January 07, 2005

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Palo Alto Online

'We won't be shushed ...'

by Bill D'Agostino

"Hi, do you want to learn about how our election died in November?" Yvonne Shevin asked strangers in Palo Alto's Lytton Plaza on Wednesday. Dressed in black, Shevin was one of about 50 locals spending their lunch hour mourning the outcome of the two-month-old presidential election.

By now, many area liberals have conceded that President George W. Bush won his re-election campaign over Democratic Sen. John Kerry. But this group is not ready to accept that outcome. The rally -- entitled a "Funeral for Fair Elections" in a press release -- was timed to immediately precede Congress' ratification of Ohio's Electoral College votes on Thursday.

While handing out informational fliers, Shevin described the downtown rally as non-partisan. However, a few minutes later she tried to start a "We won't be shushed -- we don't want Bush!" chant.

The event climaxed with a two-block march to Congresswoman Anna Eshoo's nearby office; activists hoped to get her to join other Democrats in a formal objection to the vote count in Ohio. Some in attendance Wednesday had met earlier with officials from Sen. Barbara Boxer's office. Boxer was the first U.S. senator to announce she was joining House Democrats to protest the count.

At the door of Congresswoman Eshoo's office, marchers placed a coffin, inscribed "Fair Elections RIP." Field representative Anne Ream came outside to accept their petition. She thanked the marchers for their activism, but the crowd wanted a promise of support.

"Has Anna taken a stand on the issue?" shouted Drew Johnson, of the local Green Party.

"What issue?" Ream asked, before reporting that she couldn't speak for Eshoo.

"She needs to be more courageous," another woman spoke aloud.

A few minutes later, organizer and Raging Granny Ruth Robertson spoke a eulogy for the death of fair elections. She then asked those present to visualize giving members of Congress strength to be courageous on Thursday.

"Visualizing will begin now," Robertson said, before bowing her head and sending her own silent prayer.

During the rally in the plaza, protestors were met with a few sympathetic honks and many skeptical stares. One man shouted "Liars!" from his car window as he drove near the rally.

"They'll always be conspiracy theorists, but I'm not going to buy it," Jonathan Evans said while walking by.

"We don't have a perfect system, but do you know a country with a better one?" passer-by Peter Kasenchak asked. "The United States is an honest-enough country; they would not let someone skew an election."

One of the march's organizers admitted she was used to being called a conspiracy theorist.

"If anybody tries to say it I say, 'Hey I'm a conspiracy analyst,'" said Gail Sredanovic, a Menlo Park hypnotherapist and a board member with the Peninsula chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Even though she admitted the chance of reversing Bush's victory was narrow, Sredanovic said she was also fighting for election reform for 2006.

"Regardless of the outcome, it's absolutely crucial that there be a huge outcry, that there be an investigation and that there be serious reform," Sredanovic said.

Speakers in the plaza recited a litany of complaints about the recent election, including long lines in heavily Democratic precincts, electronic voting machines with no paper trails and exit polls that greatly differed from the official results. Although a recent recount in Ohio, the race's closest battleground state, showed Democratic Sen. John Kerry lost by more than 100,000 votes, protestors in Palo Alto insisted he would have won had every vote been counted.

"If this type of election occurred in a Third World country, the whole world would be complaining and it would be considered fraud," rally organizer Peter Drekmeier said. He reminded the crowd that, prior to the election, the president of the country's largest electronic-voting company promised to deliver Ohio for Bush.

Aside from a tense, albeit brief, encounter with Eshoo's representative, the event's mood was light and playful. One hand-drawn sign asked those in power to "Steal Kisses Not Votes." The Raging Grannies sung a song entitled "Election Fraud" to the tune of "Deck the Halls."

"The levity and humor hides a lot of pain and distress," noted Judy Kramer, one of the marchers and a former board president of the now-defunct YWCA of the Mid-Peninsula. "People feel very strongly something awful is happening."

A few who marched said last year's election pushed them back into activism after decades of inactivity. The last time Glenn Sanders, of Mountain View, marched was in Oklahoma in the 1970s, when he successfully protested the building of a nuclear power plant.

"I've watched what Bush has done in the last four years and it's made me irate and panicked," Sanders said.

Former Menlo Park Mayor Gail Slocum, a former Republican, also attended. In November, she volunteered to poll-watch in Florida and what she witnessed profoundly changed her attitude. One mother, carrying her 15-month-old baby, spent hours in line to vote only to be told she wasn't registered.

"If we don't stand up right now, we'll never have fair elections," Slocum said.

Larissa Keen, of Los Altos Hills, also volunteered in a largely black precinct of Florida. There, she spoke with an 88-year-old woman who had voted in every election in her lifetime and her 62-year-old son, who was voting for the first time. The two waited for five hours and came out of the polling place saying it was worth it.

Attending the Palo Alto rally "is in the spirit of not just leaving it up to the African-American community to do what it takes to make sure the votes are counted," Keen said. "It's up to all of us as a whole country."

Staff Writer Bill D'Agostino can be e-mailed at bdagostino@paweekly.com.

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