What is it with Democrats named Al, anyway?

Eight years ago the United States experienced the closest presidential race in its history.

As had been expected for some weeks, it all came down to Florida. The networks- operating on the basis of exit polls using disastrously flawed models- projected Al Gore the winner of the Sunshine State and, in effect, the presidency early in the evening.

The Bush camp demurred, pointing out that its own information told a much different story. As the night went on, it quickly became clear that it was Bush's polls, and not the ones on which the networks were relying, that had it right.

Nevertheless, for several hours the networks refused to acknowledge their mistake, and pull Florida back into the undecided column. We will never know by how many millions the Bush vote was suppressed by the networks' ongoing message to voters in the Midwest and West during those crucial hours that they needn't bother showing up at the polls, since the issue had already been decided in Gore's favor. There seems little doubt that, in any event, it was a number greater than Gore's ultimate half-million margin of victory in the nationwide popular vote.

Sure enough, when the votes were counted, Bush had won Florida. But the margin was close, and the Democrats cried foul. The "butterfly ballot-" used for decades in Chicago and other Democratic bastions without complaint- was suddenly pronounced a confusing monstrosity that caused people actually cast their ballots for someone other than the candidate for whom they had intended to votes. The Democrats demanded a manual recount- a technique long recognized as a classic method by which a skilled stealer of votes can alter punch-card ballots in order to get votes for the other guy disqualified, and miscast ballots counted for your guy. Democratic experts in that particular method of vote fraud descended on Florida.

Although the Democratic catechism points out that both the governor and the secretary of state were Republicans, in fact neither had any practical influence over the count in the limited number of counties in which the Democrats claimed fraud. They all were highly Democratic counties, and the recount there was entirely controlled by their Democratic election officials. The highly partisan Florida Supreme Court, eager to avoid coherent criteria to which election officials could be held in determining voter intent, set aside the clear standard specified by Florida law and ruled tautologically that the constitutional criterion of voter intent was- voter intent.

Every possible method of extracting extra votes for Al Gore was tried, with the full blessing of SCOFLA. Although not a single case of illegal voter disenfranchisement was ever proven, the Democrats claimed loudly that people who had wanted to vote for Gore had been denied the right to do so in droves. An incredible number still believe it today.

And yet, it wasn't enough. The Democrats' dilatory tactics- and their dilatory tactics alone- delayed the recount to the very eve of the constitutionally-mandated date for the Electoral College to cast its votes. Quite properly, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the recount had to be concluded by midnight of that day, or the results would stand. The Democrats have been whining about the failure of their attempt to steal Florida in 2000 ever since.

Now, in 2008, another Al- Al Franken, the unfunny comedian and serial libelist whom the Democratic Farmer Labor Party of Minnesota chose to run against Republican Sen. Norm Coleman- is pulling out all the stops in an attempt to overturn his own narrow defeat.

As in Florida, boxes full of uncounted ballots predominently cast for Franken were suddenly "discovered" after the initial result showed a narrow Coleman victory. Ironically citing rulings from Bush v. Gore (as well as rulings from the Washington State Supreme Court concerning the 2004 race in which the Democrats actually succeeded in stealing the governor's mansion for Christine Grigoire, and preventing the duly-elected governor, Republican Dino Rossi, from taking office), Franken is asking for a review of the criteria on which every single disqualified absentee ballot was thrown out.

It's a situation made to order for fraud similar to that which inevitably attended the manual recount in Florida. In that 2004 Washington State election, Democrats got affidavits signed by some six hundred voters whose absentee ballots had been disqualified stating that they had intended to vote for Grigoire, and made it stick, with the help of the state supreme court. Republicans mounted a belated effort to do the same in behalf of Rossi, but their late start doomed the effort.

If a vote isn't legally cast, it shouldn't be counted. It really ought to be as simple as that. If a voter doesn't bother to comply with the law in casting his or her ballot, that voter has reasonable expectation that the vote be counted. The notion that improperly-cast ballots should be counted anyway if cast for a Democrat makes a mockery of the rule of law.

Had that principle been adhered to in Florida in 2000, the nation would have been spared the travesty of the fraudulent recount and the constant whining the Democrats have engaged in ever since. If it had been followed in Washington State in 2004, Dino Rossi would have been governor, and the credibility of the democratic process would have avoided being undermined.

And if it's followed in Minnesota in 2004, Al Franken will be able to spend the next four years writing more snide, unfunny books libeling people he doesn't agree with.

HT: Real Clear Politics

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