Panelists address how to spend the vote
by Lindsay Sandham
The Metropolitan
Bradley Wakoff / The Metropolitan
Metro political science professor Oneida Meranto, from team “Lesser
of two evils”, and Metro student and Creative Resistance member
Erik Weisner from team “Vote your hopes, not your fears,”
discuss the upcoming elections in the Tivoli’s Multicultural Lounge
Tuesday, Oct. 19.
A political debate about voting organized by campus group Creative Resistance
was held in Tivoli’s Multicultural Lounge Oct.19, featuring three
different leftist views.
The first panel was Metro political science professor Oneida Meranto
and Metro student and Creative Resistance member Alan Franklin discussing
“the lesser of two evils,” between President Bush and Sen.
John Kerry, and why people should vote for Kerry.
The second panel was Metro student and Creative Resistance member Erik
Weisner and Sunny Maynard, former Green Party candidate for Colorado Attorney
General, discussing why people should vote third party.
The third panel was Metro student and Creative Resistance member Zoë
Williams and Metro student and GLBT advocate Erin Durban discussing why
people should not vote at all.
“These are ideas we can’t share in the classroom,”
Meranto said. “These are ideas that some people don’t want
us to share in the classroom.”
“I’m on the panel to talk about the lesser of two evils,”
she said. But Sen. Kerry is not evil, not evil like Bush and not evil
like Reagan was, she said.
Meranto also said there are striking similarities between this election
and the election of 1984, between Republican Ronald Reagan and Democrat
Walter Mondale, which was the first time she chose to use voting as a
method of political participation.
She discussed the various doctrines of past presidents and their negative
outcomes, highlighting what she considers problems with the Bush doctrine,
such as shaping policies around an “evil empire” and considering
a terrorist to be anyone who does not agree with his administration’s
policies.
“I think we’re creating enemies faster than we can kill them,”
she said.
The Bush regime is fascist and the important question to ask oneself
before voting, she said, is, who is the least fascist candidate? and that
is Kerry.
The only non-fascist candidates on the ballot in Colorado are Green Party
candidate Walt Brown and Reform Party candidate Ralph Nader, Weisner said.
“If you oppose Bush, there’s no reason to vote for Kerry
because they’re so similar,” he said.
Weisner also said Kerry wants to expand the “axis of evil”
to include Cuba and wants to put an end to the Fidel Castro regime.
He also said Kerry supported the occupancy in Iraq and is now advocating
to send more members of the military to Iraq and throughout the world.
Meranto said that Kerry did indeed support the invasion of Iraq.
“But he learned from the power of his mistakes,” she said.
Williams and Durban, on the other hand, think that individual votes do
not matter and that voting itself is the most contained form of involvement.
“If voting changed anything, it would be illegal,” Durban
said.
Weisner agreed that voting is not much power, but argued that it is a
small piece of power and voting for a third party only enhances one’s
power.
He said Kerry would only do what is in his best interest and what will
get him re-elected.
“What they (third parties) have told voters they’re going
to do, that is what they’re going to do,” Weisner said. “(Kerry)
is just another politician looking out for the corporate interests of
this country. The people that don’t compromise are the ones who
go to third parties.”
Durban said her and Williams’ argument is more fleeting than the
other two panels and that no one ever thinks of working outside the system.
“There are concrete things that people do within their communities
to make change,” she said.
Both Durban and Williams stressed that their decision not to vote was
not because of apathy or lack of education, but rather because they feel
voting only perpetuates the two-party system and the government’s
control over the population.
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