Wanking Over Election Irregularities

This is just a quick reminder. Here at The MojoWire, we've been sounding off for years about black box voting and the threat posed to our electoral systems by paperless, secretly coded, vote tabulation systems and the politically compromised companies that manufacture them. We've also ranted extensively about voter registration purging and vote suppression campaigns run out of the central Republican Party committees.

As a result, it seems like it should go without saying that the one prediction about tomorrow's election we feel comfortable making without fear of being exposed as not having any precognitive abilities whatsoever is that no matter who wins control of the Senate and the House, there will be a vast, angry hue and cry from the partisans on the losing side about election irregularities and the need to investigate allegations of fraud.

Here's the reminder: we're non-partisan about fraud. Nobody should be allowed to get away with it. Not Republicans, not democrats, not Communists, or Tories or Falangists or anybody.

In the [unlikely, I still contend] event the Democrats win control of the House and Senate tomorrow, I predict we will be treated to a litany of refrains from GOP partisans about vote fraud in Democratic Party strongholds, especially in urban districts, particularly those with large non-white populations. I expect to hear lurid tales of busloads of illegal immigrants voting ten, twenty, a hundred times each. I also expect to hear the GOP suddenly acquire religion about the evils of black box voting. "Great. I sympathize," I'm ready to say to them. "Let's have investigations."

Remember: every election has some irregularities. It's when the irregularities all accumulate to the advantage of one party over all the others, that's when there are grounds to suspect fraud. That happened in 2002. It happened again in 2004. The important point I want to convey in this post is that we have a lot of work on both sides of the partisan divide in America restoring everyone's confidence in the integrity of our elections systems. Here's to hoping whoever wins tomorrow rejects the temptation to pretend that concerns about election fraud are only the puerile wanks of losers over the proverbial sour grapes.

p.s. If you live in California, please consider the race for Secretary of State very carefully. It may be the single most important electoral decision in the country tomorrow.