It’s the end of summer and the 2004 presidential election is still a few months away. Nevertheless, the hysteria and the paranoia about the validity of its outcome is generating punditry gone absurd. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has expressed anxiety – no, more than that: horror – at the thought that the credibility of our democracy is now in danger. Gee, I wonder who’s responsible for casting doubt on our electoral process. It’s four years after the 2000 election and the Democrats along with their cohorts in the mainstream press are still insisting the election was stolen by President Bush.

As Mr. Krugman writes in his column of August 17, “How might the election be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida – where recent polls give John Kerry the lead – once again swings the election to Bush.”

Mr. Krugman then goes on to regurgitate the old charges of African Americans being disenfranchised in Florida. He writes that his colleague Bob Herbert reported state police officers were going into the homes of elderly African-American voters and interrogating them as part of what the state says is a fraud investigation. Mr. Krugman is setting the stage for another round of anti-Bush hostility should the president be re-elected. The Times columnist may fear chicanery from the Republicans, but the Democrats have been caught in the act far more frequently.

In 1994 President Clinton signed an executive order to implement the Motor Voter law, making it super easy for anyone to register to vote without showing proof of citizenship. All around the city, there are tables set up by various groups to register voters in time for Election Day. I approached a Hispanic woman manning such a table in the Staten Island Ferry terminal. I asked her if she ever asked for proof of citizenship from the people she was signing up. She said that the burden of proof was on the person signing the registration form. The form itself lists the penalty for fraud but it’s never pointed out to the signer. It is conceivable, she admitted, that the person may not be a citizen.

Actually, it’s more than conceivable. In 2000, syndicated columnist Joseph Farah, author of “Taking America Back,” wrote a column the day before the election warning of voter fraud. In a column called “Voter Fraud – Again,” he tells of a friend’s Guatemalan housekeeper receiving an attractively packaged “Dear friend” letter from Mr. Clinton, paid for by the California Democratic Party. The letter urged her to vote Democratic on November 7. Although the woman had never registered and is not a citizen, the letter included a personal Voter Identification Card for her to use on Election Day. Mr. Farah called this mind-boggling fraud. “A mass mailing like this effectively registering tens of thousands of potential Democratic voters days before the election is a secret weapon held back deliberately to avoid detection, scrutiny and publicity.”

The NAACP’s Julian Bond accused Attorney General Ashcroft of being a member of the Taliban wing of American politics and yet the attorney general was himself the victim of voter fraud when he ran for senator in 2000. In the extremely close election, a judge had ordered the polls to be kept open longer than the state law permitted because of a lawsuit filed in 2000 alleging that minority voters were having difficulty voting. The person who filed the suit had died in 1999 but that didn’t matter. Mr. Ashcroft never demanded a recount out of sympathy for his opponent’s widow, who succeeded to the Senate seat. That’s hardly Taliban behavior.

While the mainstream press has given enormous coverage to alleged malfeasance in Florida, it has ignored the voter fraud that was rampant by Democratic operatives on that same Election Day. In some predominant Democrat precincts, 125% of registered voters cast ballots. In Baltimore, Chicago, and Los Angeles, roving bands were allegedly taken by bus to precinct after precinct to fill in for registered voters who had moved. In Oregon, 36,000 of the mailed-in ballots were signed by someone other than the registered voter. Gore supporters in Milwaukee were caught on videotape paying homeless people with cigarettes after busing them to the polls. They committed an illegal act, but so what? They’re Democrats. Meanwhile, if one wants to talk about disenfranchisement, watch what happens to the military votes cast overseas. In 2000, a five-page memo was sent by the Gore campaign to Florida election officials instructing them how they could screen out the ballots of the military serving abroad. The Department of Defense also shut down the mail call from vessels overseas two weeks before the election. With a Republican administration in charge this time, maybe this time these votes will be counted.

Do you want to know why New York City always votes Democrat? The Republicans routinely get kicked off the ballot, so what kinds of choice do we have? Is anyone running against Sheldon Silver? I thought Kristin Grundvig was challenging him but according to Peter Hort, who’s running for Congress against Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Ms. Grundvig has been eliminated from the ballot. So has Elizabeth Tretter, who was running for state Senate.

I agree with Mr. Krugman: The credibility of our democracy is in doubt, especially in New York State.