Stromata Blog

Quote of the Day

Jim Geraghty:

I tried telling liberals that they’re going to hate DeSantis, but they would hate him within normal parameters, not the all-consuming, paranoia-inducing, identity-defining obsessive hatred that has filled their lives since Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016. By and large, liberals didn’t want to hear it. Almost no one wants baby steps or small improvements anymore; everyone believes that utopia or dystopia lies just past the next election.

The Smooth Path to Vote Fraud

Last week the Milwaukee Police Department released its Report of the Investigation into the November 2, 2004 General Election in the City of Milwaukee. The impetus for this inquiry was the discovery that the number of votes counted in the city exceeded the number of recorded voters by more than 5,000. John Kerry’s margin of victory in the state as a whole was only about 11,000, so suspicions arose that the election in Wisconsin might have been stolen. Certainly, that was far more plausible than the paranoid theory that Karl Rove conjured up over 100,000 spurious votes in Ohio.

Jim Geraghty’s reaction was, “Wisconsin’s Voter Fraud Report Ought To Be National News”. It wasn’t, of course. According to Nexis and Google News searches, the New York Sun was the only non-Wisconsin newspaper to take notice. (An Associated Press wire was used on-line by a couple of publications but seems never to have appeared in print.)

This lack of interest reflects, sadly, the media’s habit of turning its eyes away from evidence of the slovenly conduct of U.S. elections. The Milwaukee report spells out how simple it is to cast illegal votes – and how inadequate procedures and incompetent recordkeeping make it virtually impossible either to catch fraud as it occurs or to prosecute it afterward.

The police investigators were never able to track down where the 5,000-plus ghost votes came from, much less determine whether they were legitimate. Along the way, they found that –

• The city has no effective safeguards against casting multiple ballots or impersonating other voters, nor against voting by felons, illegal aliens or nonresidents of Wisconsin;

• Illegal voting can rarely be uncovered until after the fact, when it is too late to prevent the malefactor’s ballot from being counted;

• In any event, the Election Commission’s records and procedures are in such shambles that violations are generally found only through blind luck; and

• For the same reason, prosecutions are generally futile, as the official deficiencies render almost any charge subject to reasonable doubt.

How much fraud actually occurred in 2004? The investigators cannot tell. That the will to defraud existed is shown by the clearest possible evidence: At least 16 out-of-state campaign workers, ten employed by “a major political party”, six by a section 527 organization, themselves voted illegally. I doubt that a man who cheats with his own ballot will resist the temptation to aid and abet cheating by others.

At least as disturbing as the prospect of malfeasance by parties or activist groups are the opportunities for “distributed vote fraud” by highly motivated but uncoordinated partisans. An organized effort to generate a few thousand extra votes runs a modicum of risk; an operative may squeal. If, however, a couple of thousand unconnected individuals cast one or two illegal ballots apiece, there is only a minimal chance that they will be either found out or successfully prosecuted. If you believed that electoral defeat would be tantamount to the second coming of the Third Reich, wouldn’t you feel the urge to perform that small, unethical action in pursuit of the Greater Good?

Democrats and liberals – Barack Obama is typical – scoff at the notion of election fraud and urge measures to make it easier to commit. No doubt that is due to innocent naivete, and they will change course after reading the findings from Milwaukee.

Welcome Back, Rathergate!

“Rathergate” drew much attention before the 2004 election; it may, contrary to its perpetrators’ manifest intentions, have pushed President Bush over the top. Indeed, it was a story that, one would think, deserved to be not just news, but history, one of those scandals that is zealously probed until the truth is wrenched from reluctant guardians.

After all, a major television network had used forged documents in an attempt to sway the outcome of a Presidential election. Wouldn’t the most minimally curious journalists or historians like to know more about that act of infamy than the superficies of headlines? Precisely who at CBS allowed the forgeries in? Were they active conspirators or merely dupes? If dupes, who did the duping, and how did they succeed? Was there anything to the early rumors that political party operatives were involved?

The affair remains mysterious. According to what we know (or think we know), the mainspring of the fraud was an anti-Bush crank with a long record of making wild charges. His account of how he came by the supposedly incriminating documents shifted, the various versions having little in common but their lack of credibility. That the so-called “Killian memos” were fakes wasn’t hard to see. One didn’t need to know anything about 1960s’ typewriters or notice that the font, tabs and line breaks exactly duplicated the default settings of Microsoft Word. It was enough to look at genuine records of Lt. Bush’s service, which CBS had in its possession, all of them very obviously produced by utterly different instruments. And, for the benefit of the utterly unseeing, experts hired by CBS raised strong doubts about the memos’ authenticity.

If I may quote what I said in perplexity a couple of years ago:

[A]ccepting at face value documents without a verifiable provenance that come from the hand of a known partisan zealot is not typical journalistic behavior. Biased the MSM may be, but it isn’t a ship of fools. While I’ll grant that Mary Mapes is, on the evidence of the posted chapter of her forthcoming book, a fool and a half, 60 Minutes II had a staff that was certainly capable of detecting a fake on the “Killian” level of amateurishness. Moreover, the staff started the vetting process the right way, by sending the memos to independent experts for review.

As is well known now, the examiners’ first reactions were mostly negative. Yet the network shunted them aside and went ahead with the story, cherry picking testimony from the one whose conclusions were favorable to a limited extent on a narrow issue. (He couldn’t prove that the purported signatures on the memos were forged, though he also stated that signatures cannot be authenticated from a photocopy, which is all that he was given to work with.)

No matter how much those in charge of 60 Minutes II loathed George W. Bush or how eager they were to scoop the competition, it is impossible to believe that they proceeded without greater assurance that they were relying on genuine documents. The “Killian memos” were not secondary support for a report based primarily on other evidence; they were the Big News, the breakthrough that lent credibility to an interview with a former Texas House Speaker, who contradicted past public statements about whether he had used political influence on young George Bush’s behalf, and lesser anti-Bush tidbits. Almost everyone, including ardent Bush defenders, took it for granted at the outset that the memos had checked out; any debate would center on what they proved or didn’t prove about Lt. Bush’s conduct.

That they were instead frauds – and inept frauds at that – was flabbergasting. CBS’s credulity remains flabbergasting and unexplained to this day. The Thornburgh report [CBS’s very limited internal inquiry] did not address this mystery. Yet the answer remains important, if only to make the historical record complete.

But none of the elite media cared enough to investigate. National secrets the New York Times can penetrate; CBS News’ remain secure.

Now Dan Rather, of all people, gives us a fleeting opportunity to unearth the hidden facts. I don’t hold out high hopes that his lawsuit against CBS et al. will turn up a great deal. Discovery and cross-examination can be powerful truth detectors, but at least one side has to have a desire to bring the truth to light. That would not, I suspect, be in the self-interest of either plaintiff or defendant. Yet good may come out of this mire. Maybe the case will incite the curiosity of a would-be Woodward or three. If so, Mr. Rather will at long last have performed a useful public service.

Is There Still A Pale to Go Beyond?

James Taranto has popularized the “Angry Left” moniker, and Power Line speaks of the “growing number of liberals for whom liberalism mostly means hate”. One might accuse them of exaggerating. Then one reads this about the man for whom nearly every liberal in America voted in 2004:

On the edition of his program taped in Washington, Bill Maher interviewed John Kerry. In the chit-chat at the beginning of the interview, Kerry said he and his wife had gone to Vermont for a getaway for her birthday. Maher said they could have gone to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone. Kerry's response: “I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.”

Yes, of course he was joking. But that isn’t the kind of joke that a man without a deep reservoir of hatred can utter. I wish that I were confident that the average liberal will be as appalled as I would be if Bob Dole had casually joked in 1998 about assassinating Bill Clinton.

Tora Bora on the Brain

That John Kerry, the Democratic Party’s most recent Presidential nominee, posts at nuthouse site Daily Kos is a good indicator of where his party’s ideological center lies. Can you imagine any Republican leader writing for the remnants of the John Birch Society?

And revealing of Senator Kerry’s personal seriousness is what he posts about: another trudge back to the mountains of Afghanistan to complain that President Bush was proven incompetent when American forces didn’t kill or capture Osama bin-Laden in December 2001. That is as if Adlai Stevenson had made General Eisenhower’s failure to foresee the Ardennes Offensive the centerpiece of his campaign.

Certainly the world would be a better place if Osama had gotten his 72 white grapes (vide this review for an expert look at the virgins vs. grapes question) four years ago, but he was not the world’s only terrorist, and his removal would not have demolished Islamofascism with one blow. Even if his escape from Tora Bora stemmed from avoidable mistakes by the U.S. military, and even if those mistakes can reasonably be traced to the White House, does that blunder outweigh the overall brilliance of the Afghan campaign, which overthrew the Taliban regime in a matter of days despite the handicap of long supply lines through dubiously friendly territory and reliance on dubiously competent local allies? Few operations in military history have made gigantic difficulties look so trivial. Of course, that very success is what allows Senator Kerry to obsess over the outcome of a single skirmish. Further evidence that the country made the right choice in November 2004.

The Unfinished Business of Rathergate

It was surprising, but not exactly astonishing, to learn, via PowerLine, that liberal journalistic icon Marvin Kalb doesn’t think that there is any, much less abundant, evidence that the infamous “Killian memos” were forged. He didn’t need to read blogs to learn the truth; the Washington Post reported it over a year ago.

When John Hinderaker of PowerLine sent Mr. Kalb a summary of the evidence, the response was a classic brush-off: It wasn’t important whether “The documents in Rather's story were faulthy [sic], fake, fogeries [sic], – choose your word [and choose your spelling, too, I guess].” All that’s important is that, thirty-some years ago, George W. Bush didn’t serve in Vietnam. Trying to change the course of a Presidential election by basing a major news story on phony “facts” is evidently a venial offense by comparison.

