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Being a Democrat means never having to accept an election loss
by Timothy P. Carney, Senior Columnist, Washington Examiner
October 05, 2021 12:07 PM

Before former President Donald Trump refused to accept an election he clearly lost, whipping up a series of conspiracy theories and idiotic lawsuits and stoking deadly riots at the U.S. Capitol, there were the Democrats. They literally have not accepted a single presidential election loss this century.

After Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, she declared that Trump was an “illegitimate president.” As the Washington Post aptly characterized it, she also “suggested that ‘he knows’ that he stole the 2016 presidential election.”

This was in 2019, after Democrats in Congress and hostesses on MSNBC spent years trying to prove a false conspiracy theory that Russia somehow rigged the election in Trump’s favor.

The previous time the Republicans won, George W. Bush in 2004, Sen. Barbara Boxer and dozens of House members objected to Ohio’s electoral votes going for Bush, even though he won the state by more than 100,000 votes.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, promoted a conspiracy theory whereby enough votes were switched from Kerry to Bush by voting machines and enough voters were wrongly purged from voter rolls that it “could have been” determinative of the result in Ohio and, thus, the whole presidential election.

And the time before that? Well, famously, Al Gore sued in Florida and in the Supreme Court to overturn George W. Bush’s insanely narrow victory in that state. Democratic congressmen, even after the lawsuits ended, called the result a “coup d’etat.” They also challenged the electoral votes.

Why do I bring up the distant past? Because Democrats continue to peddle the line, which would be called “dangerous” if a Republican made the same argument, that Bush “stole” the 2000 election.

Watch this video of Terry McAuliffe in 2004, claiming Republicans stole the 2000 election. McAuliffe, who has never recanted that false claim, is now the Democratic nominee for the governor of Virginia and has the backing of the entire Democratic establishment.

That’s because the Democratic and liberal establishment say the same thing as McAuliffe:

And here’s Jonathan Chait at New York magazine last month, saying Bush never won the election fairly.

The Drum/Chait case, which is the most sophisticated version of the argument, is that the most liberal recount method utilized by a consortium of newspapers yielded a Gore victory. That recount method was one of the methods that counted overvotes, described by the Orlando Sentinel as “ballots rejected because machines detected markings for more than one candidate but when examined reveal voter corrections and other clear signs of intent.”

But every other version of the recount by the newspapers yielded a Bush win.

How does Chait decide the only method ultimately favorable to Gore was the right one? Conveniently, Chait thinks that’s the fairest method. We don’t need to argue which was the fairest method, though, because the Chait Method was a post-hoc innovation by the newspapers explicitly not permitted by law.

The recount ended when the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, striking down a ruling by the Florida Supreme Court. But had the Florida Supreme Court ruling stood, all 67 counties would have counted some ballots, and, according to the newspaper, this count would have yielded a Bush win, the New York Times reported: “[I]f Florida’s 67 counties had carried out the hand recount of disputed ballots ordered by the Florida court on Dec. 8, applying the standards that election officials said they would have used, Mr. Bush would have emerged the victor by 493 votes.”

Gore’s campaign was asking for a different, less defensible remedy — a selective hand recount only in four very pro-Gore counties. Again, the New York Times noted that that too would have resulted in a Bush win: “Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.”

Again, the facts establish that if Gore had won the Bush v. Gore court case, Gore would still have lost the 2000 election. It isn’t even controversial unless you are unfamiliar with the facts.

Returning to the Chait Standard, requested or ordered by neither the Florida Supreme Court nor the Gore campaign, Chait’s evidence that it was the real standard, rests on this passage in the Orlando Sentinel:

“If the recount had gone forward, it might have been expanded beyond what the Florida Supreme Court ordered by the man responsible for overseeing it, Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis. The recount was halted before he decided how it would finally work, but Lewis said in an interview earlier this year that he would not have ignored the overvote ballots. Though he stopped short of saying he definitely would have expanded the recount to include overvotes, Lewis emphasized, ‘I’d be open to that.’ ”
Again, “I’d be open to that.” The judge in charge of the recount would “be open” to maybe implementing a counting method that would have given Gore the victory. That’s a very thin thread upon which to hang a claim that Gore really won the election.

Florida law, on the other hand, was not open to that. The law explicitly said, “If an elector marks more names than there are persons to be elected to an office or if it is impossible to determine the elector’s choice, the elector’s ballot shall not be counted for that office.”

Note that first clause — and the “or.” A ballot with two votes marked for president “shall not be counted for that office.” So, counting overvotes, which Lewis said he would consider, would have been illegal.

“Without overvotes,” the Orlando Sentinel explained, “Gore could not have won a statewide recount, the ballot study shows. In every recount scenario examined, Bush would have reaped more of the undervotes.”

You can always argue that the law should allow a more liberal vote-counting standard, but in fact, the law didn’t allow it. Under Florida law, Bush won. Had courts overturned that victory, they would have been rewriting the law in order to give Gore the victory. That would have been stealing the election.