Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

A brief note on sore losers and gloaters

It seems to me that in at least four “major” elections recently there have been some rather strange post-election goings on. OK, I know that it’s a lot more than just four– we can probably go back to the invention of the ballot to find accusations of voter fraud – but…

When Washington’s governor, “Chris” Gregoire was elected some rather odd circumstances were associated with her victory. On election night after the returns were in, she was behind her opponent, but not far enough to avoid a recount. In each subsequent recount, King County “discovered” new batches of ballots that hadn’t been counted before – and not surprisingly Dino Rossi’s margin of victory shrank – and then turned into a bare margin of defeat – tens of votes – and then 130 votes – and finally 129, after the court threw out a single vote in an election where it was acknowledged that at least 1867 votes cast were known to be illegally cast. That’s an order of magnitude more fraudulent votes cast than the eventual margin of victory.

In another, more recent election, we watched Al Franken – using the same lawyers/strategists that Washington’s new governor had used – pull off a similar feat to overturn Norm Coleman’s victory – and assume a seat in the Senate. Allegations of fraud surfaced in that race as well.

In both of these cases, a Democrat overturned a Republican victory. At this point it’s not really worth going back and rehashing things. Yes, fraud was involved in both elections – but the accepted results remain and let’s leave it at that. Chris Gregoire is Washington’s governor and Al Franken is the junior Senator from Minnesota. Nothing is going to change either result – except future elections or more ambitious political maneuvering by either of them – that is seeking a higher office.

Now, in New York’s 23rd District Doug Hoffman is alleging election fraud – perpetrated by A.C.O.R.N. – an organization whose members have been convicted of voter registration fraud in some states, and that is under investigation in others for corrupt activities. I have no idea whether Hoffman’s accusations will hold up under investigation, and I’m not going to say that A.C.O.R.N. engaged in fraud in New York. But I do want to remark on the comments on the Politico’s blog entry about Hoffman’s decision.

Mark C. writes “God, what whiners Republicans are.”

danielt writes “Oh Jeez, The far right lost an election so it is time to drag out the old "ACORN" excuse. LOL” and “So now everytime a Republican loses an election it will be because of "ACORN." Do these people know what fools they make of themselves? LOL”

pete and de write “Voter fraud doesn't exist (except when Bush stole the election)... There have been like a dozen cases of voter fraud in recent history. If it does exist, it would be the republicans and their bs electronic voting machines that are behind it.”

TaylorB1 writes “Hoffman's conduct at this point doesn't even rise to the level of "pathetic." I swear...these cry-baby crazies on the far right would rather do anything than just accept that they don't represent the views of a majority.”

and finally, southernrace writes “The Norm Coleman dog and pony show take 2.”

Since “pete and de” bring it up, let’s not forget 2000 either. Allegations of election fraud ran rampant through that election. When Al Gore lost despite the exit polling Democrats and liberals were complaining that something must be wrong with the official tallies – after all, the exit polls couldn’t be wrong. I know many liberals today that are still upset at that election’s results. Skip to 2004 and the allegations of fraud in Ohio – which went for George W. Bush – coming from Democrats were again full of outrage. It seems to me that it doesn’t matter which side loses an election – there’s going to be accusations of fraud and there’s going to be childish responses to it.

Doug Hoffman conceded the race – and now he wants a second chance because he believes there was fraud involved. There may well have been fraud, but the election is over, and he lost. Considering that the Republican in the race was even more liberal than Bill Owens, the eventual winner of the race, and took a good percentage of the liberal vote, there’s a good chance that even if he had been running as the Republican candidate he would have lost.

Personally, I don’t think the accusations of fraud will do anything to overturn the results – which aren’t complete yet, but are looking grim for Hoffman. The reason the Judge in Chris Gregoire’s election didn’t overturn the results – even though he acknowledged 1867 votes were illegally cast is plain and simple. With secret ballots, there’s no way to know who those 1867 votes were cast for. Statistical sampling isn’t a valid way to overturn them either – simply because the majority of them were cast in heavily Democratic leaning districts doesn’t mean that they were cast for Chris Gregoire and so simply reducing the vote count for each candidate proportionally to representation in the districts where fraudulent votes were cast would have been invalid. It’s sort of like basing election results on exit polling rather than on actually counting ballots.

There likely won’t be a recount in this case. New York Election law doesn’t provide for recounting paper ballots – and machine ballots while they can be re-canvassed aren’t likely to change much. So we aren’t likely to see as “southernrace” says “The Norm Coleman dog and pony show take 2” or any other such nonsense.

Rather than focusing on an effort to overturn what looks to be a foregone conclusion we should look to the future. We need to fix the system that puts marginal candidates ahead of candidates that we believe in. The Republicans chose a loser in Dede Scozzafava. RINOs like Olympia Snowe keep running and winning. If the conservatives want to take back the Republican party, and if conservative Republicans really want to be effective we’ve got to fix those problems, before the next general election sees the same bad actors on the ballot.