What, I wonder, would Mr. Kalb have thought if the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had circulated forgeries about John Kerry’s war record, then dismissed criticism on the grounds that Kerry later made false accusations of atrocities against his fellow soldiers? I suspect that he – and the rest of the journalistic Left – would be in full hue and cry after the forgers to this day. The scandal would be as unending as the Valerie Plame affair, with considerably more justification.

By contrast, Kalb and his peers, though occasionally willing, when pressed, to admit to the existence of the Rathergate fraud, are incurious about who perpetrated it. It’s well known that a crank named Bill Burkett was the proximate source of the fakes and that his shifting stories of how he obtained them are unbelievable. The unanswered, because unasked, questions are, Where did he really obtain them, and why did CBS treat them so credulously?

The general assumption on the Right side of the blogosphere is that Burkett manufactured the memos himself. If so, their misuse of military acronyms and nomenclature indicates that he was amazingly careless. As Col. William Campenni, who has first-hand knowledge of the Texas Air National Guard in Lt. Bush’s day, observes,

Whereas the typographical errors were the starting point in exposing these forgeries, for those of us actually there it was the content and format of the memos themselves that were the proof of their falsity – we just didn’t do it that way or use those forms, and the dates and people involved were fictitious or impossible. We were able to cross match them with our own records and calendars to prove that dates and events were incompatible, or that the people referenced (Strong, Carr, Hackworth, Lechliter, Burkett) were not in a position to give accurate comment.

Bill Burkett served in the same outfit and shouldn’t have committed blunders that are so obvious to his erstwhile colleagues. If he was himself the forger, one would expect greater care about matters that were within the realm of his personal experience. A more plausible hypothesis is that the documents were given to him and, in his zeal to “get” the Evil George W. Bush, he ignored all signs of inauthenticity. Believing what one wants to believe, without critical examination, is typical crank behavior.

On the other hand, accepting at face value documents without a verifiable provenance that come from the hand of a known partisan zealot is not typical journalistic behavior. Biased the MSM may be, but it isn’t a ship of fools. While I’ll grant that Mary Mapes is, on the evidence of the posted chapter of her forthcoming book, a fool and a half, 60 Minutes II had a staff that was certainly capable of detecting a fake on the “Killian” level of amateurishness. Moreover, the staff started the vetting process the right way, by sending the memos to independent experts for review.

As is well known now, the examiners’ first reactions were mostly negative. Yet the network shunted them aside and went ahead with the story, cherry picking testimony from the one whose conclusions were favorable to a limited extent on a narrow issue. (He couldn’t prove that the purported signatures on the memos were forged, though he also stated that signatures cannot be authenticated from a photocopy, which is all that he was given to work with.)

No matter how much those in charge of 60 Minutes II loathed George W. Bush or how eager they were to scoop the competition, it is impossible to believe that they proceeded without greater assurance that they were relying on genuine documents. The “Killian memos” were not secondary support for a report based primarily on other evidence; they were the Big News, the breakthrough that lent credibility to an interview with a former Texas House Speaker, who contradicted past public statements about whether he had used political influence on young George Bush’s behalf, and lesser anti-Bush tidbits. Almost everyone, including ardent Bush defenders, took it for granted at the outset that the memos had checked out; any debate would center on what they proved or didn’t prove about Lt. Bush’s conduct.

That they were instead frauds – and inept frauds at that – was flabbergasting. CBS’s credulity remains flabbergasting and unexplained to this day. The Thornburgh report did not address this mystery. Yet the answer remains important, if only to make the historical record complete. Long ago I expounded my own theory: that someone whom the network’s decision makers implicitly trusted and do not want to embarrass vouched for the memos. The details of my original scenario need to be revised in light of what we have learned since then, but the overall idea remains sound, I think, or at least more sensible than the alternative notion of mass idiocy at CBS. If I’m right, it would be extremely interesting to know who had the stature both to entice veteran journalists into a fiasco and be worth protecting afterward.

Vote Fraud: No Cure from the Courts

Today’s court ruling on the challenge to last year’s Washington State gubernatorial election was almost certainly wrong in a factual sense: There can be little doubt that illegal ballots gave Christine Gregoire her tainted victory. The massive malfeasance of King County’s election officials (along with lesser malfeasance in other counties) is indisputable (nor did Judge Bridges deny its existence), and its impact was clearly not random, as anyone who has followed the tortuous contest (best covered by Sound Politics) is aware.

What was wrong in fact may nonetheless be correct in law. Because the ballots cast by ineligible voters or added by zealous election workers (hundreds more votes were counted in King County than the number of people recorded as voting there) can’t be segregated from the mass of legal votes, the plaintiffs faced an insurmountable burden of proof. And maybe that burden should be insurmountable. One can readily imagine that a contrary decision in this case encouraging court battles over every close election and leading judges to find “creative” reasons to toss out results that they dislike.

The central problem with the Washington State election process – and with elections all around the country – is that fraud is easy to commit, difficult to detect, hard to punish and, as Judge Bridges’ ruling demonstrates, nearly impossible to reverse. That is especially true of the phenomenon to which Jim Miller has given the name “distributed vote fraud”: fraud committed by individual citizens on their own initiative, as opposed to the centralized ballot box stuffing of old-fashioned political machines. It is easy to buy or extort votes, because mail-in voting makes ballot secrecy optional. It is easy to register a non-existent “voter” or to keep on the rolls one who has died or moved out of state. It is easy for felons, aliens, nonresidents and other ineligibles to vote. It is easy to cast someone else’s ballot, either by mail or at the polling place (where identification standards are lower than for getting onto an airplane). In Mr. Miller’s words,

An analogy may illuminate what has happened. Suppose that a manager in a retail chain wanted, for whatever reason, to encourage theft by employees. It would be easy to think of ways for the manager to do that, from getting rid of cash registers to keeping poorer inventories. Anything that made it easier to steal would increase theft, since there are always some who will be tempted. But the manager would have no direct connection to the theft. He would have facilitated it, but there would be no way to prosecute him for the theft.

Similarly, increasingly lax election laws have facilitated fraud while diminishing the likelihood that anybody will be held accountable. When one adds the Manichaean conviction of many leftists that conservatives are latter-day Nazis who must be kept out of power by any means necessary, debacles like that in Washington State – or in Wisconsin, where the Presidential election may well have been stolen for John Kerry – are foreseeable and unsurprising.

In the long run, distributed vote fraud is in no one’s best interests. Right now, the game seems to be mostly a left-wing sport, but conservatives can play too if it becomes evident that there is no honest way to win elections. Rather than have that happen, we should stop this downward spiral now. Let me repeat my suggested package of modest reforms:

1. All votes should have to be cast in person, unless the voter was absent from his home county on election day for a good reason. Casting an absentee ballot without good cause should be a criminal offense. (That may sound drastic, but the practice needs to be reined in, and only criminal penalties will persuade voters and election officials to take a prohibition seriously.) To ease any burden that these restrictions may impose, states should be allowed to set up pre-election day polling stations, as Florida plans to do in future elections. Also needed are stringent standards to make sure that legitimate absentees, such as soldiers serving abroad, receive ballots in time to return them.

2. Every voter should have to present photographic identification at the polling place. Every state issues photo ID’s, so this requirement is no hardship.

3. Voters should have to register at least 30 days before the election, and in federal elections states should be required to verify that new registrants are eligible voters who are not registered anywhere else. Congress should appropriate money – even if it means cutting a farm subsidy here or federally funded museum there – to pay for this process. We will need to figure out what to do about people who move within 30 days of an election, who of course should not be disenfranchised, but that is a detail.

4. Hand recounts, which are prone to unintentional or deliberate human error, should be permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.

Alternatively, we can let democracy degenerate into competitive theft. The choice is that stark. Our children will not thank us for getting it wrong.

CPE for Moonbats

It’s no doubt reassuring to the public that most states require doctors and lawyers to complete a specified number of hours of “continuing professional education” each year, ostensibly to keep their skills up to date. That sense of reassurance might fade, though, if laymen paid attention to what kind of courses are available to meet the CPE requirement. In Washington State, Sound Politics reports, Bush-hating psychiatrists can get six hours of credit for “Politics, Justice, and Psyche: LIVING WITH THE AMERICAN ELECTION of 2004”, designed for “Professionals in Psychotherapy, Medicine, Law, Education and Religion” who are “Struggling to contain personal feelings oscillating from outrage to sorrow” over President Bush’s reelection.

The combination of left-wing psychological fragility and unintelligently designed CPE standards created this opportunity for purveyors of psychobabble. It’s far from the only example of CPE with a tenuous relationship to professional skills. A while ago, I noted that lawyers in Tennessee could get 14 hours of credit last year for listening to promoters of Shakespearean authorship theories.

There ought to be a mini-scandal here. Right now, so far as I can discern, CPE is largely a racket that does little good for either public or professionals. Perhaps it can be turned into a useful exercise, though I’m rather dubious. If not, it ought to be seen for what it is – a tax on medical and legal services for the benefit of low quality educators – and abolished.

Inoculation Against the Algore Syndrome

No matter how solid the proof that the number of illegal ballots cast in the Washington State gubernatorial election vastly exceeded Christine Gregoire’s margin of “victory”, the odds are against a court-ordered re-vote. Judges don’t rush to overturn elections. Most likely, the State Supreme Court will find a way to construe the pertinent laws very narrowly and will dismiss the Republican challenge. What happens after that?

According to one poll, 62 percent of Washingtonians, including 45 percent of Democrats, favor doing the election over again. Outraged Republicans will be tempted to combine those numbers with their own anger and adopt “Governor Fraudatoire” as their primary political target. Venting in that fashion will be emotionally satisfying. Politically, however, it would be pointless and self-defeating.

Let’s not forget that the leaders of the Democratic Party, in the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential race, proclaimed that public rejection of the Supreme Court’s alleged “selection” of George W. Bush as President would fuel future victories for their party. How did that strategy work? Here is Byron York’s appraisal, written the day after the 2002 elections:

One of the major themes of last night’s vote count was the complete failure of the “Florida anger” strategy as a motivating force for Democrats. It didn’t work in Florida, and it didn’t work around the country.

