Welcome to DouglasDeBono.Com, the Cyberspace Home of author Douglas De Bono

Welcome to DouglasDeBono.Com, the Cyberspace Home of
author Douglas De Bono.

Cottage Industry

I have been following two elections since the Bush/Kerry brawl in November. One is the Ukrainian showdown between pro-westerrn opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko and the hard line Russian favorite Viktor Yanukovych. In contrast, there is the on-going count, machine count, re-re-count in the Washington Governor’s race between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire.

The question that keeps coming to mind is which election result is legitimate and who managed to pull off a fair election?

Amazingly, I find the Ukraine—a country barely out of the grips of post-Soviet communism and empire—appears to have achieved a fair result. Albeit, the Ukrainian electorate had to go through protests, ballot stuffing, two elections and the news that opposition candidate Yushchenko had been poisoned by a Dioxin derivative traceable back to the bad old days of the KGB. It does raise the disturbing question: did the Kremlin intervene in the Ukraine and attempt to change the outcome of the election? Did the Putin Government participate in a botched assassination attempt?

Viktor Yushchenko was elected in a second vote after the Ukrainian Supreme Court invalidated the first election’s results. While the Bush Administration officially claims that they had dog in this fight, privately they must be pleased that a pro-western, pro-democracy candidate won. Of course there is still the matter of a peaceful transition of power from Yanukovych to Yushchenko—stay tuned.

The Washington governor’s race is a different matter. Dino Rossi won the general election by 261 votes (virtual tie) out of a total of 3,000,000 votes in the November 2 ballot. The narrow margin triggered a mandatory recount. Rossi won the recount by 42 votes (dead heat). The drama should have ended here, but it went on. There was a re-recount forced somehow by a court ruling that finally gave Christine Gregoire a 130 vote margin (decisive democratic victory). Does anybody smell something?

New math, creative accounting and (dare I say) fraud seems to have crept into the process. Actually crept is the wrong verb, galloped is more apt. During the re-re-count, buckets of ballots started showing up in King County (psst, read Democratic strong hold). While the King County re-re-count netted Rossi an additional 748 votes, Gregoire surged to victory on her newly discovered (manufactured) 920 votes.

Most interestingly were the 566 homeless people who claimed the King County Registrar’s office as their resident and managed to register and vote.

How does this work!?!

How does a homeless person prove identity and residency? Based on the new voting rules in Washington the disenfranchised Ukrainians had just as much of an opportunity to cast a vote in the Rossi/Gregoire debacle as the 566 homeless folks.

Does anyone else notice that every time we have a recount in a close election, democrats always seem to benefit? Does the electorate have a built in bias towards a more conservative candidate the first time around and can only be rescued by chad-popping, dimple-counting, vote-making recounters? Election fraud appears to be a burgeoning cottage industry—one that should be put out of business.

A cautionary conclusion: the American system depends on the peaceful transfer of power, and that transfer is guaranteed by a fair and open election. We might not like the results (most people know I was horrified at the 1992 election of Bill Clinton), but we accept it. For those who think they can continue to tinker with results like this should be aware that tolerance for this kind of nonsense is limited and can turn ugly very fast.