A McCain "Win" Will Be Theft, Resistance Is Planned
afterdowningstreet.org/node/36993
By David Swanson

If your television declares John McCain the president elect on the
evening of November 4th, your television will be lying. You should
immediately pick up your pre-packed bags and head straight to the White
House in Washington, D.C., which we will surround and shut down until
this attempt at a third illegitimate presidency is reversed.

A McCain "win" will not be illegitimate because I disagree with his
policies, but because he himself has rendered it illegitimate. He and
his campaign and allied supporters have sought to illegally remove
hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, fraudulently registered
people as Republicans without their knowledge and against their will,
obstructed voter registration drives, falsely warned students against
voting where they attend school, falsely accused community groups of
voter registration fraud, falsely alleged the widespread existence of
voter fraud, and encouraged supporters to falsely believe McCain's
opponent is a foreign terrorist through speeches, recorded phone
messages, and flyers. Already in early voting in a number of states
there have been cases of votes on electronic machines visibly flipping
to McCain or McKinney when intended for Obama. We will see McCain
supporters on November 4th challenging people's right to vote, seeking
to force people to vote on provisional ballots, and seeking to have
provisional ballots discarded. And we will see electronic vote counts
wildly out of step with the most recent polls, although not with exit
polls -- which we will be denied any access to unless they have been
"adjusted" to match the official counts.

Inciting your supporters to violence with racist and religious lies
about your opponent, effectively alleging treason on absolutely no
basis, should be enough, alone, to disqualify a campaign for the
presidency of the United States. Working to block voters from
registering should be enough on its own. Any of the dozens of creative
forms of vote suppression currently being used by the Republicans should
be enough. And allowing votes to be counted on completely unverifiable
machines owned and controlled by corporations allied with your party
should make the results illegitimate even if plausible. If McCain is
declared the "winner," it will not be plausible, but at this point he
has so disgraced himself and our electoral system that he is no longer a
legitimate candidate for president regardless of what the polls
(themselves fallible, but all we've got) say just before election day.
Too many people have already been denied the opportunity to even push
the buttons and have their votes miscounted. Too much incendiary slander
has been let loose. Too much visible vote flipping has already been
documented.

If Obama officially wins, McCain is likely to challenge it, charging the
Obama campaign with some of the very crimes engaged in by McCain
himself. Our reaction should be exactly the same in the event of a
McCain challenge as in the event of a McCain "victory." We should not
sit back for even a split second and wonder how it will work out. We
should not try to organize a plan on the spur of the moment to travel to
key battleground states. We should be prepared already to immediately
travel to Washington, D.C., head straight for the White House, occupy
Lafayette Square Park, the Ellipse, and surrounding streets, block
entrances, and shut the place down until Obama is recognized as the
president elect or we are guaranteed a credible election with universal
registration and hand-counted paper ballots.

We may be there for days or weeks or months. But we must be there. We
must be there by the millions. We must show each other, and the nation,
and the world that we have had enough, that we will not stand for one
more stolen election, that we will not give in to fear, lies, theft, and
intimidation. If they choose to attack our nonviolent gathering of
citizens, let them do it right in front of George W. Bush's White House
with the world's media watching. We will not back down.

I'm not hoping it comes to this, of course. If it doesn't because the
official election results are credible and just, we should celebrate and
prepare to lobby our government for real change. But if resistance does
not develop because people are too scared and obedient to act, then
you'll still be glad you packed ahead of time, and you might want to
look into tickets to Canada.