Match Wits With Inspector PowerLine!

Ok, I couldn’t get the link to work, but here’s my guess–the sword would never say the “First Battle of Bull Run” because they did not know that the second would be fought yet.

Oops, wrong mystery

This is the sort of stuff that makes me loathe right-wing bloggers.

Elementary, my dear Watson.

Observe the tires of the vans that delivered the suspicious voters to the polls. They did not have their tires slashed, Ergo…

I should probably make a few things clear, just in case.

Tire-slashing is criminal, and the culprits should have the book thrown at them. The voting problems in Milwaukee are clearly unacceptable, and the systems in place are clearly inadequate. I doubt that anyone would argue with that, right, left or center.

But I object to the easy assumption of Democratic fraud. Dwight Meredith once described a charming metaphor for political commentary of this sort. He was driving in the car with a passionate college sports fan, listening to the game on the radio. One of the players on his favorite team was called for a foul. His friend immediately screams “BAD CALL!”, regarding the foul that he, of course, could not have seen.

We could be looking at a case of Democratic fraud, Republican fraud, apolitical incompetence, or some combination of the three. To start with the assumption that it obviously must be Democratic fraud is both ridiculous and typical.

(I should also say that we’re not going to play dueling-election-fraud stories. We could do it for weeks.)

Come on, Sebastian. I’ve got no problem with pointing out the possibility of fraud. Hell, I’ve pointed out the possibility of fraud.

This is what Hinderaker wrote: “It is becoming increasingly clear that the Democratic Party perpetrated massive voter fraud in state after state in the 2004 election, just as it did in the 2000 election.”

I know that you can see the difference.

For the record, I rather doubt that the Democratic party, as an institution, commits ballot fraud. That would be a remarkably risky thing to do.

On the other hand, that Democrats do sometimes commit ballot fraud… That seems hard to dispute. You’re not all candidates for sainthood, after all.

The interesting question lies between those two; Does the Democratic party have a “wink, wink, nudge nudge” policy of officially discouraging, and unofficially relying upon, ballot fraud? Kind of the way labor unions don’t officially favor beating up “scabs”? Well, there’s certainly some circumstantial evidence: I can’t off hand think of a single measure to make ballot fraud more difficult, which hasn’t been opposed by the Democratic party.

And one suspects that, if you though ballot fraud on net were working against you, that wouldn’t be the case.

Finally, where’d I get the notion that the elections officials in this case were Democrats? It happened in Milwaukee, of course. You think Republicans run the polls there?

I think you just don’t read powerline blog and its close sister-blog Captain’s Quarter very much. They both have had a long series of posts on the issue of voter fraud in the Great Lakes states. To sum up an update post as being the whole of the reporting is completely unfair.

The two sites have reported plenty of evidence of wrongdoing in those states. See here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here or here .

Funny, I seem to recall there were precincts—GOP-leaning precincts—with more votes than registered voters in Ohio. Now, I don’t think Kerry won Ohio either, but I’m disgusted at people who take the exact same irregularities in one state as honest and in other states as clear proof of fraud.

And which side might that be? Perhaps the side that bitches and moans every four years, creating a convient target to fire up their base, yet does nothing to address the underlying problem?

The same problems in Milwaukee have existed for years – and probably elsewhere as well. I live in an overwhelmingly Republican city, and in addition to not being asked for ID was allowed to take my registration form into another room along with everyone else registering at the time. I called and wrote letters to the local paper, as well as the Journal Sentinel, but no one seemed to be interested.

Yet the legislature has done nothing and now under GOP leadership has cut funding for elections. It wasn’t hard to guess that Milwaukee, which had more first-time voters by orders of magnitude, was going to have an registration rush. On top of everything else it had a popular candidate, who became the state’s first black US Rep.

The Milwaukee Elections Commission was forced to dip into county emergency funds, hire temporary workers and scrambled to process 20,000 registration cards overnight, hours before the polls opened.

But no, we don’t want to hear about the system creaking like an old bridge threating to crash into the river. That might cost money to fix. We want to talk about the punks who slashed the tires on the GOP GOTV van and shake our fists in the air.

“Funny, I seem to recall there were precincts—GOP-leaning precincts—with more votes than registered voters in Ohio.”

I assume you’re refering to that county Keith Oberman was making such a fuss about? Yeah, I was rather exercised about that, too… Turned out the morons have some goofy way of reporting the totals, which results in inaccurate numbers being reported initially for precincts on the edge of the county. I do hope they’ve got the sense to fix that before the next election.

What happened with the James Tobin indictment for jamming of get-out-the-vote phone lines?

Depends on what you mean by “massive”, I suppose. What went on in King county might not have been on a huge scale, for instance, but it sufficed.

Sorry Brett, only in your imagination. Usually there are better blogs for this tinfoil hat stuff. Freerepublic, say. Hey, even the Dkos diaries on the other side!

You didn’t mention the slashed tire episode:

Tire slashing update
On Tuesday we noted that thirty vans rented by the Republican Party in Milwaukee to drive voters to the polls had been disabled by having their tires slashed. It appears that the Milwaukee police are making some progress investigating the…

Posted in Power Line on November 5, 2004 10:22 AM

I think there are indictments on the way.

