Political Commentary

A Pattern In Close Elections

17 Comments

Mickey notices one:

That’s eight Dem wins, zero GOP wins. I sense a pattern! And this is a Republican year. Shouldn’t the nailbiters be distributed fairly evenly between the parties? …

If anyone has an explanation for this apparent phenomenon, let me know. All theories—including paranoid and supernatural explanations—will be considered. It’s also possible that Politico is biased in its selections. … My own hypothesis is that the pattern results from a curse issued by Al Gore after he was declared the loser in Florida in 2000 …

With all due respect to my friend Mickey, I have an alternate theory…

As Hugh Hewitt wrote, if it’s not close, they can’t cheat. Having a simple majority isn’t enough with these crooks.

17 thoughts on “A Pattern In Close Elections”

  1. The answer is cheating by the Democrat Sec. of State. Check to see if the Republican losses in close elections are matched to an SoS democrat in office.

    Also see http://www.secstateproject.org/ funded by spookey dude George Soros.

    Yep, to win today it must be by a large enough majority to not get stolen.

  4. Mickey is operating from a sloppy premise, since the GOP did win some close races (Kirk, Toomey, plenty of House seats, including my district). It would be a more interesting question if he’d actually run the numbers and tallied which party won races by vote counts of .1%, .5%, 1%, etc.

    But even if the Dems won more of the close races the obvious explanation would be that the DNC did a better job than the RNC of identifying and putting resources into races that were going to be close. The GOP was systematically misled by Rasmussen into thinking they had comfortable leads where in fact the races were close, and Michael Steele has let Karl Rove’s GOTV machine atrophy.

    But leave it to Rand to bypass doing the math, and the obvious explanations, and go straight to the voter fraud bogeyman.

  5. Bill, the ultimate accusation of cheating came from exactly the scenario you are seeking…the accusation that GWB stole the election in Florida from Gore, aided and abetted by the Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

    This feeling persists today, even though the media conducted their own study afterward showing that had the limited county by county recounts requested by the Gore team been completed, Bush would still have been the winner of the election.

  6. It does look bad, but I suspect another partial explanation is that Democratic leaning districts are simply less competent at running elections in the first place, so when the recount happens, that’s where the most missed votes will show up.

  7. Jiminator: ‘This feeling persists today, even though the media conducted their own study afterward showing that had the limited county by county recounts requested by the Gore team been completed, Bush would still have been the winner of the election.’

    Yes, but the only reason the Dem’s couldn’t ‘change’ the outcome was due to the fore-runners of the tea-party movement. If you recall, Gore, after pontificating on the ‘sanctity’ of ‘all’ votes, decided to contest the results of only 4 counties. Heavy democratic counties, that he thought would suit his purpose, not on ‘finding’ votes that had not been tallied, but rather by creating new votes by the method of 3 commissars (2 dem, 1 rep) would ‘devine voter intent’ (absolutly impossible by the way) and creae the needed votes to overcome Bush’s lead. When the strategy was starting to be questioned, the Dem’s tried to move the process out from under the prying eyes of the public (Florida sunshine law) and unstairs to a private location, where they could continue their shennanegins undisturbed.

    I remember being amazed by the Republican’s response of banging on closed door, demanding the process be brought back into the open where law decreed it be. Had never seen conservative ‘street justice’ (normally a hallmark of the left) like that before, and neither had Washington D.C. as even Joe Lieberman called it a ‘riot’. No property was damaged , no one was physically harmed,no one was arrested, yet it was to Joe, a ‘riot’. Too funny.

  8. Karl :’It does look bad, but I suspect another partial explanation is that Democratic leaning districts are simply less competent at running elections in the first place, so when the recount happens, that’s where the most missed votes will show up.’

    Like here in Illinois? Where votes for 3 or 4 different suburbs were all found in Cicero? Many miles and multiple suburbs away from the voting places? Said to be there for ‘safe-keeping’? In a suburb (Cicero) known for it’s mob connections going back to Al Capone? You mean that kind of incompetence?

  9. In PA, Toomey won by 2% or 78K votes and carried every county except Philadelphia, Delaware, Lackawanna, Allegheny Erie, Geen, and Montgomery.
    In IL, Kirk won by 2% or 71K votes and carried every county except Cook, St. Clair, and Alexander

  10. …the obvious explanation would be that the DNC did a better job than the RNC of identifying and putting resources into races that were going to be close.

    For once Jim, I have to absolutely agree with you. The RNC just didn’t think of getting the felon vote like the DNC did for Franken. Or calling republican voters to have them send absentee ballots to a democratic operative. Or using illegal aliens to get out the vote. Or registration fraud throughout the country paid for by taxpayers. Or finding new votes after the election that all go for the DNC candidate. Or the sweet deal with unions… funds going both ways.

    Yep, the RNC really needs to up their game.

