NOVEMBER 5 COULD BE THE LAST REAL ELECTION of our lifetimes. Votes will continue to be cast and counted for decades to come, of course, but America is fast becoming an Iraq-ocracy in which rigged elections are staged merely to give the illusion of legitimacy to illegitimate rulers.

The evidence that democracy is on its death bed is all around you. The Democratic Party is going berserk because of Republican and Justice Department efforts to prevent vote fraud, reports USA Today.

What could this do to politics in fine places such as Chicago, where four out of every two residents, graveyards included, vote? What could happen to control of the U.S. Senate if incumbent Senator Tim Johnson lost the thousands of voters suddenly and mysteriously added to his South Dakota’s voter rolls in recent months?

Elections increasingly are decided not by voters but by judges. We have already seen the vote of primary voters shoved aside by a New Jersey Supreme Court, which defied explicit state law by putting the hand-picked puppet of Democratic Party bosses onto the November ballot. Democrats are reportedly planning to deploy at least 1,000 lawyers to Florida to try again, as they did in 2000, to use an all-Democrat-appointed state Supreme Court to determine the election outcome – to decide this year whether the incumbent Governor Jeb Bush, the President’s brother, gets reelected.

The new voting in Florida, remember, is via computer. There will be no more paper ballots to recount and debate dangling chads over. Those who control these machines can produce any electoral outcome they desire. From this democracy ex machina the only appeal available is to an ideologically Leftist Florida Supreme Court.

In California the most corrupt Governor in American history Gray Davis is also up for reelection. Davis is the nation’s single biggest recipient of Enron campaign donations. He has also squeezed other corporations and his appointees for more than $70 million in donations, raising almost as much campaign loot as Al Gore did for his 2000 national Presidential run.

Davis is pushing a California ballot measure, Proposition 52, that would open the way to unlimited vote fraud. It provides for same-day voter registration. Under this proposed law, a person could walk into a polling place on election day and present either a California Driver’s License or two other proofs of residence – “proofs” such as a junior college fee or student identification card or “mail addressed to the voter at his or her current residence address,” be it a dormitory or a flop house.

Gray Davis vetoed a controversial, politically-risky bill passed by his Democrat-dominated legislature to issue state driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, which would instantly have given them the identification needed to become same-day voters under Prop. 52. But nobody doubts that Davis will sign this bill the day after he is reelected as Governor.

Note that none of these identifications involve proof of citizenship. Neither does this law allow any time to check whether the flimsy identifications presented are authentic or forgeries. But if Prop. 52 passes, polling place workers must allow the person presenting such documents to vote. And once this secret vote is cast, it cannot be separated from the votes of citizen-residents.

California airwaves are glutted with pro-Prop. 52 ads showing an apparent Hispanic soldier in uniform whom, the announcer declares, could be denied his right to vote if he returns from fighting for America only days before an election. This is nonsense, of course. And it takes some kind of chutzpah for Democrats, who in Florida in 2000 used their lawyers to disqualify hundreds of military absentee ballots, to now pretend to be on the side of our men and women in uniform.

The campaign for Proposition 52 is itself a fraud on voters, and this “soldier” is manifestly an actor. As one military wife observed, the ad shows him with his military beret tilted the wrong way on his head in a manner no actual soldier would ever wear it. (The pro-Prop. 52 ad also claims to increase penalties for voter fraud – but it does so only in trivial and almost-certain-to-go-unenforced ways.)

If the Proposition 52 fraud succeeds – and its opposition seems to have no money to run truth-squad counter-ads to the heartstring-tugging propaganda pushing it – voter fraud will have been made as easy as pie in the Golden State. No even halfway honest election there will ever again be possible.

In Oregon, where a giant scheme for outright socialized medicine is on the ballot, all voting is done by mail. What this means is that your neighborhood’s letter carrier, a member of a Leftist labor union, can decide whose ballots arrive at the registrar of voters office to get counted. It also means that, like the 25 percent of ballots now cast absentee by mail in other states, ballots can be cast in behalf of senile grandparents and others who otherwise would never show up at a polling place.

One day after the November elections, campaign finance reform takes effect. Ordinary citizens like you and me will forever after be forbidden from airing television ads to influence federal races during the 60 days prior to an election. As this column was the first to note, however, groups such as the Sierra Club Foundation have been granted exemptions from this gag on free speech.

As the Green Party in Colorado has recently complained, the Sierra Club should logically be supporting this most environmentalist of parties. Instead, the Sierra Club is endorsing and aiding Democrats, acting not like an ecology group but like an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. The same is true of so-called feminist groups, most of which always support Democratic men running against Republican women.

But these “non-profit” Leftist groups will be able to speak out via advertising in future elections, while you and I are told to keep silent or risk financial and criminal penalties.

From now through November 5, speak up and persuade your friends to vote in our last genuine election. If you stay silent or complacent, get ready to kiss the democratic portion of our democratic republic good-bye.