Ask most Americans what was the most infuriating and perhaps even scary court battle they have ever seen, and they’ll probably tell you it was the 35-day Bush vs. Gore battle over Florida’s electoral votes in 2000.
Pretty soon, that case could seem like mere child’s play.
Consider this scene I witnessed on the second day of the Democratic National Convention in August while waiting for a shuttle bus on a downtown Denver street corner.
A prominent conservative writer was waiting with me when a major Democratic operative walked up. The good news was how friendly the two were, considering their strong political disagreements. Chalk one up for the possibility of civility in politics.
The bad news was where their conversation quickly turned. The gist was that this election could easily turn into Florida-times-30. Congress’s 2002 “Help America Vote Act,” which mandated that states implement systems of “provisional balloting” and all sort of other rigmarole, opened a legal Pandora’s Box.
Both of these political veterans agreed that we could be faced with not one lawsuit but hundreds, involving hundreds of thousands, even millions, of provisional ballots being challenged, along with a host of other possible areas of conflict.
The two political pros didn’t say this next part, but the implications are clear: With so much confusion and feelings running so high, the potential for nationwide street demonstrations is high.
The legal battles have already begun. Witness the case in Ohio that I wrote about last week, in which Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner refused to provide voter verification information to local elections officials despite acknowledging that 200,000 new registrations include “discrepancies” – discrepancies Brunner wants the local officials to just overlook.
In his newly revised book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy,” John Fund of The Wall Street Journal explains that we are on the verge of “election by litigation,” and that our civil sacrament of free and fair elections is at risk.
“You can lose your vote through voter fraud as surely as you can through voter intimidation,” Fund writes. Then, in page after page, Fund details voluminous evidence of voter fraud that has been growing in recent years across the nation – in recent elections occurring, for instance, in Seattle, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, Miami, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, among other places.
And these aren’t Fund’s own conclusions, but those of official investigations. Consider Milwaukee, 2004, where – much too late to change the reported outcome of the race – an 18-month official probe found an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of an election in the state of Wisconsin.”
Fund reports that Democrats alone have 10,000 lawyers ready throughout the country to press for every advantage they can find.
It is in this light that the recent shenanigans with the now-infamous ACORN group should be considered. Barack Obama spent years serving as a lecturer on “power” to various ACORN training sessions, in addition to serving as an ACORN lawyer and providing funding for the group.
As Fund warned in his book – which he wrote before ACORN started making national news last month, so clearly not as an effort to piggyback on any candidate’s current political strategy – “ACORN is pledging to spend $35 million this year registering voters—both real and fictive.”
The goal is simple: Create so much confusion that the law gets thrown overboard and the vote counting become an exercise in raw political power.
In another career, I served once as an unofficial, long-distance advisor during a Louisiana election dispute. Only 12 disputed votes would decide which candidate would make it into a runoff, and the attorney for the apparent loser had only 48 hours to show probable cause for the results not to be certified.
The attorney’s brilliant solution? Convince a judge to subpoena every single machine and bring them, locked, to a central location to be checked directly under court supervision.
In the end, rightly or wrongly, those results stood. But the warning bells are sounding that none of us may be able to be confident in this year’s heavily litigated election results without some sort of similar move to bring all the vote counting under one central authority.
The problem is, there’s no warehouse in the country even remotely big enough to hold every American voting machine for review.
Quin Hillyer is associate editorial page editor for The Washington Examiner.
