Illegitimate

Can anything be more nauseating than the sight of Republican officials denouncing the election results in the Ukraine because there has not been a full investigation of allegations of fraud?  (What's next?  Criticism that the apparent winner's brother was involved in counting the votes?)  Perhaps it would be the sight of the Kerry campaign trying to decide whether it wants to "join" or just "participate" in the Ohio recount.

Kerry apparently thinks that Al Gore's mistake in 2000 was fighting for the recount in Florida, and if Gore hadn't have done it, he would have been a viable candidate in 2004.  So he has sat back, letting the Green and Libertarian Parties do the heavy lifting, not expressing more than the faintest hope that a recount in Ohio will change the result. 

That seemed like a plausible strategy until a federal judge refused to speed up the recount, ruling that there is no reason to get the votes counted before Ohio names its electors on December 7 because there is no reasonable chance either the Green Party's David Cobb or the Libertarians' Michael Badnarik will end up the winner.  The December 7 date for selecting electors is significant, because as you might recall the actual legal rationale for the Supreme Court's decision to shut down the vote count in Florida in 2000 was that it decided Florida had a compelling interest in having its electors named by the deadline, and it was too late to come up with a uniform recount standard for the state.  (I know some say the real deadline is January when the electoral votes are actually counted, but I don't see Congress accepting a challenge to Ohio's electors even if a recount shows Kerry did win.)

Sure, I think it's pretty damned unlikely a full recount would give Ohio's electoral votes to Kerry.  But it is important to consider that unlike Florida in 2000, Ohio already has laws on the books that explain exactly which punch card ballots should be counted and how, so no litigation over whether a hanging chad counts but a pregnant chad doesn't.  So there is a clear standard that would govern a recount.  This is significant because even though there weren't enough provisional ballots to make a difference, once you start counting punch card ballots that may not have been picked up by the machine readers, it is possible it could get close.

The bottom line is, with all the stories about voters in Democratic precincts having to wait for hours to cast their vote because there weren't enough machines, the threats of widespread challenges and all the other vote suppression efforts, the result of this election is not legitimate -- certainly by the standards the Bush administration wants to apply to the Ukraine.  Don't talk to me about Bush having won the popular vote unless you are willing to say he shouldn't have been the incumbent in the first place for the same reason.  (For the record, my problem with Bush last time was his campaign's thuggery in Florida -- as long as we have the Electoral College you can have a winner who did not win the popular vote.)