Also check out the ballot fraud in a Kenosha county group home in 2002, I dont have cite for that.

Here’s what I think.

GIVEN THAT:
* the Republican party controls the White House;
* the Republican party controls the House of Representatives;
* the Republican party controls the Senate;
* the Republican party controls the Supreme Court;
* the Republican party seeks to increase its power and influence at the expense of that of the Democratic Party;
* the Republican party has been strongly criticised around the world for its handling of the 2000 and 2004 elections;

AND:
* an investigation into Democratic Party fraud would go a long way to redressing the balance of reputations;

THEN:
* What are the chances that if actual Democratic Party fraud existed, the Republican response would be limited to grumbling and and innuendo on little right wing blogs?
* What are the chances that if actual Democratic Party fraud did not exist, the Republicans would run a whispering campaign of smear and innuendo on little right wing blogs anyway, in the interest of confusing the issue?

Given the above, the existence of Republican complaints of Democratic Party fraud on little right wing blogs and nowhere else strongly predisposes me to suspect that innuendo is all they have, and no such fraud actually took place.

But that’s just my logical mind. The propaganda works anyway because most people don’t think it through like that. And that, folks, is why Joseph Goebbels is laughing in Hell.

Great post, Ted. My only complaint: You should have used all three of them and their silly-assed nicknames: Hindrocket, the Big Trunk and the Deacon. These guys are adults?

It’s not necessarily partisan bias to think that Democrats commit more vote fraud; most of the Democrats I know who do politics think so to. The reason is no special virtue on the part of Republicans, but that Democrats are dominant in urban areas, where it is easier to commit fraud, because fewer people know their neighbors, and the polling places are closer together if you are looking to ship fraudsters from one to the other.

Nor is it particularly weird to think that the precinct captains in Milwaukee are all democrats; given that it is a rust-belt industrial city, I’d be surprised indeed to find that any precinct had enough Republicans to elect one to the role. I think it would be very safe indeed to say that the overwhelming majority of Milwaukee’s election officials are Democrats. If one believes that fraud was committed in Milwaukee, it isn’t unreasonable to suspect that it happened with the connivance of local elected Democrats.

That said, it’s not reasonable to think that the national party organises these things, any more than it’s reasonable for Democratic partisans to spew childish bile about how the “Rethuglicans” mounted some massive plot to steal the White House. Fraud, when it happens, happens locally, because national conspiracies are just too hard to keep quiet. And while it seems hard to believe that 300 people managed to vote twice without the help of some election official, we are talking about the government here, which a conservative should know is not exactly an effective organisation. Hinderaker should have given the Democratic Party the benefit of the doubt, as he would expect reasonable Democrats to give his party.

Incidentally, Ted, did you know that Inspector Haledjian is being given new life?

It’s not necessarily partisan bias to think that Democrats commit more vote fraud; most of the Democrats I know who do politics think so to.

Odd. I know that after much of the GOP’s South Dakota GOTV staff resigned over a vote-fraud scandal, the Bush campaign hired many of them to run the Ohio GOTV operation. (At least three of the ones hired in Ohio were later indicted.)

I also know that the BC2004 Northeast regional director was the guy who organized an illegal phone-jamming attack on New Hampshire Dem’s GOTV office in 2002 (since indicted, as Drapeto points out). He resigned from the campaign once his role became public knowledge–not when it was known within the campaign.

So I’d say we don’t need any aprioristic arguments to think that the national GOP does organize and direct voter fraud. That seems significant. Perhaps your Democratic friends should wise up.

The equation of “controls” with “has a slight majority” is simply evasive. There are numerous sources of power in any society, and America has several areas of power which are dominated by leftish thought.

If the smear is not to be laughed out of the room by its pure absurdity, then despite the republican dominance of _everything_ (and I only left the media out so as not to be bogged down by right-wingers insisting the media is part of the librul conspiracy too), it’s vital that they still project the image of the plucky underdogs. And so the previous commentator pops up on cue to explain that it’s all an illusion. As someone else once said:

conservatives love being the lonely little voice in the wilderness, pitted against the evil monolithic liberal state.

Just watch them be oppressed: they squat way down, they try and look underfed and pathetic, they squeak in tiny little voices. They use words like “poor me.” It’s like watching Arnold Schwarzenegger try to pass for Shirley Temple. Suitable for entertainment, if you’re tired of watching traffic lights change.

*Republicans understand that people who live in glass houses don’t want to start stone throwing contests.

That’s rich. This would be the party of the twice-divorced Newt Gingrich, who plans a primary run in 2008 built upon the catchphrase “Under God”? The party of Bill “Slots o’ Fun” Bennett, self-appointed arbiter of virtue? The party of George W. Bush, who couldn’t bring OBL to justice but still managed to win an election by convincing people that the other side wasn’t “serious” about terrorism?

Please, Brett. Unmitigated chutzpah is integral to the Karl Rove playbook–it is one of the defining characteristics of the Republican Party today. You’ll see more stones thrown from glass houses in an hour of Fox News than the left could ever hope to hurl in a year.