In February 2001, in a Washington hotel ballroom, Terry McAuliffe, the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, gave a speech that worked a crowd of party workers into a near-frenzy. “We will transform the anger about Florida into energy about politics,” McAuliffe said, his voice rising to a shout. “We will prove there is victory after denial, democracy after Florida, Daschle after Lott, Gephardt after Hastert, and justice after the United States Supreme Court. We will give the American people a Congress they can be proud of, and we will show George Bush the door in 2004!”

The anger in the room that day bordered on the irrational. And so did McAuliffe’s strategy. Driven by his own and his top aides’ frustration over Florida, McAuliffe made defeating Jeb Bush his party’s number one goal. Doing that, he believed, would have a “devastating” effect on George W. Bush and help Democrats win the White House two years from now. Just last Sunday, McAuliffe flatly predicted that Jeb Bush would lose and said, “We are going to win Florida, which is going to set us up very nicely for 2004.”

Well, not quite. Screaming about the supposed unfairness of the last election isn’t a sufficient reason for anyone to vote for you in this one. Taking the McAuliffe road in Washington State will almost certainly lead to the same sort of failure.

If we want good to come out of this evil, it is important to see this year’s election mismanagement not as a partisan windfall but as an opportunity for fundamental reform directed toward minimizing the risk of future fraud. (I’ve already offered my own suggestions for concrete improvements.) If Democrats resist cleaning up the process, that is, if they act like their party has a vested interest in fraud, that will be a legitimate issue in 2006 and 2008.

My hope, naturally, is that everybody will embrace ending shady election practices as essential to preventing American democracy from degenerating to a Third World level. My expectations are less rosy. The common impression, which has empirical data to confirm it, is that Democrats benefit disproportionately from election illegalities. It’s hard to deny that –

Democratic leaders behave as if they believe more Democrats commit vote fraud. Nearly always, when the two parties split on election rules, the Republicans want more checks on fraud and the Democrats want less. The infamous 1993 “Motor Voter” Act, which did so much to make fraud easier was opposed almost entirely by Republicans and had been vetoed by the first President Bush. I don’t say that all supporters of the legislation . . . knew that it would make vote fraud easier, but some of them did. Like the anonymous liberal activists, they see some fraud as a reasonable price for getting more representation for the victim groups they identify with.

It is telling, I think, that there is one group, military voters, for which Democrats tend to prefer tougher rules and the Republicans easier rules. Military voters generally back Republicans, at least in recent years. That Democratic leaders prefer rules that make cheating easier (for everyone except military voters) is understandable if they think they gain from the cheating, but hard to explain otherwise.

So we can expect at least some Democrats (and the media outlets that parrot them) to throw roadblocks in the way of reform. Naturally, they won’t argue candidly, like the “liberal activists” cited in the post linked above, that stealing votes is a legitimate way to empower the downtrodden. Instead, we can expect misdirection, beginning with amnesia about what happened in King County last year. Look forward to plenty of puff pieces on Christine Gregoire’s rise from poverty – the first member of her family to attend college, etc. – accompanied by credulous repetition of her incredible assertion that the Washington vote count was “a model to the rest of the nation and the world at large about how an election system, as close as this one is, can be done with the highest of quality”, indeed, “an inspiration”. We’ll be told that the votes were counted three times, not that heavily Democratic King County had nearly 2,000 more votes than voters [note update] and numerous other irregularities (too many to list here but chronicled at Sound Politics. Even less likely is an analysis of whether the final, manual recount was in fact more accurate than the preceding machine counts that gave the nod to Republican Dino Rossi.

Also predictable is a burst of equivalence: So funny things happened in King County; what about Florida in 2000, huh? The quick answer is that we favor honest elections everywhere. If Democrats believe that Washington and Florida represent two sides of the same dirty coin, that just shows that reform is a neutral idea, not a GOP plot.

The longer answer is that the central problem in the Florida count (leaving aside fictitious claims of “vote suppression” and the supposed inability of Democrats in Palm Beach County to comprehend a ballot designed by a Democratic official) was the difficulty of counting punch card ballots with sufficient precision to resolve an extremely tight contest, a problem compounded by the effects of handling (the infamous “hanging chads”). The proper corrective measure is better technology, which the state has been working to install.

Fundamental to Washington’s debacle are systemic problems, not imperfect technology. Most significant is the fact that 70 percent of the votes last year were cast by mail. However convenient that may be, mail-in ballots carry no assurance of secrecy and facilitate mischief of all types. There’s no way to be sure that what is marked on the paper represents the free choice of an eligible citizen rather than the product of intimidation, bribery, forgery or other fraud. Moreover, the wide distribution of unmarked ballots (they are mailed to over a million households) makes it easier for any dishonest election worker to obtain the raw materials for manufacturing votes.

What went wrong in each state was different, and different solutions are called for. It makes sense to try to solve both. Certain liberals, I fear, would rather deal with neither.

If Christine Gregoire retains her office, let’s congratulate her – and work to see that no office holder will have to labor under the same taint in the future.

Bias or Idiocy?

A moiety of the blogosphere is up in arms over the failure of CBS’s internal report on the Dan Rather scandal to blame political bias for the network’s readiness to pass off obvious forgeries as genuine documents. It is, indeed, hard not to boggle when the investigators conclude that there is no “basis to accuse those who investigated, produced, vetted or aired the Segment of having a political bias”. In noteworthy contrast, as Power Line observes, they casually assumed that criticism of CBS was informed by right-wing prejudice.

Almost every report commissioned by an institution in trouble has some implicit ne plus ultra line. In this instance, that was evidently the question of whether CBS is an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Messrs. Thornburgh and Boccardi knew, I suspect, that the price of getting their report released to the public in full, rather (no pun intended) than being presented in selected excerpts, was a declaration that the phony 60 Minutes II segment involved only bad judgement by underlings. Like an accounting firm caught in an auditing blunder, CBS’s management hopes to fire the engagement partner and selected staff, while declaring that the incident says nothing about the overall quality of its procedures.

Hmm, that doesn’t always work, does it? Or so my colleagues who used to work at Arthur Andersen inform me.

But let’s take the report at its word. If CBS’s failure to subject fictitious documents to so much as minimal scrutiny sprang purely from competitive pressures, doesn’t that suggest that the network’s news operation is fundamentally incompetent and untrustworthy? Only a relatively small fraction of the news has a strong partisan angle; “myopic zeal” to get a story out before one’s competitors can infect anything – not just accounts of a politician’s past but also stories about tsunamis and lawsuits and corporate transactions and baseball teams.

If the staff at CBS News thinks in a politically skewed fashion, that is a problem; if it is incapable of thinking at all, one wonders why the public should bother paying attention to whatever it “reports” on any topic. Just as I place more credence in the New York Times, for all of its one-sidedness, than in politically disinterested supermarket tabloids, I shall in the future consider CBS as the place to go for impartially reported nonsense. Apparently that is how Mr. Moonves wants me to think of his organization, and I am happy to comply.

Addendum: I see that Rathergate.com made a related point earlier this evening:

The Memogate report concluded that former Producer Mary Mapes misled her co-workers, misled her sources, and misled supervisors.

So if there is no political bias at CBS, like Dick Thornburgh and Lou Boccardi conclude, why should we conclude that this news story was the first that Mapes fudged?

Investigations into bad journalism at The New York Times (Jayson Blair) and USA Today (Jack Kelley) examined all of the stories written by said authors and uncovered a litany of errors and falsehoods.

CBS’ substantial credibility issue is not over yet. It needs to pull together a team of reporters to pick apart her other stories, contact her sources and determine what other falsehoods she has foisted on us.

For those who are interested, the Spot Formerly Known As Kerry has reprinted Miss Mapes’ apologia. It looks like she aims to become a heroine of the Loony Left à la Cynthia McKinney. Any bets on how long before she starts blaming Zionist neo-cons for her plight?

Do-It-Yourself Vote Fraud

The most patently absurd of all statements made about this year’s farcical governor’s race in Washington State came from “winner” Christine Gregoire:

I think we have been a model to the rest of the nation and the world at large about how an election system, as close as this one is, can be done with the highest of quality. . . This is the biggest display of democracy I have ever seen and I am proud of it and I think it’s an inspiration. [quoted, with undisguised astonishment, by Sound Politics]

Meanwhile, in this universe, the vote counting and recounting and re-recounting exposed procedures that were, at the very least, slovenly. That they might also be less than honest is suggested by the fact that nearly all of the “corrections” just happened to favor one party’s candidate, to an extent difficult to account for by chance.

We will never know for certain which candidate really received more votes properly cast by registered, eligible voters. One reason is that ballot box stuffing is no longer a centralized affair orchestrated by political bosses. Inattention to even to most elementary safeguards has bred do-it-yourself cheating. Jim Miller usefully outlines the problem in “A Review of Distributed Vote Fraud”. He lists six factors, some obvious and others controversial, that explain why fraud is easier and more tempting than ever and why it tends to favor Democratic candidates:

1. Not every person who wants to vote is honest.
2. Dishonest people are more likely to cheat if controls on cheating are weakened.
3. Controls on vote fraud have been weakened in recent decades, notably by the passage of the 1993 “Motor Voter” Act and by the increase in absentee voting.
4. Dishonest people are more likely to cheat if they view an election as important.
5. Voters, especially on the left, viewed the [last] election as more important than most.
6. Cheaters are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.

The last point in particular may sound like partisan sniping, but –

Democratic leaders act as if it is true. Both nationally, and in most states, most Republicans want stronger controls against cheating than most Democrats do. In 1993, nearly all of the opposition to the “Motor Voter” Act came from Republicans. President George H. W. Bush had vetoed it earlier; President Bill Clinton signed it.

