The state of Florida was up in the air. Had Gore won it, he would have been the president. The world saw the fiasco the ensued: tens of thousands of voters, mostly for Gore, had their votes nullified. The votes of many others just disappeared.

Today’s U.S. election frauds are mostly due to hi-tech anomalies, but those of the recent past were much more blatant. Former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson won his first race for the U.S. Senate in 1948 under suspicious circumstances. When the votes were counted, he lost by a hundred or so. Johnson demanded a recount and, miraculously, 287 votes were found that had not originally been counted. Of the 287, 286 were for Johnson. Coincidentally, the 287 people voted in alphabetical order, and some had been dead for a while. They were so enthused about a Johnson senate seat that they rose from the dead to vote for him.

Like every other dishonest U.S. tradition that has surfaced in the "new" Iraq (bribery, disappearance of billions of dollars, brutality, etc.), the good old American tradition of fraudulent voting is already in place in Iraq. Every side in the recent "elections" has called foul. In some instances, the prevailing party gained more votes than the number of registered voters. Nobody is happy, even the victors who stated that they should have received more votes than the bogus ones already accumulated.

One group that has been left totally out of the picture is the Turkmen of Iraq. Today, I received a press release from the Netherlands-based Iraqi Turkmen Human Rights Research Foundation. In addition, I received a few pictures of voting shenanigans that occurred in the Kurdish area of Iraq. Evidently, many pre-teen youngsters voted, and voted more than once. The camera caught them wiping off the ink on their hands that was affixed to show they had voted. Once the hands were clean, they lined up to vote again.

Here are a few highlights from the press release:

• Thousands of voters, particularly the Kurds, have been seen voting several times in a day in one election center. Simple papers and illegal documents have been accepted by the Kurdish managing team to allow Kurdish voters to cast their votes.
• Distribution of voters to election stations had been achieved manually, which made the direction of a voter to a specific station possible. This factor facilitated the use of multiple voting by singe voters.
• In the Kurdish quarters of Turkmen regions, particularly in the Kerkuk province, the Kurds had been left freehand to behave as they wanted. All types of manipulations had been achieved. The observers of the Iraqi Turkmen parties and civil organizations have been insulted, bitten and prevented to enter the election centers by high-ranking Kurdish police, particularly in the election centers of Kurdish quarters, for example" Rahim Awa, Shorja, and Imam Kasim. The number of Kurdish voters who were registered by the Kurds in these three quarters is about 160,000, in spite of the total population of them being not more than 150,000.

Bush hailed the Iraqi elections as a mighty victory. He maintained that Iraq will now become a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. In fact, the elections were even more crooked than the one he manipulated to become president.

I have yet to see a negative word in the U.S. press about the elections. However, international media have brought up the issue. In The Netherlands, a video published by the daily newspaper Volkskrant was shown on December 15 that was titled "Easily Removable Democracy." It highlighted scenes of people washing their hands and voting more than once. Underage voters took great advantage of the voting mechanisms in Iraq.

The new democratic Iraq has quickly established an age-old American tradition of voting fraud: vote early and vote often.