day after election day, Kerry *conceded* the race to Governor Bush before the votes in New Mexico were *even* counted, confirming my worst fears.

And to this day I'd dearly love to know how many people voted for Nader 2004 in Bernalillo County's Precinct 166.

Voting is socially acceptable masturbation.

Prove me wrong. Puhlease.

And I didn't even mention that I got a caging letter.

Perhaps you've heard of the Republican Party's "caging lists", the existence of which was exposed by a stray email. You know -- the idea was to get voters knocked off the rolls in the event of a state-wide challenge for precinct-by-precinct recounts.

Long story short:

The Republican Party of Texas sent out a bunch of vaguely threatening form letters in the mail, urging registered voters to vote Republican in the weeks preceeding the 2004 election. The idea was to target people who had changed their addresses within a set period of time, and then whatever letters came back undelivered would be challenged in prospective recounts as fraudulent votes.

Heaven help anyone who lives at so ungainly a street address as 1795 1/2 Central Ave. NW No. 4. (Not my real address, but not far from it, either.)

My response? Before I even knew what it was?

Got the letter.

Photocopied it.

Mailed the photocopy in a card (with Felix the Cat on a hot pink background) to Governor Bush in Washington DC saying "not that I'm not flattered, but I don't swing that way" -- even though I suspect no one at the White House would get the flippant triple-entendre combined with the reference to "Duckman".

And a copy to one reader here who shall go unnamed.

And a copy somewhere else, who shall likewise go unnamed.

One funny letter? Fine, I can reply with funny letters in triplicate.

Voting *is* masturbation.

Do it early.

And often.

Enjoy it every time.

While you can.