What was almost certainly “distributed vote fraud” proved crucial in the Washington race. Democrat Gregoire’s official “victory” margin is 130 votes. She picked up a net of over 200 votes entirely from a court decision allowing her campaign to track down purported mail-in voters whose signatures on their ballot envelopes didn’t match their signatures on file. In a few instances, the mismatch may have been a false negative, resulting from aging or illness, but it is overwhelmingly probable that, in the great majority of cases, somebody other than the “voter” signed. Those ballots may have been given away or extorted or sold. Whatever the cause, there is no justification for letting them cancel legitimate votes, yet all that the court asked was that party operatives obtain an affidavit ratifying the fraud after the fact. As a further example, reviews of voter data from King County, Washington’s liberal stronghold (Republican Dino Rossi carried the rest of the state by a hefty margin), show hundreds of apparently bogus voter registrations and other irregularities. According to Sound Politics, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office –

essentially confirmed that there are no safeguards to prevent these sorts of abuses from occurring. The only improvement in the process will be effective January 2006, when federal law requires that names and Social Security Numbers have to be matched against the federal SS database. Such checking will commence sometime in 2005. In the meantime, and certainly prior to our tainted election, there was effectively NO credible verification of identity.

Checking Social Security numbers isn’t a cure-all, since non-citizens who can’t legally vote can (and, if they wish to work legally, must) obtain Social Security cards. Still, it will help reduce fraudulent registrants in the future. As for the past, however,

While it is trivially easy for anybody to register and vote fraudulently, it is extremely difficult to cancel their registrations. The Sec. of State spokesperson explained that the elections officials do not investigate fraudulent registrations and voting; it’s up to other voters to file challenges and the burden of investigation and proof is very high.

The Washington GOP is, inevitably in this day and age, contemplating a lawsuit. Unlike most election-related litigation, this one might be a public service. As John Fund remarks in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, but a bargain at $3.95 a month),

Any attempt to overturn Ms. Gregoire’s victory after three vote counts will face long odds. But the effort to uncover the flawed and fraud-prone procedures behind Washington State’s election debacle would provide a useful road map to the fixes the state will need to make in the future.

Washington isn’t the only place where a road map is needed. Distributed vote fraud bids fair to become a major anti-democratic (albeit pro-Democratic) force in 21st Century politics. Like Bolshevism, it should be strangled in its cradle.

God and Christine Gregoire

The chairman of the Washington State Democratic Party, appearing yesterday on a liberal talk radio program, startled the host by declaring that “God has placed” Christine Gregoire in the state governor’s chair. Perhaps this is a sign that Democrats are starting to try to connect to religiously observant voters. Perhaps it indicates that chairman Berendt has a rather distinctive concept of deity.

The “god” who moved in these mysterious ways was the King County canvassing board, whose Democratic majority has continuously found new votes and reclassified old ones throughout the recount process. (Sound Politics has an eyewitness account of some of the strange goings on.) Mayor Daley (Richard J., that is, not the anemic Richard M.) used to do the same thing, but Da Mare had the finesse to produce his magical mystery ballots on election night itself. Another sign of how old-fashioned craftsmanship has decayed.

It is unlikely that Republican candidate Dino Rossi can do anything to reverse this outcome, fraudulent though it may be. King County’s slipshod election procedures make it almost impossible to separate deliberate cheating from sort of honest mistakes. In any case, the Democrats have several hundred late-found, not-yet-counted ballots in reserve.

Unless the state GOP has a tactical nuke in readiness, the wise course of action is to yield gracefully, as John Thune did when he “lost” the heavily tainted South Dakota Senate election in 2002. A prolonged legal battle will be chancy, and victory could well be Pyrrhic.

Instead of fighting on this ground, we need to look at how to prevent future fiascos of this kind. If “Governor” Gregoire unintentionally sparks a drive for genuine election reform, she will have done more good than she can do harm as chief executive of Washington State.

The clearest obstacles to reliable elections (aside from the incorrigible partisanship that inspires men to try to steal them) are mail-in ballots and slipshod procedures for verifying voter eligibility. Mailed ballots aren’t cast secretly and, as Washington’s experience demonstrates, pass through too many hands to be trusted. It is bad enough that voters mostly don’t have to present identification at the polls. It is intolerable that no one can know who really filled out one cast via the Post Office.

It would be a great surprise, to say the least, if a Democratic governor and Democrat-majority legislature took any steps to reform a system that has served them so well. One can only hope that reform will prove to be so potent issue in the 2006 election that King County can’t overpower the rest of the state. For federal elections, meanwhile, there is recourse outside Olympia. Congress has the ultimate authority to prescribe “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives”. Let me suggest a short, simple package of reforms:

1. All votes must be cast in person, unless the voter will be absent from his home county on election day for a good reason. Casting an absentee ballot without good cause should be a criminal offense. (That may sound drastic, but the practice needs to be reined in, and only criminal penalties will persuade voters and election officials to take a prohibition seriously.) To ease any burden that these restrictions may impose, states should be allowed to set up pre-election day polling stations, as Florida plans to do in future elections. Also needed are stringent standards to make sure that legitimate absentees, such as soldiers serving abroad, receive ballots in time to return them. Hundreds of Washington servicemen apparently lost their franchise this year because of state tardiness.

2. Every voter must present photographic identification at the polling place. Every state issues photo ID’s, so this requirement is no hardship.

3. Voters must register at least 30 days before the election, and states must verify that new registrants are eligible voters who are not registered anywhere else. Congress should also appropriate money – even if it means cutting a farm subsidy here or federally funded museum there – to pay for this process. We will need to figure out what to do about people who move within 30 days of an election, who of course should not be disenfranchised, but that is a detail.

4. Hand recounts, which are prone to unintentional or deliberate human error, should be permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.

These measures would not be a sure prophylactic against fraud. There are, for example, lots of fake ID’s in circulation. But they would make fraud more difficult. If we’re going to be cheated, at least let it be by professionals!

Incidentally, Washington has a Senate election in two years, with a Democratic incumbent whose victory had certain Gregoire-like features. Rossi in 2006 sounds good to me.

A Final(?) Twist in Washington State

Three times since the counting of mail-in ballots began, the King County election board has stumbled upon unexpected caches of votes in Washington State’s eternal gubernatorial contest. The first put Democrat Christine Gregoire close enough to demand a machine recount. The second gave her a manual recount. Third time looks like the charm that will move her to Olympia. Nearly 600 “valid but previously rejected” ballots have mysteriously appeared. The story is that a clerk didn’t look in the right place for on-file signatures and mistakenly determined that the voters weren’t registered.

None of the other 38 counties has had any “magical mystery ballots” (as Sound Politics, the place to follow the twists and turns of this farce, calls them), much less three sets. The state Republican chairman isn’t being hyperbolical when he says that these strange events can only be the product of “either gross incompetence or vote fraud”.

I would bet on both, but it doesn’t really matter. Washingtonians are tired of this election. Republicans are just as tired as anyone, and their reaction to having the election snatched away in this dubious fashion will be a couple of days of complaining followed by stolid acceptance of the purported outcome.

That is probably the right response. Winning a governorship isn’t worth months of political and legal turmoil. It’s sadly true that many Democrats don’t feel that way, but we won’t improve matters by adopting their “to the death” mentality. What Republicans need to do instead is learn the lessons of this race and use them to form the basis for electoral reform.

As I have argued before, the clearest lesson is that near universal voting by mail is pernicious. The King County story illustrates how easy it is for mistakes, deliberate or unintentional, to undermine the reliability of the canvass. That problem merely compounds the principal objection: that mail ballots are not secret, stultifying one of the key protections for the democratic (but not, these days, Democratic) process.

Congress ought to outlaw the practice except in cases of clear necessity (e. g., soldiers serving abroad). Everyone else should vote at a polling place after showing positive identification. We can minimize inconvenience by having the polls remain open for several days, as Florida has just decided to do, but the dangerous “convenience” of conducting elections via the Post Office must end before it leads to worse fiascos than the one unfolding in the Pacific Northwest.

Update (12/15/04): John Fund, writing in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only but well worth $3.95 a month), counts a larger number of strange ballot discoveries in King County:

Voting Late and Often in Gregoire Country

The Washington Supreme Court yesterday unanimously rejected a Democratic lawsuit that called for some 15,000 invalid ballots to be reexamined as part of the statewide recount of the nation’s closest race for governor in decades. At last count, Republican Dino Rossi was leading Democrat Christine Gregoire by 104 votes out of 2.8 million cast.

But Democrats are optimistic they will prevail because yesterday for the seventh time election officials in Seattle’s liberal King County found extra votes they say should be counted. Monday’s treasure trove consisted of 561 absentee ballots that clerks say were wrongly disqualified. That number was revised upward to 573 ballots on Tuesday. Then, late yesterday evening, another pile of 22 previously undiscovered ballots were found at a recount facility. “Those 22 ballots should absolutely not be counted,” says Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. “They have not been in a secure location. There is no postmark on them. We will absolutely contest those votes.”

Bill Huennekens, King County’s superintendent of elections, confirmed to reporters that 22 ballots were found but he had no information on whether or not the ballots had been secured.

John Carlson, a talk show host who was the GOP candidate for governor in 2000, says his callers have become deeply cynical about the recount process. “One said that King County might as well stand for Kiev County in Ukraine,” he said.

Republicans Underground

Ben Stein, who has been a denizen of the Deep Blue Seacoast for 24 years, writes,

. . . a man on a forklift came by and winked at me. “Keep giving ’em hell,” he said softly. “There are more of us here than you think. Bush rules.”

This is the way it is here. We meet in smoky places. We give the high sign, we nod knowingly. We are like members of the Maquis in Occupied France. Or early Christians emerging from the catacombs in Caligula’s Rome. We are the GOP in Hollywood, and on the West Side of L.A. The culture here is so dominantly left-wing, PC, vegan, hate-America that many of us feel we have to behave as if we were underground.

