Lessons of Ohio and San Diego: Recounts Easily Days late and Many $$$ Short

Land Shark

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Jan-30-07 10:38 PM
Original message

Lessons of Ohio and San Diego: Recounts Easily Days late and Many $$$ Short

Edited on Tue Jan-30-07 11:18 PM by Land Shark

The actual experience of going in and fighting after an election is over for a recount or to contest an election is really quite educational and instructive. You learn that there's another level of rigged game, and it's the law itself in some cases -- it all just so happens to have been written 100% by incumbents, and lo and behold we have nearly 100% re-election rates for incumbents. Coincidence!!! But I've done that post-election litigation, up to an including congressional election contests like CA's 50th Congressional District, and in a nutshell here's some of the lessons learned.

In a REAL disputed election, you'll not get at these paper trails (bad) or even paper BALLOTS (better, cuz they count on the first count) IN TIME for the tight deadlines after an election -- even if the Supreme Court does NOT halt your recount OUTRIGHT. In fact, It's now more than 7 months after the special congressional election in CAlifornia's 50th CD of June 6, 2006 and we're STILL trying to get a recount or get to TOUCH our first optically scanned paper BALLOT. THe elections officials priced access to the ballots at $150,000, 8 times higher than any previous recount.

Real remedies, real protection happen PRIOR to the announcement of first results. Or they likely don't happen at all.

Fake or unreliable remedies take place after the first count. For this and other reasons, the activists in San Diego's 50th Congressional District have seen the future intended by the Holt bill (paper trails or ballots with post-election "audits"). This Holt-future simply does not work. Among other things, the precincts to be audited under the CA audit rules were selected prior to the completion of the first count and in some other places, prior even to the election itself, which defeats the purpose of the audit, and frees up the other 99% of the precincts to be counted and completed in the sloppiest or most fraudulent manner possible. I don't think any activist in San Diego involved with post-election investigation or litigation will tell you paper trails or paper ballots, recounts or audits are worth very much at all in a disputed election. They could be worth something, but pre-first reporting of results remedies are always best, and the post-election remedies will tend to be frustrated, or break down, or be improperly performed WHEN IT COUNTS THE MOST, in a disputed election where the election officials don't really want their first reported results to be shown defective.

The recent conviction of two democratic-county elections officials for rigging a nonrandom recount that should have been random in order to avoid more work of a hand recount and to engage in CYA shows that you can't trust DEMOCRATIC officials to RE-Count (as opposed to count0 DEMOCRATIC ballots!!! The human urge of CYA and avoiding the fishbowl of publicity and avoiding work easily trumps the desire for truth in elections.

RECALL the arguments after 11/04: THey made much hay of the fact that "bipartisan" election boards supervised elections in Ohio. But BOTH parties, being made of human beings, want to cover their butts, get home for thanksgiving, avoid work, and otherwise avoid a media fishbowl! Thus, we can't really, AFTER the election, TRUST ANYONE INVOLVED IN THE ORIGINAL COUNTS.

Don't put your eggs in post-election remedies like audits (most are statistical bullshit AS WRITTEN IN STATUTES and can't possibly work) or recounts that, while potentially valuable often don't actually materialize when it really counts.

And in any event, a recount is a NARROW remedy that corrects only against "counting error" and not any other kinds of error. To see what I mean, just try recounting a stuffed ballot box ten times, and I think you'll find that you get a stuffed recount result ten times as well. Feel better now???