Get Out The Vote by Procrastinator

Tom Rowan, at American Thinker, wrote an interesting article on the 2000 Florida vote fraud that almost saw our obsessive-compulsive former candidate for President and now warming freak-in-chief Al Gore be elevated to the highest political office in the land. Hmm, after watching Bush and Obama, maybe that wouldn't have been such a disaster.

Like many of us I watched this bit of political theatre from the sidelines, mostly on TV and newspapers and the magazines that could get something out quickly. This was before blogging blossomed into what it is today. There were many odd things that raised suspicions, such as the speed with which the Democrats had figured out what happened and had the lawyers to prove it, and the oddness of just one county—Palm Beach County in case you have forgotten—being the epicenter of so much confusion and difficulty in marking ballots. Many of us have used these kinds of paper ballots without much difficulty so what happened in Palm Beach County in 2000? Some of us were suspicious because we have seen other close elections which always seem to favor one party when the votes are re-counted, and those counts are always in heavily one-party cities, where all those who count the ballots are paid to do so by that one party.

But when you don't have a mechanism for understanding how they do it, statistical arguments aren't totally convincing. It's not so hard to understand how vote counting in Cook County—Chicago—works. But Florida hasn't been a totally owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party like Chicago and most of Illinois for that matter. So when Rowan pointed to a statistical and practical guy, Robert Cook, who had apparently examined not only the overall numbers but also the graft and grist of how votes can be "got out." Especially with the kind of punch-hole ballots used in Florida at the time. His studies even explain the numerous "chads" and other remnants, much more common when more than one ballot is punched.

I won't test your patience by delaying the punch-line. Sorry for the word play. It turns out that when you have hundreds or thousands of ballot cards lined up in a row, it is child's play to punch another hole through all of them at the same time. What this does is exactly nothing if you punch Gore again because there is already a hole there. But when you do it to a Bush vote or a Buchanan vote then you have a ballot that is thrown out because it has two votes for President. Voila. You don't stuff the ballot box with Gore votes which I could never figure out how they did, you simply subtract a Bush vote, which was done for 15,000 Bush ballots in Palm Beach County. There may have been other mechanisms involved once the totals got close to each other, not quite so elegant as the wholesale ballot punching, as in the charade conducted more recently in Minneapolis/St Paul to put the unfunny Al Franken into the Senate.

I wonder if the Republicans in the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin knew that the Democrats would be up to these same tricks, and despairing of preventing this, decided to keep their powder dry until all the fake ballots had been added and the real ballots defaced and then came in with a late bunch of real ballots from Waukesha, which they had reason to suspect might be heavily in favor of the Republican Prosser. Brilliant, but I don't think that will work again now that the secret is out.

Judging by the early warnings coming from Donna Brazile and other Democrat operatives—who can be relied upon when one wants to use the "Pravda" technique—these problems may become even more of a problem in 2012. What can we do?