At a self-help meeting where men and women confess to drug use, betrayals, thefts, homicides with cars, at a break, a woman stealthily came up to me last Saturday and motioned me into a corner outside the room in Malibu. “I want to tell you there are some of us who agree with you. We have to keep it quiet because we want to get our kids into the right schools, but we’re there. We’re there. And there are more of us every day.” Then she scuttled off into the night. Slamming crack can be spoken of with a smile, but not voting GOP. That could be dangerous.

Along the same lines is an anecdote that I heard last weekend. The chairman of a California science fiction convention wore a suit to one of the con events with an American flag pin in his lapel. Afterwards the Guest of Honor, a well-known author, took him aside and whispered, “May I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Are you a . . . Republican?”

Whispering back, “Yes.”

Dropping to the faintest sotto voce, “So am I.”

Streaks of purple herald the dawn.

BTW, I have at last figured out the real significance of the not instantly intuitive use of red for conservative states and blue for liberal ones. The Cold War is over, thus rendering obsolete the identification of red with the Left. Instead, the media have raised from their collective subconscious memories of old maps, on which the British Empire, front line of civilization, spread across the globe in red, and French possessions were colored – what else? – blue.

Blue State Tribalism

The aftermath of this year’s election exposed such a seam of seething anger on the American Left that watching it vent has become a form of right-of-center recreation. One can indeed say that the “blue” states earned that color with the incessant bitterness and pessimism that emanates from Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Georgetown and Manhattan. Reading condescending screeds denouncing the primitive, superstitious, bigoted, ignorant, intellectually deficient “red staters” is a kind of pleasure, rendered slightly guilty, I’ll confess, by the realization that one is laughing at other people’s sincerely felt, albeit neurotic and preposterous, sense of despair.

Viewed as absurdist comedy, blue state polemics can scarcely be bettered. Here are rich people leading comfortable lives – the least exposed to non-self-inflicted pain of any in human history – in a country that places only the most relaxed constraints on their activities and asks little from them beyond the payment of what they unanimously profess to regard as insufficiently burdensome taxes. They are by and large free not merely from legal restrictions but also from what Tocqueville characterized as more tyrannical, the force of public opinion. The worst impingement that their freedom must endure is the knowledge that many of their countrymen, including its President, silently and unobtrusively disapprove of the way that they live and do not desire to emulate it. It is that lack of unanimous endorsement of their commitment to hedonism that drives blue state pundits mad, in all senses of that word.

The surest evidence that the blue mood of the blue statists is unwarranted is their boldness in expressing it. If they really believed that George W. Bush intended to summon NASCAR hooligans and fundamentalist busybodies to turn America into a dystopic rural Utah, would they dare to utter a word? Consider how careful they are not to offend Islamic fundamentalists, whose overt program of seventh century revivalism is retrograde by Jerry Falwell’s standards and backed by murder and mayhem. All that is would take for Evangelical Christians to gain the same dhimmi-like accommodation would be a few car bombs and assassinations. Then we would hear much about how Protestantism is a much maligned Religion of Peace and its critics mean-spirited racists. The blues rest happy, however, in the confidence that they will never face a Christian Osama bin-Laden.

They are equally unlikely ever to face up to the psychosomatic nature of their malady. The comedy shows every prospect of running for years or decades, but we shouldn’t laugh too heartily. Behind the farce lies a potentially serious problem for our country.

Among the ironic failures of the Enlightenment was that it fostered self-conscious, virulent nationalism. Humanity has always been divided into mutually uncordial tribes. The post-medieval mentalité has elevated their petty, traditional rivalries into ideological imperatives. In principle, of course, enlightened liberals are above tribalism and bound by no special attachment to their native land. In America they are proudly not patriots, much less nationalists. Yet behind that cosmopolitan façade we see the burning hatred of “the other” that one associates with the strife between Hutu and Tutsi or Serb and Croat. The tribal enemy, the “red stater”, is wholly loathsome, a figure whose malignity is obvious whether or not it has been revealed by malign deeds, whose purposes are irreconcilable to truth and justice and whose very language reeks of repugnant sentiment, if not of the “non-existent” category of “evil”.

The nearest prior parallel in our history is the Southern tribalism that preceded the Civil War. Contemporary political correctitude has reduced that conflict to a stark, simple caricature, in which the Union went to war to abolish slavery and nothing else mattered very much. That picture leaves out a crucial and incongruous fact: Secession was an irrational strategy for preserving legal slavery. Almost no one in the North favored eradicating the institution from the existing slave states. Yankee public opinion did not welcome William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown as prophets of liberation; it condemned them as wild-eyed agitators. The courts, well furnished with Southern judges, were unsympathetic to abolitionist claims. As the war broke out, several cases extending the Dred Scott precedent and promising to expand the rights of slave holders on free soil were working their way toward the Supreme Court. In short, there was no prospect that, within the foreseeable future, the national government would tamper with slavery where it was already established. President Lincoln, for all his personal detestation of the practice, had no more ambitious goal than to keep it from spreading further.

Southern independence, had it been attained, would have chilled this favorable climate for the slave power. A Union shorn of the slave holding states would certainly have repealed the Fugitive Slave Law, ceased to pay attention to Dred Scott and definitively outlawed slavery in the territories. For escaped slaves, emancipation would have lain just across the Ohio River, not in far off Canada.

These considerations were obvious at the time, were pointed out by contemporaries and were totally ignored by the White Southern tribe. As Mary Chesnut, wife of a secessionist Senator from South Carolina, put it, separation was the inevitable choice simply because “we hated the Yankees so much”.

That hatred was, of course, intimately bound up with slavery, but perhaps we tend to confound cause and effect. As is well known, Southern enthusiasm for the “peculiar institution” intensified as the 19th Century progressed. In 1800 a large segment of Southern opinion, including figures as unlike as Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, deplored it and foresaw its eventual oblivion. By 1860 it was heralded as “a necessary good”, although, as Eugene Genovese has chronicled, Southern consciences were never entirely easy about its concrete embodiment. Part of the reason for the pro-slavery trend was economic self-interest and part an attempt to stifle moral misgivings through argumentation, but a third part was hatred of the North. Because the Yankees had abolished slavery and condemned it as immoral, Southerners embraced it all the more fervently.

Today we see very similar, if not identical, developments among the blue state elite: the same tendencies to exaggerate conflicts with their countrymen into grounds for separation and to grow steadily more extreme in supporting practices – abortion is the clearest example – that the “enemy” dislikes. So far, gabble about secession is only a pose, but the disproportionate and irrational rejection of “red state values” shows itself in other ways, particularly in much of the Left’s sullen attitude toward the War on Terror. Macaulay’s verses referring to the last days of Republican Rome could be prophetic for America:

Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than the foe,
And the tribunes beard the high
While the Fathers grind the low.
As we wax hot in faction
In battle we wax cold,
And men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.

Macaulay’s coda was in fact wrong about Rome. Roman arms were never so dazzlingly successful abroad as when the state was verging on dissolution in civil war. The warning applies more aptly to 21st Century America, where military success is impossible without cooperation from the home front. Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey and Caesar did not have to be much concerned about civilian interference with their military decisions. General Sanchez has (and should have) no such latitude of action. A large portion of Blue America shows every sign of rejoicing in defeat and does what it can to make victory as difficult as possible – not because it shares the goals of Osama bin Laden but because it does not want any association with those of George W. Bush. It is a senseless course of action, one that will, if followed to its end, do more harm to the blues than the reds. Tribal hostility is, however, rooted in prejudice, and prejudice does not have to be justified by reason or even enlightened self-interest.

A Tentative Thanksgiving in Washington State

The good news on Thanksgiving Eve is that the recount in the Washington gubernatorial race is complete, and Dino Rossi is the winner by 42 votes. Whether the Democrats will demand further recounting remains to be seen, but it is, for now, a welcome landslide.

The discouraging news is that the county-by-county results spell finis for my former home state’s reputation for high quality political procedures.

Consider these interesting facts: As of noon today, the recount had resulted in only a de minimis change in the initial totals. With 38 of 39 counties, representing 69 percent of the total votes cast, reporting, Rossi’s margin was up by a net of 26 votes. He had gained 722, Christine Gregoire 696. The increases mostly represented ballots that the voting machines failed to tabulate on the first go-round but accepted the second time, plus the effects of minor human errors.

Then came King County. Based on the pattern everywhere else, there should have been about 640 newfound ballots, of which one could have expected Gregoire to receive roughly 58 percent (her overall percentage in the county), or about 370 new votes to Rossi’s 270. Instead, over 900 additional ballots appeared, 62 percent for Gregoire, giving her almost enough to close the gap.

I don’t wish to sound paranoid, but how likely is it that the machine count in King County was that seriously out of line with the rest of the state? Suspicions founded on these quick stats are supplemented by reports of odd goings-on in the counting room. As reported by the invaluable Sound Politics, Republican observers complained repeatedly about refusals to count ballots clearly marked for Rossi, inadequate security for ballot boxes, missing ballots and alterations of ballots by pro-Gregoire election workers. We can expect to learn much more about all this if Rossi vs. Gregoire turns into 2004’s Bush vs. Gore.

The next step, if the Democrats choose to pursue it, is a recount by hand, where the opportunities for partisan “improvement” of the results are far greater than in a machine tabulation. Republican happiness over the apparent outcome thus has to remain a bit tentative. Here is a sobering summing up from Sound Politics’ Jim Miller:

And if Gregoire wins this second recount, will I consider her win illegitimate? Almost certainly yes. Not because of the glitches in the recounts, which at times almost seemed intended to create Republican suspicions, but because of what I have begun to call “distributed vote fraud”, the vote fraud committed by individuals, and made easier by our lax election laws. (I described the problem here and here.)

