The cold numbers say Gore was defeated by racial vote suppression trickery—as were John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. Gore grew a beard. Hillary moaned about her loss, blaming her defeat on women for giving in to “tremendous pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’” All three conceded at light-speed, nary a peep from them about the screwing of the un-white voter.*
But one Presidential candidate screamed bloody murder.
In 2006, the Guardian flew me to Mexico to investigate the suspect loss, by a fraction of 1%, of the “Bernie Sanders of Mexico,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador. On election night AMLO was way ahead when the official count stopped—and resumed with a massive, absurd reversal in the final minutes of the count. I and other investigators found massive ballot-box stuffing (video-taped!), ballot box dumping and intimidation of voters at gunpoint.
I discovered that the games with Mexico’s electoral rolls were secretly orchestrated by the Bush Administration, using the same crew that had purged the Florida voter rolls of fake felons for Bush in 2000.
When I met with him, AMLO made clear: he wouldn’t do an Al Gore. Rather than grab his ankles, AMLO grabbed a microphone, leading an occupation of the central square of the capital, rallying every day for six months. In the Distrito Federal I witnessed something I’d hoped to see in the USA . . . a progressive candidate call a fraudulent election a fraudulent election.
AMLO’s demand was simple: count all the votes, “urna por urna”—ballot box by ballot box.
Mexico’s Electoral Commission, a joke of a watchdog, had authority to review each ballot box, but chose only 1%. They found enough votes for AMLO in just that 1% to make it clear that if all ballot boxes were opened and counted, he’d win. So they kept the ballot boxes sealed, uncounted.
Despite warnings that the protest would destroy his political career, he persevered.
¡Urna por urna!
Still, in the end, he lost.
So he ran again. And again. Then, in 2018, Mexicans fed up with los Trumpitos, the little Trumps, the light-complexioned grasping grifters who have held the Mexican presidency by theft and assassination for decades, crushed the gangster government and elected AMLO with too many votes to steal.
AMLO ran on a five-point platform, and Number Uno was, Count Every Vote. Urna por urna.
As with Stacey Abrams’s campaign in Georgia, talking about vote thievery did not discourage voters, it got them fired up. (AMLO even overcame a $7.2 million smear campaign by Trump’s advisors, Cambridge Analytica.)
AMLO insisted for 12 years, Juntos haremos historia. Together we will make history—while north of the border, instead of making history, defeated Democrats chose to make millions.
* In all fairness to Kerry: In September 2017, years after the election, the ex-candidate was asked why he conceded despite evidence of the racial fix in Ohio. To my surprise, he cited a “very good chapter on the election” in my book, Armed Madhouse. He did not mention that the chapter in question is called “Kerry Won.” The kid who asked why he conceded despite the evidence in the book was shocked with a taser. Discussion over.