Florida, the Democratic Party, and the Vanishing Voter

While yesterday Florida’s Democratic party idea of a mail-in primary seemed feasible, today it looks dead-on-arrival again. This is because the Republicans who rule in Florida are certain that State law prohibits election officials from authenticating votes cast in a Party's primary outside the one organized by the State. This seems a potentially fatal blow to the controversial plan (Hillary Clinton, who hopes to have "her" Florida delegates seated at the Convention was very much opposed to it).

With the possibility of a new vote vanishing, efforts to find a way out from the nightmare of a battle inside the "Credential Committee" of a brokered convention, seem fruitless so far. As things stay today, it is quite possible that Americans will watch live at brawls between the Obama's and Clinton's factions on the floor of the Denver Convention.

Castro resigns: Will the American Obsession with Him Fade?

It was 3AM in the US, last night, when Reuter broke the news that Fidel Castro has resigned, citing this letter to Granma website: "A mis entrañables compatriotas, que me hicieron el inmenso honor de elegirme en días recientes como miembro del Parlamento, en cuyo seno se deben adoptar acuerdos importantes para el destino de nuestra Revolución, les comunico que no aspiraré ni aceptaré- repito- no aspiraré ni aceptaré, el cargo de Presidente del Consejo de Estado y Comandante en Jefe."
It will be interesting to see, now, if the irrational obsession with him felt by all American Presidents from John Kennedy through George W. Bush will decline. Among international relations scholars, there is a consensus that the ailing Cuban regime has been kept alive by the US embargo, a powerful stabilyzing factor in the island. Unfortunately, American politicians have been kept hostage of the powerful Cuban community in Florida, the State that gave Bush the 25 votes in the Electoral College need to become President in 2000.
There are literally hundreds of book dealing with the CIA and Cuba, most of them of modest interest. One that had new material when published in 1994 was David Corn's Blond Ghost, while a more recent one is Dan Bohning's The Castro's Obsession. Corn write the first biography of Ted Shackley, who ran from Miami the inter-agency program to overthrow Castro in the early Sixties.
A more scholarly approach, focusing on the larger picture of the different path chosen by Canada, Mexico, and Spain toward Cuba (constructive engagement) is found in the book by Michele Zebich-Knos and Heather Nicol Foreign Policy Toward Cuba: isolation or engagement? The authors have assembled a group of scholars to describe the domestic causes and evaluate the international effects of these different approaches.

Election 2000: listening to the other side

Some readers have taken issue with the choices of books we proposed about the election of 2000 (see Election rigging in Harlem?). Basically, their complaint is that some publications that defended the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore didn't make the list.
While this Review makes no pretense of being a "balanced" forum (we strongly support progressive ideas, and fight conservative ideologies) we respect the canons of scientific discussion, and will try to convince those who held different opinions that we have good reasons to think what we think. In this particular case, we have no trouble in admitting that a couple of publications that offer serious arguments do exist. One is Richard Posner's book Breaking the Deadlock. Posner is a real conservative intellectual, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and one of the most influential American legal theorists. He has been too much controversial a personality to make to the Supreme Court, but half of the members of the Court today wouldn't qualify to be his clerks (to WHICH half of that body we think, we'll let you guess). In any event, his book should have been mentioned, and we apologize for not putting it on the list (not that we subscribe to a single paragraph of his conclusions, of course).
Another volume, this one a "balanced" book, is E. J. Dionne's and W. Kristol's Bush v. Gore. It offers journalistic commentary (Dionne is also a respected author of political essays, among them the brand-new Souled Out) but the book has value because it puts together the basics (various legal decisions, not only the last Supreme Court's per curiam opinion) and also a number of editorial stuff that offers a good deal of insight about the pundits' reasoning during those critical weeks.

Election rigging in Harlem?

Has the "example" of successful election rigging in Florida in November 2000 spread INSIDE the two parties? According to the New York Times in some precincts of Harlem not a single vote was cast for Barack Obama. That seems, well, difficult.
The investigation is under way, but the larger topic of the integrity of the elections in a federal system is not in the news. This is truly surprising, given the amount of literature created not only by the stolen election of 2000, but also by the strong suspicions cast over the critical results of Ohio in 2004, suspicions that are still alive today (see this). You can also find an analysis of various issues of 2004 presidential elections (in Italian) here.
Among the analysis of the Florida case, we recommend Jeffrey Tobin's Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election and Vincent Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President Of course, those books were hardly alone: in a more scholarly fashion, the issue was tackled by Robert Watson (Counting Votes), Mark Whitman (Florida 2000: A Sourcebook on the Contested Presidential Election), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Electing the President, 2000), Cass Sunstein and Richard Epstein (The Vote: Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court), Jarvis's Bush v. Gore: The Fight for Florida's Vote, and, more important, Roy Saltman: The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence. Saltman traces the evolution of voting technology, highlighting how the antiquated systems in use today are a legacy of the 1950s. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to disentangle the responsibilities of federal, state, and local authorities in monitoring and counting the votes. It would be even worse if the various factions inside the parties took advantage of these obsolete and undemocratic procedures to rig the primaries, too.