Here is my guesstimate again. If a Democrat wins a statewide election in Washington by fewer than 100 votes, then their margin almost certainly came from fraudulent votes. If they win by fewer than 1,000 votes, then their margin probably came from fraudulent votes. I can’t prove those numbers are correct, of course, but neither can anyone who disagrees prove that they are incorrect. We simply don’t know how many fraudulent votes are cast in our elections, but we can be almost certain that they benefit Democrats, net.

Searching for McCain-Feingold’s Well-Hidden Virtues

[Note to visitors from The Corner: If you want to read about who really won the popular vote in 1960, the pertinent post is here. But feel free to browse wherever you like.]

One might assume that the election season just past would have dimmed liberal enthusiasm for the Free Speech Deprivation Act, otherwise known as “McCain-Feingold”. Senator McCain himself complained noisily that the evils he so hated – big money from fat cats, negative advertising, invasion of the politician/media monopoly on political commentary by bloggers and other members of the uninformed public – did not abate. He attributed the lack of results to the wimpiness of the law’s enforcers, but anyone less brimming with paternal pride could reasonably conclude that the whole enterprise was misbegotten.

Still, when a liberal position becomes blatantly indefensible, we can always count on Al Hunt, the Wall Street Journal’s ambassador from the Loony Left, to defend it. In his column today he declares that “McCain-Feingold Did Its Job” [link for on-line Wall Street Journal subscribers only]. The proof: In Al’s telling, the law succeeded because it actually did nothing at all. So what if the 2004 Presidential election was the most expensive in history, or if billionaires infused cash into the race more freely than ever before, or if the rhetorical tone was slightly less elevated than a fishmongers’ convention. None of that mattered. “The purpose of the McCain-Feingold law was not to reduce the amount of money in American politics; it was to reduce the corrupting influence peddling. It worked.”

I recall hearing quite a bit about other purposes when the law was being debated, but let that pass. What about “influence peddling”? I’m pleased to see that Mr. Hunt believes that it has been eliminated and presume that he will not in the future rail about how the Bush Administration is doing the bidding of its financial backers. I’m surprised that he didn’t notice that a money-heavy special interest group, plaintiffs’ lawyers, effectively selected one party’s Vice Presidential nominee. It was obvious last March that John Edwards would add zero to the Democratic ticket, and he abundantly confirmed that expectation during the campaign, failing to carry not just his home state (56 percent for Bush) but also his home precinct (a 70 percent Bush landslide). If John Kerry had been a free agent, he would undoubtedly have chosen someone else, but he wasn’t, because plaintiffs’ lawyers are the financial bulwark of his party and demanded their man in the number two slot. I can’t think of any pre-McCain instance in modern times of monetary influence being deployed so openly and effectively.

So much for what McCain-Feingold supposedly did. What, in Al’s left-eyed vision, didn’t it do?

Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell charged McCain-Feingold meant “the mutual assured destruction of the political parties.”

Instead the Republicans and Democrats flourished, raising more money – well over $1 billion, up about 20% from four years ago, even without soft money – vastly increasing the number of donors, especially small givers, and expanding their support for candidates around the country.

The Republicans had, as it happens, vastly expanded their donor base before McCain-Feingold, and it was clearly in the Democrats’ interest to do the same. Mr. Hunt seems to be suggesting that the party couldn’t recognize its own self-interest without government prodding. Well, that does fit in with his general view that citizens are helpless without Uncle Sam’s benevolent guidance.

With all of its newfound financial strength, however, is the Democratic Party really in better shape than before? One of the most conspicuous features of the campaign was that Senator Kerry didn’t control his own organization or message. A major segment of pro-Kerry (or, more accurately, anti-Bush) advertising came from non-party groups, many of them on the alienated fringe of American politics, and much of the Democratic get-out-the-vote effort fell to the likes of Americans Coming Together, which more or less openly promoted vote fraud. Perhaps the net effect of such support was positive for the Democrats, but for better or worse, the party could do little to influence it. Instead of putting tens of millions of dollars into the hands of the Democratic National Committee, George Soros and his ilk set up their own structures imbued with their own extremism. Official Democrats had little choice but to coordinate as best they could, with the knowledge that many policy options (e. g., an affirmative attitude toward the war effort) were anathema to their much-needed allies.

That the GOP suffered this loss of control to a much lesser extent was due to the comparatively low level of independent pro-Bush expenditures. One can imagine, though, what might have happened in 1996 if McCain-Feingold had been in force then and Richard Mellon Scaife had decided to play Soros by making huge ad buys on a “Vince Foster Was Murdered” theme. Poor Bob Dole’s respectable loss would have turned into a rout and poisoned the party for years to come. One of the great vices of the new electoral regime is that it removes a safe outlet for men with more dollars and anger than sense, viz., soft money, and encourages them to conduct their own independent campaigns. That development undermines the political parties more than the acquisition of more hundred-dollar donors reinforces them.

More important than the fate of political parties is the future of free political discourse. Here, too, Mr. Hunt sees no problem at all.

The soft money ban, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch flatly insisted, “is an infringement on the rights of free speech.”

Perhaps Sen. Hatch can tell us whose speech was silenced this year? There was no shortage of views and counterviews; no points of view were eliminated by McCain-Feingold. The campaign-reform legislation didn’t outlaw speech. What it did say was that overtly political activities in federal campaigns fell under the federal law.

I suspect that a newspaper columnist would grasp the absurdity of his last couple of sentences if their logic were applied to his employer, but he is right about “no shortage of views and counterviews”. Naturally not, since the law did not stifle either political parties or the media; the target of its restrictions on speech was the ordinary citizen who doesn’t have either a party or a network at his disposal. There, happily, the legal barriers proved ineffective, thanks to the ability of “527 organizations” to speak out freely. But Mr. Hunt does not cheer that parade of “views and counterviews”.

The proliferation of the 527s – named for a section of the Internal Revenue code – was fueled by wealthy donors of both sides: Democrats like billionaire George Soros and Peter Lewis and Republicans like Texans Boone Pickens and Bob Perry. This resulted in this year’s toughest attack: the sleazy anti-Kerry swift boat ads and the anti-Bush Media Fund attacks. [BTW, how do the SBVT ads, consisting largely of eyewitness statements, earn the epithet “sleazy” while Moore-like conspiracy theories are merely “anti-Bush”?]

These groups should have been curtailed; it has nothing to do with free speech. The law for more than a quarter-century has said that if the “major purpose” of any group is to affect the outcome of a federal election, it falls under the campaign-finance law and is subject to a contribution ceiling of $5,000. It’s estimated that 80% of the 527s’ funding was from fat cats who gave $250,000 or more.

The problem is the nefarious [sic] Federal Election Commission was unwilling to enforce this law. If it had, there still would have been a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry and a Media Fund against George Bush, but to thrive and grow these groups would have required genuine grass-roots support not the deep pockets of Boone Pickens or George Soros.

Though phrased as an objection to the source of funding of 527’s, the attack is really on their right to speak out at all. If, as Mr. Hunt elsewhere avers, McCain-Feingold took “federal officeholders out of the game; that's where the corruption took place”, it follows that large individual donations to 527’s are not “corrupting influence peddling”. What, then, is wrong with them, except for the fact that they make it possible for groups like the Swifties to get their message out effectively?

What would Al Hunt think of a law that forbade anyone from investing more than $5,000 in a newspaper? Would he accept the argument that it had nothing to do with freedom of the press, since a paper could still be published if it relied on “genuine grass-roots support” rather than “deep pockets”?

McCain-Feingold was not fatal to democracy, because neither regulators nor courts are yet willing to enforce it rigorously. Nonetheless, to the extent that it was applied, it had only detrimental effects: facilitating the entry of extremism into American politics while simultaneously curbing First Amendment rights. Continued advocacy of this system of prior restraint is not rational from anyone’s point of view. Unfortunately, the statute has become a liberal icon. It will, I fear, have to wreak much more damage before the Al Hunts of the world recognize the urgent need for its repeal.

Further reading: As usual, Matthew Hoy’s analysis is worthy of attention.

This Year’s Lesson from Washington State

The State of Washington’s charming image, a compound of mountain vistas, latté shops, Microsoft, mellow ex-hippies and excruciatingly pure, high-minded government, may suffer remaking as the gubernatorial vote count drags on. Today is the official deadline for counties to certify results, but the race between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire (a favorite of the plaintiffs’ bar, whose unstinting support has pushed her forward despite a record of dubious legal competence) is so close that it puts on embarrassing display the slovenliness of the state’s election process and the negative consequences of voting by mail instead of at the polls.

The most attention-grabbing election incidents were the late appearance of some 10,000 “magical mystery ballots” in King County, rescuing candidate Gregoire from what had looked like inevitable, no-recount-needed defeat, and Democrats’ trolling for affidavits from “voters” whose provisional ballots didn’t bear their own signatures. The former may have been the result of incompetence rather than fraud. The latter is, at the very least, disturbing. As recounted by vote fraud expert John Fund (in the subscription-only OpinionJournal Political Diary, just $3.95/month, cheap):

How Many Votes Do I Need? Because I Got’em Here Somewhere

Republican Dino Rossi holds a 19 vote lead out of 2.8 million votes cast as Washington state begins its final day of vote counting to determine if Mr. Rossi or Democrat Christine Gregoire is the state’s new governor. But this race is clearly heading for a recount and possible litigation.

Yesterday, King County superior court judge Dean Lum refused to stop election officials in liberal King County (Seattle) from counting 400 provisional ballots that had been rejected because the signatures on them did not match signatures on the voter registration forms. Democratic Party workers were able to obtain a list of 929 rejected ballots and over the weekend gathered signed affidavits from 400 of those voters asking that their rejected ballots be counted.

Ryan Bianchi, communications assistant for the campaign of Ms. Gregoire, admitted their approach was blatantly partisan. A Democratic volunteer asked if the person who filled out the provisional ballot was a Gregoire voter: “If they say no, we just tell them to have a nice day,” he told the Seattle Times. If voters said yes, they are asked if they wanted to make their ballots valid. Only those ballots were turned into King County officials, who promptly announced they would count them. This makes Al Gore’s 2000 call for a selective counting of Florida counties look positively kosher.

State Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance is outraged that King County would determine that ballots were legitimate based solely on signatures collected by Democrats. Democratic state chairman Paul Berendt responded: “Going to court to stop ballots from being counted is disgraceful.” Seattle Mayor Greg Nickles chimed in: “Let’s count every vote.”

Yes, but what about Washington State’s other counties, where two-thirds of the state’s people live? Many provisional ballots in counties won by Mr. Rossi were rejected but no one sent squads of partisans out to try to convert them into valid votes. Even Judge Lum expressed displeasure that he had been asked to “micromanage an election,” but he nonetheless allowed King County to count provisional ballots harvested by Democratic workers.

King County officials say they are applying the same standard of scrutiny given to absentee ballots that face rejection because of inconsistent signatures. King and other counties accept written oaths vouching for their veracity. But unlike absentee ballots, provisional ballots, which are given to voters if their names don’t appear on registration rolls, don’t have a presumption of validity. They must be set aside and investigated to make sure they are legitimate. For King County officials to reject such ballots because of mismatching signatures and then allow partisan operatives to selectively verify them represents a blatant attempt to put a fist on the scale in favor of one party. Sadly, it looks like this election will wind up in court.

The fact that the signature on a ballot envelope isn’t the same as a “voter’s” real one is good prima facie evidence that somebody else cast it. Maybe it was given away freely. Maybe it was bought, coerced or stolen. In any case, the non-voter shouldn’t be able to legitimize his own or another’s illegal action by ratifying it after the fact. If votes secured through bribery or intimidation count just like all others, why don’t we just put public offices up for sale on eBay?

The same comment applies to non-provisional absentee ballots with phony signatures and begins my tug at the skein of impropriety inherent in any election conducted primarily by mail.

In Washington State, there are no restrictions on absentee voting. This year about 70 percent of all votes were mailed in. Ballots cast by mail are not secret. An individual may choose to keep his own confidential, but he can also sell it, give it away or yield it to superior physical or moral force. I know personally of instances in which indifferent voters handed their ballots to family members or friends to fill out, and there surely were many sinister cases. If as few as one percent of the 2.8 million votes cast for governor were improper, the election, in which the winner will have a plurality of a few hundred at most, may well have been decided by patently illegal ballots. Should the governorship be bestowed on the contender whose supporters were most successful in securing the ability to vote more than once?

In the 19th Century, tremendous battles were waged to obtain the right to the secret ballot. In the 21st we have grown indifferent to it. If the Rossi-Gregoire squabble wakes us up, it will have been a useful election, no matter who winds up as the official winner. If, on the other hand, these abuses become the norm, democracy is doomed to degenerate into a clash of opposing fraudsters.

Update, 9:26 p.m. CST: With all counties having certified their results, Dino Rossi is the winner by 261 votes, at least until the mandatory recount is completed. The fact that my preferred candidate has (so far) won does not alter my opinions about the process by a single iota.

Vote Fraud Reminder

Because President Bush won Ohio by more votes than Cleveland Democrats were able to steal, vote fraud (the real thing, that is, not the Loony Left fantasies about how Diebold rigged all the voting machines) hasn’t been a hot post-election topic. Had Ohio been closer, matters would be different. We would be hearing a lot about the counties with more voters than citizens old enough to vote, as well as about dubious ballots in Philadelphia, Detroit, Madison and other locales in states that went narrowly for John Kerry.

That fraud did not swing this election is not a good reason to go to sleep. The invaluable OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only, but a bargain at $3.95 a month) offers a reminder from another close state, New Mexico, where Democrats are trying to keep Republicans from watching the last stages of the count:

Yesterday afternoon, Democratic Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron asked the state Supreme Court to overturn lower court ruling that had allowed Republican observers into the polls in Sandoval and Dona Ana counties. She also seeks to overturn a decision by the Bernalillo County Clerk to allow observers there. In her court filing, she contends state law doesn't provide for challengers to be part of the review process.

But cynics point out that she filed her petition shortly after the Bernalillo County Clerk told media outlets that observers had discovered instances of voter fraud during the qualification of provisional ballots. Provisional votes are cast by people whose names did not appear on registration rolls but nonetheless were allowed to vote pending verification of their eligibility. In counting the first 5,000 provisional ballots in Bernalillo County, observers turned up 53 instances of individuals voting more than once. They also found four voters who were dead and dozens of felons attempting to vote. In two cases, the same individual tried to vote three times: early, absentee and on Election Day.

Double voting appears to fall into two categories: voters who themselves may have voted multiple times, and those whose votes were essentially stolen. Dwight Atkins of Albuquerque attempted to vote on Election Day, only to discover that someone had already voted early in his name. Rosemary McGee showed up to vote at 3 pm on Election Day. But someone had voted in her place at 7:00am (the imposter actually misspelled her name on the signature roster). Both were shocked to learn that if an imposter votes first, the fraudulent ballot will stand, and the provisional ballot, cast later by the legitimate voter, will be disqualified.

Earlier this year, when Secretary of State Vigil-Giron went to court to prevent expanded enforcement of the state’s requirement that first-time voters show a photo ID, New Mexico Democrats insisted voter fraud didn’t exist in New Mexico. So much for that argument. But now it appears that local Democrats are willing to go to court to make sure more evidence of it doesn't turn up.

Making dishonest election practices more difficult ought to be among the highest Republican priorities. Actually, it should be a high priority for all honest citizens, and I retain the hope that plenty of honest Democrats concur, despite the maneuvers of a few of their party’s “leaders”.

Addendum: By virtue of the comment from Kevin Standlee, this post is now included in the “Science Fiction” category as well as the obvious ones. Incidentally, the 14-hour tally at the 1991 Worldcon was turbo speed compared to the Washington State gubernatorial count  this year. One begins to wonder whether Washingtonians will know the identity of their new governor before the old one leaves office!

Dementia and History

New York Times reporter Dean E. Murphy does not look forward hopefully to the assassination of President Bush. He says so himself in a form letter responding to criticism of an essay that he wrote for yesterday’s Times entitled “Can History Save the Democrats?”:

The goal of the article was to review some of the history surrounding so-called realigning elections, as many have described President Bush’s victory, and examine clues from the past about how such realignments have come to an end. In a sense, it was meant to look at what tomorrow might bring through the prism of yesterday.

Readers might have gotten a different impression from the fact that the two historical events discussed at greatest length are the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and McKinley, after which the piece ends ominously:

Professor Wilentz of Princeton said that even if the 2004 victory was an incremental one, that should not comfort the Democrats. He said Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush now have a chance to do what Hanna and McKinley never did: Lay the foundation for lasting Republican dominance.

“The Republicans are basically unchecked,” Professor Wilentz said. “There is no check in the federal government and no check in the world. They have an unfettered playing field.”

Until the next act of God, that is.

All quite innocently meant, the writer avers in his apologia:

As the article states near the beginning, “an act of God” during the Bush presidency could range from “a national calamity, a deep schism in the ruling party, the implosion of a social movement under the excesses of its own agenda or the emergence of an extraordinary political figure.” While assassination would certainly qualify as a national calamity, many other events would as well. Certainly, the article never advocated any of them.

Very well. I grant that Mr. Murphy had no malign intention. His analysis is instead a good example of how Bush Derangement Syndrome leads men without malign intentions to write driveling nonsense that reinforces dementia in their readers.

The essay has nothing accurate or informative to say about “how such realignments have come to an end”. Its linking of McKinley’s death to the end of Republican electoral hegemony is preposterous:

Had McKinley not been killed, Marcus A. Hanna, the political handler who was as instrumental to McKinley’s success as Karl Rove has been to Mr. Bush’s, would have pursued his dream of “creating a Republican machine that would go on forever,” Professor Wilentz said.

Instead, Theodore Roosevelt became president, and pursued progressive policies at home and power projection abroad. “What followed shifted the Republican Party in a direction it had not planned to go, and created the groundwork for 1912 and eventually the New Deal,” Professor Wilentz said. When his successor, William H. Taft, turned back to conservatism, Roosevelt ran against him in 1912 on the Progressive, or Bull Moose, ticket, and split the Republican Party, yielding the White House to the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson.

“One can't imagine what American history might have looked like had McKinley continued to the end of his second term,” Professor Wilentz said.

Yes, one can. Progressivism would still have been a major force within the Republican Party. TR was hardly the party’s sole progressive and he would have been a strong contender for the Presidential nomination if McKinley had served two terms. Had he been thwarted, a Democrat might well have captured the White House earlier than Wilson, drawing votes from Republicans restive under dogmatic conservative dominance. In any event, no Hanna-built machine could have survived the Great Depression.

Mr. Murphy’s counterfactual evidently differs toto caelo from mine. He (for it is clear that he quotes Professor Wilentz with unstinting approval) views McKinley’s assassination as a fortunate deliverance from what would otherwise have been perpetual right-wing Republican misrule.

Nothing else is treated in as much detail, and the other suggestions for ending realignment that are casually tossed about – a schism in Republican ranks, “the emergence of a paladin the Democratic Party”, “new waves of immigrants entering the electorate” – are patent long shots. A Democrat who swallows Mr. Murphy’s theses will be drawn to the conviction that President Bush is in a position to “lay the foundation for lasting Republican dominance”, an ascendancy that will be “unfettered” with “no check in the federal government and no check in the world”.

Doesn’t that sound ominous? Mr. Murphy offers his readers a choice among despair, hope for an improbable rescue and the direct course of killing the tyrant. He apparently regards trivia like regular elections as no limitation at all on the ruling faction. There is only one logical inference to be drawn from such a chain of discourse. If Mr. Murphy does not like that inference, he ought to reconsider his premises.

