Is the Voting System Broken?

Because of the spat of ACORN stories we are getting about tampering with the vote I am reprinting a letter published in Long Island Newsday, Dec 7, 2000.

Is the Voting System Broken?

Knowing what we now know about chads, dimples, undervotes, overvotes, absentee ballots and voting machines, will we ever be able to trust the result of any future election?

Any watchful person following this story now knows that millions of votes go uncounted in every election. Millions more votes are disqualified. It happens in every voting precinct and in every election throughout the United States in every race.

If Vice President Al Gore and his supporters are right, then why should any American believe the results of any election? Will all future American elections be decided by lawyers when the races are close?

What has made American elections work since the founding of the country is the belief that the people who manage them are for the most part honest, hard-working and fair. Yes, there is the occasional scandal, but overall the results have been trustworthy-or have they?

And isn't that really the question we must now ask ourselves? Because if our elections are a fraud, then the voting franchise is also a fraud. Without the freedom to vote and have it counted honestly with the same rules for everybody, there is no franchise and without it there can be no America-at least not in the way the founders envisioned it

Handling the Immigration Issue

The Republicans need a more sophisticated way to handle the immigration issue. It seems like the even the dumbest news anchor, pundit or questioner can trip them up into some ridiculous argument or statement that can be used to grind them up into little pieces and render them unelectable. The New Narrative would like to contribute to this effort. It would begin by pointing out that there isn't an immigration strategy than can work unless the current system is reformed. It takes more than 10 years to complete the citizenship process and the backlog is so long that if the current illegal population returned home they would not be processed for at least a decade; probably one of the main reasons many won't return home and prefer to live in the shadows. So we should begin by reforming the Immigration and Naturalization Service into a tight, streamlined organization that can reduce the processing time and clear up the current backlog. Secondly we should control all of the entry points so illegal aliens cannot enter the country without documentation. And third: We should reform the visa and political asylum process so that it can keep track of those here on visas and not be used for trivial immigration cases. Republicans must not let themselves be drawn into arguments about specific nationalities, but focus instead on the INS as a service that is failing the nation. The racial and ethnic hustlers are constantly looking for ways to use the immigration debate to defeat any remedy except open borders. The Republicans must handle the argument better if they want to win.