  11. I voted for the first time at age 19 in 1976, the election that put Mr. Carter into office as President. Abner Mikva won my congressional district by only 10 votes. He was later appointed a Federal Judge by Jimmy Carter and later on served as White House Counsel during Mr. Clinton’s dark days post Monica Lewinsky.

    I was informed that my vote and my dad’s votes were “challenged” (i.e. not counted), and these were two votes that were known to the community as most likely being for Mr. Mikva’s challenger, Sam Young. That I was a Sam Young supporter was widely known — not having a car, I commuted to a summer job on a train, and I had a Sam Young bumper sticker on my briefcase, something for which I was taken to task by a local Democratic committeeman on the street walking home from work, that a “young person” such as myself should be voting Democratic.

    I was a “commuter” college student studying Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University, living at home with my parents in Glencoe in far northern Cook County. I had a plant-trip job interview with IBM in Lexington, Kentucky at their inkjet printer division on election day, planned far enough in advance that I voted absentee. As Cook County is one of our nation’s largest and most populous counties, this involved a train trip downtown to the Office of Stanley T. Kusper to vote and sign the envelope containing my ballot.

    My father’s case was arguable as he had taken a job at Ford Motor Company in Redford, Michigan north of Detroit, but was commuting and spending weekends with the family, as the recession that put Gerald Ford out of office had made it hard to sell our house. But he owned a house in Glencoe, his wife and kids occupied that house, he spent his weekends there, and he maintained his voter registration in Cook County.

    In my case, I was residing in Cook County in a house owned by my parents, I was attending college in Cook County (Evanston, a few stops down on the commuter train line), and I was only out of town for that one day for a job interview.

    No, the outcomes of these squeeker elections do not required fraud, even though Cook County was involved in my case, it is just hardball election politics. The only fraud is when Democrats speak of “counting every vote” or getting “young people or college students to vote” — it is pure power politics. Republicans play hardball too, but it seems that Democrats are more experienced and play harder.

    As to the Al Gore situation, Florida 2000 was one of those cases where the Republicans played ball harder than the Democrats, this has been greatly resented by Democrats who see themselves as the New York Yankees of this kind of thing, and I believe they have redoubled their legal efforts and efforts that are completely legal — witness Al Franken and the 2010 election.

    But as to calls for “counting every vote” in Florida 2000, that public pronouncement was the fraud, given the energetic efforts to disallow military absentee ballots (i.e. young people, men and women, on “plant trips” to Iraq and Afghanistan).

    Some worthy at Newsweek was blathering about the “unfair” outcome in Florida — I e-mailed this pundit my concern about the invalidated military absentee ballots and related the above story. This did not result in any retraction or even sympathy for my situation, that my vote was invalidated on account of my known support for a candidate in an absentee ballot situation, but said pundit lapsed into a few platitudes about “voter intent” and that was the end of our exchange.

  12. What we’ve got here is sloppy vote counting. When “counting every vote” would tend to favor the GOP, then the Dems tend to not put much effort into finding those ballots that mysteriously appear wedged in the bottom of voting machines or lost in someone’s trunk. They also keep counting until the Dem is ahead, and then find a way to wrap things up quick. That’s why they hold back the vote from heavily Dem precints until the last moment, so they can have a better idea of how may extra votes they need to “find.”

    Those are the things that happened to Rossi in the Upper Left Washington in ‘004. Every recount more ballots would be suddenly “found”, whittling away at Rossi’s lead, until suddenly at the last moment, he’s behind. (Not also that the Sec.of State was a notorious RINO whose idea of “fair play” was to never challenge the Dems or their interpretation of the rules.)

    So yes, it’s all perfectly legal, but it’s also a gaming of the system, one which the “good government” types never seem to care about.

  13. In the Illinois 10th congressional district (by population zmostly in Democratic Party controlled Cook County) , a candidate long backed by the Illinois Democratic party lost to a GOP newcomer (and tea party candidate) in very close race.
    GOP: 108,518 votes Dems: 103,512 votes.
    Was there cheating by tea party minded activists? Well, as far as anyone can tell, no deceased Republicans voted twice.

  14. What’s the point of your story Bob? Let me tell you then… the democrat probably only had 90k votes but couldn’t quite close the gap. That’s sort of a joke. What’s not a joke is the blatant cheating that goes on primarily by one party.

  15. It’s an old game.

    “You hick! I’ll be back pulling strings to get guys elected mayor and governor before you ever get a 10-buck raise. Yeah, how many of those guys in office owe everything to me. I made them. Yeah, I made ’em, just like a — like a tailor makes a suit of clothes. I take a nobody, see? Teach him what to say. Get his name in the papers and pay for his campaign expenses. Dish out a lotta groceries and coal. Get my boys to bring the voters out. And then count the votes over and over again till they added up right and he was elected.

    – Johnny Rocco, Key Largo

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