Captain Ed takes a look at the results of the Presidential elections in Wisconsin and finds some rather iffy numbers coming from the Badger State. Given that Bush was expected by many to win Wisconsin by a narrow margin, the fact that Kerry outperformed Gore’s totals in 2000 is more than a little surprising. Of course, there could be a reasonable explanation for all of this, but instead we have the “count every vote” crowd complaining about fictional irregularities in a state Bush won by well over 100,000 votes.
Of course, the “count every vote” crowd have no desire to count Republican votes, which is why when Christine Gregoire manages to steal an election in Washington using ballots from King County that magically appeared in time to give her a 138 vote win and when Milwaukee’s vote counts don’t match the census data there is hardly a peep from those who would hold themselves as the defenders of American democracy.
UPDATE: Captain Ed gives an example of this double standard with the latest bloviation from John Kerry. What Kerry forgets:
The complaints center on Cuyahoga County, of course, where Cleveland voters complained of standing in line for hours due to the lack of voting machines, a side effect of the higher turnout from 2000. However, what Kerry doesn’t mention — again — is that Cuyahoga County election officials are Democrats, not Republicans. The county goes heavily Democratic in elections at all levels. If anyone screwed Cuyahoga County voters, it’s the Democrats who have always promised their minority-bloc voters the moon and delivered below subsistence.
But of course, it’s always the Republicans fault, never mind the fact that the Democrats are the ones who are charged with running elections in the districts that had the highest number of problems…
So if a few hundred missing ballots suddenly showed up in Yakima County, Washington, a month after the election, you would have advised Dino Rossi to forget about counting them, out of principle, because they must have been illegally obtained right? Who do you think you’re kidding? Honestly, I would have been pissed off if what happened to Rossi had happened to a Democratic candidate as well (oh wait…it did happen to Al Gore in 2000), and ultimately I believe the Dems would have been best advised to have conceded to Rossi after the second recount. As it stands now, most Washingtonians are unconvinced of Gregoire’s legitimacy and Rossi’s politically-savvy fall on the sword has martyred him for a Senate run against a vulnerable Maria Cantwell in 2006.
As for Wisconsin, the urban and rural areas of the state all voted slightly better for John Kerry than they did for Al Gore, while the suburbs and exurbs all voted slightly better for Bush than in 2000. The exact same scenario played out in neighboring Minnesota. If you know the demographics of Wisconsin, at least outside of the German suburban doughnut surrounding Milwaukee, Kerry’s victory shouldn’t be all that perplexing. The only thing surprising is that so many blue-collar counties in northern Wisconsin continued to let the NRA tell them to vote for the guy unapologetically depopulating and deindustrializing their communities….albeit by smaller margins than was the case in 2000.
As for Ohio, there are plenty of suspicious aspects of the outcome (a five-point disparity between normally accurate exit polls and the actual vote count), but I don’t believe there are too many who seriously believe Kerry had overcome a 100,000+ vote deficit. Your “Democrats are in charge of the counties that had the most problems” claptrap fails to recognize that Ohio’s REPUBLICAN Secretary of State determines the allocation of voting methods in each county. Furthermore, it kind of makes sense that most voting problems and long lines would take place in urban areas where people actually live as opposed to rural right-wing bastions like Holmes and Mercer Counties. Also, Franklin County, where Columbus is located, has up until very recently been a Republican stronghold. Are you sure that the county is run by “Democratic election officials”?