People the world over are drawn to the United States by promises of freedom and opportunity.  They want to have a say in what happens to them; they want their voices to matter, their votes to be counted. 

Unfortunately, farm workers at Fresno-based Gerawan Farming have learned the harsh lesson that living in America is no guarantee of basic freedoms like speech and assembly, constitutional assurances notwithstanding.  They have learned that a powerful union can collude with a government agency to force them into association that will take both their freedom and their money.

In November 2013, the workers voted to decertify the United Farm Workers from their workplace, seeing no need to give up 3 percent of their pay, and the freedom to strike and negotiate hours directly with their employer, to a union that had done nothing for them.

But the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) has locked up those votes and still refuses to count them one year later.  As CWF's Matt Patterson writes in Forbes:

"Why would the ALRB do that? Simple: Far from being the impartial arbiter of labor disputes it’s supposed to be, the ALRB is nothing but a union enforcer, using the power of the government to herd workers into the smothering embrace of the union.

The board has no interest in seeing the UFW decertified from yet another farm (the union has been bleeding members and money for decades). If the UFW goes extinct, there would be nothing for ALRB busybodies to do. No union, no labor disputes, no need for the ALRB. No wonder Fresno Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Hamilton accused the board of being ”in cahoots“ with the union."

The irony, of course, is that many of these workers came to America from Mexico to escape such despotism.  Consider some recent examples of electoral chicanery inflicted on people South of the Border:

1) In the 2006 Mexican presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the Democratic Revolution party (PRD) ran against Felipe Calderón from the National Action Party (PAN).  Calderón was reported to have officially won by less than 1%, but investigations found massive irregularities and different results.

These irregularities were a result of inaccurately “adding up” ballot totals- at multiple voting locations, there was a notable difference between the number of blank ballots supplied before the election and the number of used and unused ballots collected after the election. 

These faulty numbers sparked a recount by The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a research center dedicated to promoting democratic debate.  After the CEPR recounted 14.4% of the total ballots, the CEPR concluded that López Obrador would have defeated Calderón.  

2) In the 2012 Mexican presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (PRD) ran against Former Mexican State Governor Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).  Still scarred from the 2006 scam, López Obrador launched legal challenges against Nieto’s victory to find yet more evidence of voter fraud.

In the 2012 go-round, the Federal Elections Institute (FEI) seems to have made alterations to handwritten records at polling sites before they put “official” totals on their website.  Alterations included not only drastic increases in the number of PRI votes but also reductions in the number of PRD votes. 

Again, corruption silenced the people.

Now roughly two years and one country later, farm workers in California's Central Valley face eerily similar issues.  Thanks to the ALRB and the UFW, Gerawan workers are being forced to submit to an unwanted authority.

Newly re-elected California Governor Jerry Brown can pressure the ALRB count those votes.  Until and unless he does so, Americans and her guests have will have reason to fear that the Constitution's promises of freedom and democracy are tainted with malevolent contingencies.