From Common Wonders
The fairness of the election is more important than the results

By Bob Koehler

After the first challenge, this one big guy stood over me and pointed his finger, Anne Schultz e-mailed me. Shaking a bit with anger, he said that he could throw me out in a minute for disrupting the election. The woman was on her way out of the polling place, and I asked her to stay until this was resolved, which she was glad to do. I reminded him that I wasn’t disrupting the election, I was simply doing what was within my rights, but after that the cozy relationship I thought I’d established with the judges, with the help of bringing donuts, went rather to hell.

This is democracy raw, warts exposed. It’s not the kind you see on TV — all sanitized numbers and gleeful winners — but the real deal, one vote at a time, a power struggle in every precinct, as fair as it has to be (and no fairer).

Our vaunted, flawed system — loose from its moorings, adrift in cyberspace, sealed off from real scrutiny for so long by media smugness — had a lot more eyes on it than usual last week. This is the untold story of Election ‘06. The real winner in the Nov. 7 election is the grassroots voter protection movement, wrote Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at FreePress.org. That the well-oiled, well-funded Rove/Bush theft machine lost control of (Congress) says just one thing: Somebody was watching.

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