Posted on 11/13/2002 3:38:56 PM PST by knighthawk
WASHINGTON - A week after the big Republican win in the U.S. off-year election and the evidence is accumulating: the Democrats lost ugly. Consider just two cases:
1. South Dakota. As Byron York reports on NationalReview.com, up until 6:38 a.m. on the morning after election day, it looked as if the Democrats had lost the South Dakota Senate race. With 838 of the state's 844 precincts reporting, Republican challenger John Thune led Democratic incumbent Tim Johnson by more than 1,000 votes. Then something odd happened.
Six precincts that normally report early delivered their results very late. And guess what? All six reported unprecedentedly massive votes for the Democratic candidate -- so huge, in fact, that they sufficed to counterbalance Thune's majority in the other 99.3% of the state.
The six late precincts were all located in one county, Shannon County, site of a large Indian reservation -- and also the site of many past allegations of voter fraud. In 1998, with Tom Daschle on the ballot, Shannon County reported 1,599 votes, 79% of them Democratic. This time, Shannon reported 3,118 votes, 92% of them Democratic. The Shannon County late surge pushed Johnson over the finish line. At 10:22 am, Tim Johnson was declared the winner by 527 votes out of 334,435 cast.
In other words: A fraud-prone Democratic-controlled county delayed reporting its results until the tally was complete everywhere else in the state, by which time it was clear that the Democratic candidate needed 1,000 more votes to win. The county then delivered almost 1,600 more ballots than in 1998, virtually every single one of them marked for the Democratic candidate. Curious, no?
2. Arkansas. Democrats were widely expected to pick up a Senate seat in Arkansas. The incumbent Republican, Tim Hutchinson, was a Baptist minister and a founder of a Christian school who voted to convict Bill Clinton in the January, 1999 impeachment trial. Six months later, Hutchinson divorced his wife of 30 years. In the summer of 2000, he married one of his former staffers.
Arkansans take a dim view of this kind of behaviour, and all through 2002, Hutchinson trailed in the polls. His Democratic opponent, Attorney General Mark Pryor, the son of a popular former governor and senator, presented himself as a Christian family man in television commercials: One showed Pryor leafing through a Bible, then cut to a shot of the entire Pryor clan gathered around the family table, heads bowed in prayer.
Forty-eight hours before election day, however, the Drudge Report posted a story about a potential ethical problem of Pryor's own: He had for some months employed, a Mexican-born housekeeper and paid her in cash. Was she a legal immigrant? Had he paid the required taxes?
On the Sunday before election day, Pryor denounced Drudge's story as an "11th hour smear." He said that his housekeeper had provided him with evidence that she was a legal resident of the United States and that she had not worked for him long enough for any payroll taxes to be due. He backed his story up with an affidavit from the housekeeper herself. Arkansans believed him, and Pryor won 54% to 46%.
The following morning, the Arkansas Times ran this item on a story about to be printed in a Little Rock Spanish-language newspaper:
"The woman now tells El Latino editor Michel Leidermann that she was indeed an illegal worker when employed by Pryor for about six months in 1999 and that she told his wife this at the time. ... She says she was encouraged by Pryor in-laws to sign a statement absolving Pryor and that she did so because she was unnerved by being the centre of controversy."
There is of course no proof that Pryor or anyone close to him in fact induced the housekeeper to swear out a false affadavit. Inducing perjury is a very serious crime. On the other hand, another famous Arkansas pol made something of a speciality of it -- and it took him all the way to the White House.
South Dakota and Arkansas are not the end of the story. There are troubling accounts of voter fraud and ballot manipulation by local Democratic officials throughout the country. The Alabama gubernatorial race will turn on whether 7,000 allegedly bogus ballots from Democratic precincts are accepted or rejected by the state courts.
Nobody should prejudge any of these cases. But when sour-grapes Democrats try to explain away their defeat in 2002 by pointing to a Republican advantage in money and airtime, it's worth remembering that the Democrats went into this election with some special strengths of their own: control of many local jurisdictions where elections can still be won or lost the old-fashioned way -- in the dark, when nobody is looking.
DFrum@aei.org
Good old Chicago-style politics!
Horowitz says that the Democrats can usually put 2-3% crooked votes in the pot whenever they want. I say maybe 4 or 5%, when they utterly control the machinery.
Small potatoes? Negligible? Au contraire. Enough to win.
There's a good old hispanic name, for you.
BTTT!
If a frog had wings.... Never gonna happen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.