Political groups Unity for Democracy and the New Progressives held a day-long rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday to draw attention to what they are calling is a rigged election system centered on moneyed interests and deaf to voters’ concerns. Several hundred joined in a “Take Back Democracy March” which kicked off the event. After walking to the White House, they returned to the Lincoln Memorial, where a dozen speakers spoke from its marble steps, highlighting serious problems with U.S. election process.
They included high-profile campaign people, activists and independent media personalities from a nonpartisan base, expressing deep frustration and dissatisfaction with the election system, balloting processes, voter disenfranchisement and corruption, along every step on the road to the presidency. There were many Bernie Sanders supporters as well as Green party speakers. A Trump supporter also spoke.
At the end of speeches, ten activists participated in an act of civil disobedience when they walked into the Reflecting Pool. But no U.S. Park Police showed up and there were no arrests. Walking in the Reflecting Pool is a misdemeanor, and act of civil disobedience which was a common tactic in the 1960s during the Vietnam War protests, and has often been borrowed by modern movements.
Delegate Jeff Day who worked on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, encouraged organizers and activists to talk to their neighbors about issues important to them that are not being discussed by candidates. He urged making effort to reach out to others. “Talk to your neighbors and take time to make sure they’re voting,” he said.
He asked of those present to reflect on their involvement over the last year. “What are we doing for us?” he asked. He suggested letting go of the “let’s go shopping mentality” and adopting an attitude of “sacrifice for the common good mentality.”
Day decried the excess of the consumer based economic system as a key stumbling block for many which focuses on consumption as opposed to focusing on individual needs, such as single payer healthcare, public education and community involvement. “The corrupt corporations and bankers that have paid and bought off all the politicians are taking this country in the wrong direction,” he said.
“We’ve got to speak up, step out and start being active,” he said.
Independent media streamer, Claudia Stauber from Cabin Talk, gave an unscripted talk about voter’s concerns with delegates, votes, and access to the Democratic National Convention, concerns which resonated throughout the Sanders campaign. She began her discussion by saying “Cabin Talk!” to draw attention to the simplicity of what she had to say as she does in her live streams. “We can disagree, and that’s what democracy is all about, but what we do need to have is that every voice actually gets heard but in this election cycle that hasn’t been the case,” she said.
“Even though we’re in DC, there should be log cabins right here,” she joked, in a reference to Lincoln. Stauber drew a comparison between U.S. elections of the 1860s and the modern elections in other parts of the world, where paper ballots ensured that all votes were counted. “We need unrigged elections with paper ballots with citizen oversight while they are counted,” she said.
Stauber believes a paradigm shift is needed in the way success is defined. “How we define success, especially in the Western world, we define it only monetarily at this point. The way we need to define it is how many smiles we have and how happy we are,” She said.
Stauber said she wants to convey that there is a big change in direction happening as a result of new ideas and a positive message from the Sanders campaign. “Bernie did bring that out, and we need to continue it,” she said. “We need to be kinder to our planet, to each other, and to animals,” she said.
Law professor Tim Canova, who ran an unsuccessful insurgent Senate campaign against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in South Florida, invoked the words of Lincoln, asking, “What is democracy? Lincoln talks about ‘of the people, by the people and for the people. Democracy requires human rights for everyone and not just here in this country but everyone in the world.”
Canova cited revelations from the Wikileaks site which has been releasing emails of the Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, as evidence the election has been operated under a rigged system, influencing the media and the voters and tilting the nomination of the Democratic party in the favor of Clinton. “We’ve got to be vigilant, we’ve got to be loud, we’ve got to keep speaking truth to power and to the powerless,” he said.
Addressing the loss of trust in the election system, Canova offered, “There is a reason that every European democracy has banned the voting machine. Paper ballots, counted by hand in public [is a] true democracy.”
Canova said that people were waking up to issues such as the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement presently before Congress, climate change, high incarceration rates for non-violent drug arrests, and the overturn of Citizens United.
Though the election cycle seemed to beset with losses of key candidates progressives had been behind, Canova said that people are waking up and getting involved. “This year has been an historic election year and it’s going to seem a lot of us that we’ve fallen short, but this is only the beginning, we’ve just started to fight,” he said.
