Now that Campaign Season is over, I guess it's time for Contested Election Season to begin.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't remember that being as big a feature of the American political scene before the huge fuss of 2000.
I mean, I understand that there were messed-up elections in America's past, dating clean back to the Jefferson-Burr dogfight, but from the earliest I started paying attention... call it the mid '80s... I don't remember the whole Banana Republic drama of recounts and lost ballots and hanging chads and lawsuits occupying the media eye until the Bush v. Gore mess, and now it seems we can't pick a dogcatcher without more skullduggery than a Chicago mayoral election.
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True. Now we not only have a margin of error, we also have a margin of fraud.
Well, even the rampant vote-fraud machine of the Minnesnowta DFL couldn't close the gap between Mark "I bought this seat" Dayton and Emmer for governor...it's down to less than a 10,000 vote difference (out of about 2 million), and that will probably trigger an automatic recount.
Brave, brave Mark Dayton...
"When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Dayton"
The integrity of the system used to be more important than winning any particular election.
Now, winning is the only thing that matters. Hence, we are on our way to becoming a third world country.
I think the Harry Reid victory is the only one that really reeks of SEUI programming glitches and arm-twisting so far.
The write in count in Alaska will be fun to watch. I wonder how many people can actually spell "Murkowski" correctly.
@Bram: the Murkowski campaign was even giving out rubber bracelets with Murk's name on them so they would remember how to spell it. Wonder how the bracelets made it past poll observers and weren't flagged as electioneering tokens?
Anonymice have been successfully legislating from the bench for years...might as well elect from there too.
AT
Growing up in western Pennsylvania (call it Pittsburgh), I often heard stories of how the elections there were crooked. Bought elections, dead people voting--twice, etc. Some local officials said it was worse than Chicago, although I doubt that anything could be that bad. Mostly it was ignored by the media as grumbling after a lost election.
2000 was the first time (in recent history) the national election was close enough to be lost, and the media thought the wrong party lost, so they jumped all over the "elections shenanigans" bandwagon.
That's not to say that the shenanigans didn't or doesn't happen, just that now it is almost expected to hear the complaint of fraud at every close call.
The whole thing in Nevada is a great example. If it isn't fraud, it sure looks like it, or at least incompetence on the part of both voters and election officials.
There's only one rule to stealing ANYTHING, from a loaf of bread to an election. Don't get caught.
Reminder to the Dems - when competing, the losers learn more than the victors.
Corollary: The more important or valuable something is, the more harder people look when it's gone.
Second Corollary: It's harder to steal something the next time around.
I'm hearing about late-night shennanigans in Connecticut’s governor race too.
@Bob: the courts ruled that providing a list of the candidates names wasn't electioneering, so why not a bracelet, too?
Ridiculous decision...
. . . and up hear in the People's Republic of Seattlstan, Dino Rossi, candidate for the US Senate, is about to lose his third political race. The first time was when he ran for governor. He won by a small margin. So they recounted. And 'found' several trunkloads of unopened ballots. Rossi won that recount. So they 'found' more ballots. In fact, in their searches, they managed to 'find' at least three additional stashes of ballots, after which they counted again, and he finally lost, at which point he was declared the loser. By, if I recall correctly, 123 votes.
I expect more of the same this time around.
BoxStockRacer
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