Saturday, November 13, 2004
In the wake of the election - voter fraud
This is about the dog that didn't bark in this election - the lawyers. The one thing that everybody feared was to have the debacle of Florida 2000 all over again. It would have been a grand industry for so many. (And The Drudge report and Zogby certainly did their best to keep our spirits up with those late polls and exit poll numbers. )
Yes, it is true - election outcomes are sometimes very hard to face. A lot of people could have prospered from a challengeable result. Prior to the election I visited the AEI where John Fund discussed voter fraud, and presented his book on the subject. Even though there is nothing that says Florida 2000 can't repeat itself, Fund seemed to be sure of at least one thing - that the U.S. has nothing to learn from other countries.
This became evident when I asked him what other countries (with few or non-existant cases of voter fraud) did right: Afterall – Australia has mandatory voting, with an average of more than 90 percent of voters showing up at the polls. And Australia haven’t been rocked by missing ballots or hanging chads. The same goes for countries like Sweden, Norway or Denmark, where voter turnouts are usually around 85-92 percent.
Fund didn’t seem to like the examples I brought up. His answer was as blunt as it was revealing of the U.S. predicament itself: “We will solve this. But we will do it according to American traditions”
What those American ways of life are? Voter fraud, anybody?
Yes, it is true - election outcomes are sometimes very hard to face. A lot of people could have prospered from a challengeable result. Prior to the election I visited the AEI where John Fund discussed voter fraud, and presented his book on the subject. Even though there is nothing that says Florida 2000 can't repeat itself, Fund seemed to be sure of at least one thing - that the U.S. has nothing to learn from other countries.
This became evident when I asked him what other countries (with few or non-existant cases of voter fraud) did right: Afterall – Australia has mandatory voting, with an average of more than 90 percent of voters showing up at the polls. And Australia haven’t been rocked by missing ballots or hanging chads. The same goes for countries like Sweden, Norway or Denmark, where voter turnouts are usually around 85-92 percent.
Fund didn’t seem to like the examples I brought up. His answer was as blunt as it was revealing of the U.S. predicament itself: “We will solve this. But we will do it according to American traditions”
What those American ways of life are? Voter fraud, anybody?
