No Surrender For Desperate Democrats?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Senator Kerry’s campaign theme song was Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender.” Of course, Mr. Kerry did concede the election the day after the polls closed, but even as Electoral College delegates travel to their state capitals to officially cast their votes this coming Monday, some Kerry supporters are still taking their candidate at his word.
Stung by the election results, a small number are refusing to give up their fight in the face of apparent indifference from the weary Democratic nominee and most mainstream news organizations. Since the Democrats’ Black Tuesday, rumors have been trafficked among the faithful on the Internet, mixing fact and fantasy, fueling conspiracy theories as well as – one might imagine – Web research into emigrating to Canada.
While leading Democrats like Bill Clinton have been counseling Democrats to learn from this defeat by reaching out to the red states, the Reverend Jesse Jackson has been leading scattered rallies calling for a recount in Ohio and writing on Wednesday in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “U.S. Citizens have as much reason as those in Kiev to be concerned that the fix was in.”
Comparing the United States to the Ukraine, where the opposition candidate was apparently poisoned during this fall’s presidential campaign, is less than helpful. It’s a cheap and calculated insult to the integrity of our democracy. Our system is imperfect and often messy. Enough small-scale irregularities and questions remain that the Government Accountability Office and U.S. Election Assistance Commission have announced that they will conduct reviews of the election process in the coming year.
Much of the speculation has centered on the pivotal Buckeye State – feverishly referred to by Rev. Jackson as “this year’s Florida.” President Bush’s total in Ohio has shrunk by almost 20,000 votes since the immediate post-vote projections. In a suburb of Columbus, for example, Mr. Bush was briefly credited with nearly 4,000 votes in a precinct where only 638 people voted. Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez has reported that in the 4th Ward on Cleveland’s East Side the candidate of the conservative anti-immigrant Constitution Party received an unlikely 215 votes, compared to Mr. Kerry’s 290 and Mr. Bush’s 21 – while tallies show that 93,000 Ohio voters went to the ballot but did not mark a preference for president. The Green Party and Libertarian candidates are expected to formally contest the results of the Ohio election after Monday’s Electoral College vote.
But even in some anti-Bush partisan’s perfect scenario in which all the questionable votes went to Mr. Kerry, it is unlikely in the extreme that this could dislodge the president’s current 119,000-vote lead. With all the bitterness welled up from the 2000 race, they seem to have lost sight of the fact that the supposedly contestable Bush margin of victory in Ohio is more than 220 times what it was in Florida four years ago.
An added source of desperate speculation is the now famously flawed early exit polls that predicted a Kerry sweep of the swing states until late afternoon. This colored initial coverage on Election Day, and raised questions about which side benefited from the perceptions created by the leaked information. Two days after the election, Mr. Clinton’s former pollster-in-chief Dick Morris wrote a heated column in The Hill alleging sabotage in which he stated, “To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible…the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.”
The calls for an inquest have cooled considerably as the business of forming a second-term administration has dominated the front page, but the presence of a second American presidential election where flawed polls caused considerable confusion on Election Day raises serious questions – especially after the networks scrapped the old Voter News Service and replaced it with the supposedly more reliable National Election Pool. This should be an area of common concern, where Democrats and Republicans can come together in a bipartisan commission to study the exit polls, the efficacy of electronic voting-machines and the possible need for further election reforms.
Some Republicans may be tempted to ignore this issue because the results of the last two elections broke their way – in this analysis, victory for “our” side means that the system works. But consider the conservative outcry if Mr. Bush had won the election by 3.3 million popular votes – still increasing his totals in every region except the Pacific Northwest and every demographic except rural voters – but Ohio had swung the other way, giving Mr. Kerry an electoral victory in a reverse replay of the 2000 election. The calls for fundamental election reform, including a review of the Electoral College, would be deafening. Partisan self-interest cannot be the only lens by which we analyze the strength of our democratic institutions.
The standards should be higher. On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Kerry emerged from his post election silence to issue the following statement: “It’s critical that we investigate and understand any and every voting irregularity anywhere in our country, not because it would change the outcome of the election, but because Americans have to believe that their votes are counted in our democracy.” Surely that is a statement those of all political persuasions can get behind: The election is over, but not our quest for a more perfect union.