Posted on 12/10/2002 9:00:22 AM PST by xsysmgr
A new poll, privately conducted for Republicans in South Dakota, suggests that some GOP voters who crossed party lines to vote for Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson are now feeling "buyer's remorse."
Johnson defeated Republican challenger John Thune by 524 votes. During the campaign, Democrats appealed to GOP and independent voters by arguing that a vote for Johnson would be a vote to keep Sen. Tom Daschle as Senate Majority Leader, which would mean more clout for South Dakota in the Senate.
In the end, of course, Democrats lost the Senate and Daschle is set to become Minority Leader.
After the election, pollsters retained by the GOP contacted 500 randomly selected people who had voted in the Senate race. The pollsters found that 17 percent of Republicans and independents said they voted for Johnson. To those people, the pollsters asked, "At the time, the Johnson campaign was saying that a vote for Tim Johnson was a vote to keep Tom Daschle as majority leader in the Senate. Thinking back, how important was the issue of keeping Tom Daschle as majority leader to you — was it very, somewhat, not very, or not at all important?"
Thirty-one percent of the Republicans and independents surveyed said it was a very important factor in their decision to vote for Johnson, and 37 percent said it was somewhat important.
Then the pollsters asked: "If you had known that because of what happened in other states that the Democrats would lose control of the Senate and Tom Daschle would no longer be majority leader, would you have still voted for Tim Johnson, or would you have voted for John Thune?"
The results are another indication of just how close the election was. Ninety-five percent of those surveyed said they still would have voted for Johnson. But five percent said they would have voted for Thune had they known Daschle would no longer be Majority Leader. That would be well over 1,500 voters — more than enough to make Thune the winner on Election Day.
Meanwhile, investigators in the South Dakota attorney general's office are looking into allegations of voting irregularities in last month's election. Several of those allegations are discussed in a new National Review cover story based on the testimony of dozens of Republican poll workers who say they witnessed Democrats engaged in improper and possibly illegal activities at several precincts across the state.
A source in the attorney general's office says many of the allegations — including charges that Democratic poll watchers ran get-out-the-vote operations out of polling places, aggressively coached voters, and engaged in illegal electioneering — are very difficult to prosecute. "First of all," the source says, "they are low-level misdemeanors, assuming they can be proven. And second, they are fairly far down the ladder in terms of whether or not the conduct can be converted into some indication that the returns at the ballot box would be changed."
Investigators are more interested in three affidavits, also discussed in National Review, from people who say Democratic get-out-the-vote van drivers offered them $10 to vote. "Those are, of course, serious allegations," the source says.
Finally, it appears that an indictment will come this week against Becky Red Earth Villeda, the Democratic activist who is suspected of trying to falsify hundreds of absentee ballot applications. In recent weeks, state officials have said they discovered 15 phony ballot requests associated with Villeda and are still investigating 1,700 others. "She was found to be in possession of several hundred absentee ballot applications," a source says. "They had been filled out, with people's names and addresses on them."
I have reservations about that claim. The RATS would have needed to dig up 1,500 more dead Indians to vote for Johnson.
Yep, that's why you wait til all the other precincts have been counted before coming up with the reservation returns.
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