Byron York has a column in the Hill that should have honest patriots worried regardless of their partisan affiliation. The topic is the "we wuz robbed" North Dakota Senate election of 2002. For those who have forgotten, the Republican challenger lost that election by 524 votes and there were sworn affidavits of hundreds of false voter registrations among many other Democrat illegal actions.
In the end, Sen. Tim Johnson kept his seat, nobody has been tried, much less convicted for the scandalous behavior, and it looks like nothing has changed in North Dakota law or practice to prevent a repeat as Thune tries again against Sen. Daschle in 2004.
What is really worrying is York's implicit call that the rule of law isn't working and that if the other side is cheating we might as well join them:
For their part, Republicans should have learned a valuable lesson from that race. And the lesson is: Cheating works.Bring in lots of lawyers from Washington, New York and Los Angeles. Intimidate the honest, well-meaning elderly ladies who work at the polling places. Observe the rules governing polling-place behavior when those rules work in your favor. Break them when they don’t. If your candidate wins, ignore the inevitable charges of misconduct from the other side.
If authorities treat the loser’s evidence as they treated the Republican case in 2002, the whole thing will end up a murky mess, which you can then claim as total exoneration.
And the best thing is, while the other side complains, you’ll have your man in the Senate.
This is a call to lawbreaking. It's despicable and, in an atmosphere of poor electoral law enforcement, inevitable.
Posted by TMLutas at February 5, 2004 11:16 AM