by TONY MESSENGER, Columbia Daily Tribune
November 2, 2004
Rest easy, Boone County voters, the Canadians are here to save the day.
It’s a relief, eh?
Canada’s former minister of communication, David MacDonald, sat in the Boone County Public Library yesterday to let us know that he and others are watching our election today to make sure there is no repeat of the 2000 fiasco marked by Florida’s hanging chads and a presidency decided in the U.S. Supreme Court.
"It’s important that americans from coast to coast … believe it was fair," MacDonald says of today’s vote.
To that end, MacDonald and South africa’s Norman du Plessis will be jumping from polling place to polling place today, taking notes and observing.
Meanwhile, their counterparts will be in St. Louis, Ohio and Florida doing the same. Fifteen international observers are here to monitor our election, all brought here by the San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange.
MacDonald makes it clear he views his duty as a nonpartisan one. "We’re not going to be protesting anything," he says. There’s no reason to question MacDonald’s motives, even though he referred to himself yesterday as one of the "shock troops, an activist" in deferring a question about election monitoring to du Plessis. But there are plenty who question the role of Global Exchange and other election monitors.
MacDonald says one of the reasons he agreed to join Global Exchange’s so-called fair election effort is because his research showed him that the organization didn’t have any partisan goals related to this election. He should have kept researching.
The group is about as left wing as they come, protesting the corporatization of U.S. politics, the World Trade Organization and other similar groups, pushing a free trade and sustainable society agenda and, in general, opposing just about every possible policy related to President George W. Bush’s administration.
Further, one of Global Exchange’s co-founders, Medea Benjamin, is openly campaigning for Democratic candidate John Kerry. "There is no greater political imperative this year than to retire the Bush regime, one of the most dangerous and extremist in U.S. history," Benjamin and others wrote in an open letter that’s received wide distribution. "as people dedicated to peace, economic justice, equality, sustainability and constitutional freedoms, we are committed to defeating Bush."
Benjamin has a right to her views. In fact, she’s put her money where her mouth is, fighting all over the world for social justice. There’s nothing wrong with that. But can her organization be considered non-partisan?
Hardly.
She is, for instance, only four years removed from her run as the Green Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from California.
So why is MacDonald here?
Global Exchange has an agenda. The group says so in a position paper on its Web site. Its members believe america’s two-party system is corrupt. They call it "a two-party duopoly that increasingly represents only the narrow interests of a wealthy elite. … Ours is a crippled democracy, each day appearing more an oligarchy than a republic."
among the group’s solutions to our country’s political problems is instituting a system closer to Canada’s parliamentary structure in which parties are represented based on the percentage of the population that votes for them. Sensing a pattern? In Canada, Benjamin’s losing Green Party would have won some sort of national representation, even though she lost.
That’s the way of the world in MacDonald’s home country. It’s why conservative columnist Judi MacLeod of the Web publication Canada Free Press ridicules the so-called election monitor’s nonpartisan claims.
"That man doesn’t know fairness and balance," she says. "He’s down there to do what he can to help the liberals."
Global Exchange actually bills MacDonald as a progressive conservative. MacLeod calls him a "red Tory," a pejorative term. "He used to be a pretend Tory," she says of MacDonald’s former membership in one of Canada’s more conservative parties. Now he’s a member of the leftist New Democratic Party.
"They’re far left of even the liberals in your country," MacLeod says.
MacDonald bristles at the criticism, which has been echoed this week by other conservative think tanks in the United States.
"I’m quite fascinated that there is such a level of defensiveness over elections in america," he says. "I’ve made it clear that my role here … is to be nonpartisan. If other people want to denigrate that, that’s their problem."
In fact, it’s ours.
In a day or two, MacDonald’s group, and the equally tainted monitoring group Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, will reveal initial reports about voting in Boone County and the nation.
There will be errors, of that we can be sure. There always are.
But read between the lines when you’re told that america’s election system needs change.
The proctor of Boone County’s global test already has the answers up his sleeve.
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