The Same-Sex Petard

How delightful it would be if the Massachusetts Supreme Court could be given credit for President Bush’s second term, if its holding that same-sex marriage is embedded in the Commonwealth’s constitution had really drawn a flood of evangelical Christians to the polls and halted an otherwise irresistible Kerry juggernaut. That would be enough irony to last the rest of the decade.

Alas, it isn’t true. One doesn’t need statistical analysis to disprove it, only a little knowledge of the evangelical and fundamentalist species of Christianity, about which the average left-wing commentator (or right winger, for that matter) knows as much as he does about Martians. I’m no expert either, but, though not an evangelical or even a Protestant myself, I have some acquaintance with evangelicals and don’t find the forces that affect their voting behavior impenetrably mysterious.

The reason why so many in this group routinely stay away from the polls isn’t because they are ignorant, pace the comforting secularist stereotype, but because they take seriously St. Augustine’s dichotomy between the City of God and the City of Man, not regarding themselves as full-fledged citizens of the latter. They are well aware that it allows and encourages abominations – what else would one expect? They do not believe that it can be changed in any essential way by changing its political leaders. Hence, no-fault divorce, legal abortion and other social issues have not in the past spurred them to vote. It isn’t plausible to assert that the less palpable threat of state recognition of same-sex “marriage” would motivate them more strongly.

What motivated them this year was exactly what moved a lot of other voters: the threat of Islamic terrorism. However little one may care about the internal affairs of the secular polity, responding to a direct attack is a different matter. St. Augustine himself took part in the defense of his earthly city against the Vandals.

That first time evangelical voters strongly preferred President Bush to Senator Kerry is no wonder. Like the majority of other Americans, they considered him more resolute as a commander-in-chief. That their primary issue was the conduct of the war (which many may well have seen as a matter of “moral values”; isn’t every issue at some level a moral one?) is shown by their failure to boost Republican candidates further down the ticket. The GOP lost a batch of state legislative chambers and had no net House or Senate pickup outside the South. In those contests, the Democrats’ new voters, who are convinced that all Republicans are fascists, were more efficacious.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court did not, then, swing the Presidential election. The impact of Goodridge v. Department of Public Health was more limited and predictable: A large number of states enacted constitutional amendments to head off any similar action by their own courts. The effect will to present a new obstacle to advocates of same-sex marriage if and when, as they claim to anticipate, public opinion turns in their favor. If they really believe that the future is on their side, the clever follow-up to Goodridge would have been to support a Federal Marriage Amendment. Pro-homosexual lawmakers could easily have ensured passage of a version that restricted only courts, not legislatures. Congressional action to send such an amendment to the states for ratification would have killed enthusiasm for state constitutional changes and thus left same-sex marriage proponents in a better long-run position than they occupy now. Like many zealots, however (including some on the Right), they were quite incapable of discerning their own strategic interests.

The Fundamental Reason Why Bush Won?

An e-mail from a friend:

On election night, I was in Hong Kong (where it was locally already Wed, morning) getting ready to fly back to the US. The outcome was still unknown as I was watching CNN at an airport lounge. A fellow sitting a few seats down blurted out that if Bush won he’d rather stay in China and live under the communists that come back to America. I replied that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. That no matter who won, living in the US was a hundred times better than living in China. I then predicted that Kerry would lose because it was well known that too many Democrats are just one step away from turning on their country and thus cannot be trusted. I then stalked off to my gate.

How Sixty Minutes Could Have Destroyed America

Suppose that Ra^thergate had been postponed until the Sunday before the election. Had Senator Kerry not been running so poorly in the polls right after Labor Day, CBS might well have delayed release of its forged documents until the last minute, when there would scarcely have been time for them to be exposed and discredited. Intrinsically trivial though questions about President Bush’s National Guard service were, the charges aired by Sixty Minutes, like the DUI roorback in 2000, would have swayed some voters. All that would have been needed to change the outcome were fewer than 100,000 switches in Ohio.

So John Kerry would be President-elect, very likely without a popular vote majority, but Republicans can’t complain about that. Then, inevitably, proof would have emerged that his victory was founded on a blatant fraud.

Republicans haven’t been as emotional about this election as Democrats. There are few, if any, Kerry Haters to match the legion of Bush Haters. Nonetheless, forbearance has its limits. There would certainly have been an uproar, and the Kerry Administration would have been poisoned from the start. In time of war, that is not a good condition for the nation’s commander-in-chief.

These considerations explain why investigating the CBS fraud and punishing its instigators remains important. It was not merely a lark or a misjudgement; it was a serious threat to constitutional government. The perpetrators ought not to be allowed to elude justice.

The New Electoral Map

A closer look at the state-by-state returns shows why Republican strategists feel optimistic about the future:

Overwhelmingly Republican (60%+): Alabama (9), Alaska (3), Idaho (4), Indiana (11), Kansas (6), Kentucky (8), Mississippi (6), Nebraska (5), North Dakota (3), Oklahoma (7), South Dakota (3), Texas (34), Utah (5), Wyoming (3). Total: 107
Overwhelmingly Democratic: District of Columbia (3), Massachusetts (12), Rhode Island (4). Total: 19

Strongly Republican (55%-59%): Arizona (10), Georgia (15), Louisiana (9), Montana (3), North Carolina (15), South Carolina (8), Tennessee (11), West Virginia (5). Total: 76. Running total: 183
Strongly Democratic: California (55), Illinois (21), Maryland (10), New York (31), Vermont (3). Total: 120. Running total: 139

Republican Edge (52%-54%): Arkansas (6), Colorado (9), Florida (27), Missouri (11), Virginia (13). Total: 66. Running total: 249
Democratic Edge: Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), Hawaii (4), Maine (4), New Jersey (15), Washington (11). Total: 44. Running total: 183

Contested (Neither party above 51%): Iowa (7), Michigan (17), Minnesota (10), Nevada (5), New Hampshire (4), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20), Oregon (7), Pennsylvania (21), Wisconsin (10). Total: 106

In other words, a Republican candidate who holds onto every state in which George W. Bush got at least 52 percent of the vote needs to pick up a mere one-fifth of the electoral votes in the “battleground” states.

Electoral maps are, it must be observed, written in the clouds. Compare and contrast 1896 with 2004. Nonetheless, for a few election cycles at least, the GOP will begin the race for the White House with a decided head start.

Exeunt Exit Polls (A Fond Hope)

I hope that this year’s fiasco persuades the news media to stop conducting and disseminating exit polls. Not because they are necessarily unreliable but because they have spoiled election night. Since at least 1980 the pattern has been consistent: Polls close in a bunch of states on the hour; with ten minutes the states are called based on exit poll numbers; airheads chat aimlessly for 50 minutes; repeat until ennui sets in. There is almost no old-fashioned discussion of how the vote count stands, where the counted votes come from or how the trends compare with earlier years. If a state’s exit poll isn’t conclusive, the talking heads don’t know what to talk about. It makes for a boring, uninformative show – and sometimes a misleading one. This year, for instance, it was clear from an early hour that President Bush would carry Florida, because he was running comfortably ahead of his 2000 margin in the northern and central parts of the state. The network commentary should have been emphasizing that fact and how difficult it would be for Senator Kerry to reverse the tide with returns from not-yet-reported Dade and Palm Beach Counties. Instead, only Republican operatives provided that information, and they were naturally discounted as partisan.

Modern computer databases make it simple to put a plethora of past election statistics at reporters’ command, and modern computer graphics allows the data to be presented in readily assimilable form. Just from a pure business point of view, wouldn’t that attract a bigger audience than long stretches of Dan Rather growing progressively more disconsolate?

One might think that, without exit polls, we would lose statistics on how various subsets of the electorate voted, e. g., that President Bush drew 11 percent of the black and 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Leaving aside the question of how badly we need that knowledge, it would not in fact be unobtainable. Anyone with precinct-by-precinct vote totals, Census data and a flair for multiple regressions can infer how any identifiable group split its vote with at least as much accuracy as a poll. No doubt the political parties already carry out that analysis, though they have little incentive to share their results with the public.

Although the aesthetic case against exit polling is overwhelming, I suppose that not everyone will consider it decisive. Millions of innocent words will be slaughtered in the debate over what went wrong with the 2004 surveys, if anything went wrong at all. The pollsters themselves, as I understand it, insist that they got everything right and have been misrepresented. Maybe so, but here are numbers, including virtually every state considered to be “in play”, that were being reported around the blogosphere shortly before the polls closed. I list Bush first and Kerry second, followed by the actual results and the difference between Bush’s predicted and real percentages.

Florida 49%-51% [52%-48% (-3%)]
Pennsylvania 46%-53% [49%-51% (-3%)]
Ohio 49%-51% [51%-49% (-2%)]
Michigan 47%-51% [49%-51% (-2%)]
North Carolina 52%-48% [56%-44% (-4%)]
Missouri 54%-46% [53%-46% (+1%)]
Arizona 55%-45% [55%-44% (0)]
Minnesota 44%-54% [48%-51% (-4%)]
Wisconsin 47%-52% [49%-50% (-2%)]
Colorado 51%-48% [52%-47% (-1%)]
Louisiana 56%-43% [57%-42% (-1%)]
Iowa 49%-49% [50%-49% (-1%)]
Arkansas 53%-47% [54%-45% (-1%)]
New Mexico 49%-50% [50%-49% (-1%)]

None of the deviations is huge. Individually they fall within the poll’s margin of error, but it is certainly striking that, in 12 of 14 cases, the Bush percentage is understated. Moreover, the larger states tend to have larger discrepancies. I am hesitant to offer an explanation, but innocent ones are not easy to formulate.

Anyway, I don’t want innocent explanations. When returns start arriving on November 7, 2006, I want to hear much more from guys like Michael Barone and Larry Sabato, who know what elections are about, and as little as possible from Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw. The lower the credibility of exit polling, the more likely we are to see real analysis.