Copyright © 2000 J. Neil Schulman
All rights reserved.

November 21, 2000

Unless you're a party-line Democrat constitutionally incapable of self-honesty, decency, or honor, it's now obvious that there is no depth to which the political operatives of the Democratic Party will not go in order to win the 2000 presidential election. This should be of concern even to supporters of Ralph Nader, Pat Buchanan, or Harry Browne. It should be of concern even to those who long ago completely lost faith in elections to produce a just outcome and who are non-voters on principle.

On election night, Democratic partisans working for Voter News Service, in a "vast left-wing conspiracy" with Democratic partisans working for the news divisions of the major TV news networks, used distorted exit polls, early calls for Gore state victories and delayed calls for Bush state victories to inform Republicans in five out of six time zones that George W. Bush had already lost the electoral votes necessary for victory, inhibiting Republican voters intending to vote from casting their ballots. The proof of this is that almost all final pre-election polls in California showed the race for president a dead heat within the margin of error; the actual balloting will give the California electoral votes to Al Gore by a margin of 12 percent.

Within seconds before Gore was publicly to concede Florida's electoral votes to Bush, based on Bush being about 5,000 votes ahead, suddenly and mysteriously votes for Gore appeared out of nowhere to reduce Bush's margin of victory to fewer than 200 votes, though Bush's tally rose again to about an 1,800 vote margin later that night … after Gore's campaign declared the race was not over. Then a machine recount mysteriously managed to reduce the Bush margin of victory to about 300 votes -- which is statistically outside the parameters of an honest machine recount.

Democrats later started manual "recounts" in heavily Democratic counties, evading Florida deadlines for election certification by a slew of law suits, managed by the Democratic Party's primary client, the trial lawyers. These recounts have relied on tried-and-true election-stealing techniques, ranging from moving ballots to their favored candidates stack, marking ballots, manipulating ballots, altering ballots, defacing ballots, hiding ballots, and even eating the chads that represent the evidence of their cheating. In Miami-Dade County, the Democratic Party officials running this election fraud even banned the news media's cameras, to make sure their crimes were not photographed. In the middle of vote counting they have repeatedly changed the definition of a vote -- hanging chad, dimpled chad, pregnant chad-- to whatever will give them the margin of victory.

Democratic operatives repeatedly use as their justification for these actions that it is important that every vote for Al Gore be counted, if it can swing the election. But then they have the sheer effrontery, without even an actual legal justification, to discard almost all military absentee ballots which are likely to increase the Bush vote margin.

Finally, the Florida Supreme Court, comprised of Democratic appointees, ignored the ruling of a lower court (with a Democratic judge, no less!) and violated separation of powers by enjoining the Secretary of State, the statutory official empowered by the Florida legislature to certify the election results, from exercising her statutory authority to do so. At a televised hearing it was made clear there exists no statutory authority which allows this Democratic-Party-appointed court to have done so, or to waive a deadline set for certification of the election results set by Florida election law. So they simply delay certification by delaying their own ruling, while other Democratic Party appointees come up with the requisite numbers for their candidate to win.

Or, alternatively, the Democratic operatives can tie up Florida's 25 electoral votes beyond the federal statutory deadline for the reporting of electoral votes, which would prevent Florida from appointing electors at all. This lowers the plurality of electoral votes needed for victory and ensures the margin of victory for Al Gore.

All the while this is going on, the functionaries of the Democratic Party engage in the most blatant demagoguery, demonstrating, spinning, rationalizing, that it is the Republicans who are trying to steal the election by their demands that Florida election law be enforced as written. The Democrats act not as adults but as children throwing a tantrum. They act like the campus radicals they used to be. They act like union goons. They act like gangsters. They act like the political machine in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.

The Democratic Party is going to claim that they rightfully won this election no matter who takes the oath of office for president of the United States at noon on January 20, 2001. They are going to claim they were cheated if their machinations ultimately fail and Al Gore is not sworn in as the 43rd president.

This is no longer a question of anything other than which party has the greater power. The Democratic Party is using its power bases in the canvassing boards of several Florida counties to change vote results. It is using its power base on the Florida Supreme Court to prevent certification of the election despite constitutional and statutory requirements which would give the victory to George W. Bush.

I think the Democrats are counting on the Republicans' sense of honor to save the country from an all-out political brawl by conceding. I think the Democrats are, in effect, saying to the Republicans, "You don't have the stones to win."

Well, the Republicans have the power to end this election right now, without a brawl, without dragging this out one more minute, and the only thing which is holding them back is fear of the Democratic propaganda machine.

The Republican Party has the plurality of votes needed within the Florida state legislature to comply with federal and state constitutional requirements and to directly appoint a Republican slate of electors pledged to George W. Bush. The Florida legislature does not have to wait for a ruling of the Florida Supreme Court to do so; they can do this today.

Their justification for doing so is simple: they would be enforcing Florida law, under which George W. Bush was, after two statutory counts within the statutory deadline, the victor of Florida's 25 electoral votes, and consequently the president-elect of the United States.

I urge the Florida legislature to do this without delay, before Democrats create further discord.

The worst the Democrat spinmeisters can do is foam at the mouth, which they will do no matter what. If the Democratic Party's lawyers manage to tie up Florida's electors in court after that, there will be a sound basis for the Republicans who control a majority of state delegations in the U.S. House of Representatives to overrule a Democratic-Party stacked electoral college vote and intervene to elect George W. Bush president.

The Democrats will call this stealing the election. So what? That is what in reality they have been doing. They have made it clear that they cheat, that they have no respect for the rule of law, that they are willing to change the rules in the middle of the game if it looks like the rules are standing in the way of their victory. They will even cheat the military out of their votes.

It's time for the Republican Party to prove that they have the will to govern, by telling the Democratic Party and its operatives that they are no longer children or campus revolutionaries and their tantrums will no longer hold the United States hostage.