Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Joho the Blog: W doesn't tip—The ultimate trivialization of democracy or telling character detail? You be the judge. (And, yes, by running the link to this video, I am definitely having it both ways. Feels good.)

My view? Like the old joke goes, some of my friends are for it, some of my friends are against it, and I stand with my friends.

Paul Krugman (where's that Pulitzer?) has a typically savvy column today, on Saving the Vote:

Everyone knows it, but not many politicians or mainstream journalists are willing to talk about it, for fear of sounding conspiracy-minded: there is a substantial chance that the result of the 2004 presidential election will be suspect.

When I say that the result will be suspect, I don't mean that the election will, in fact, have been stolen. (We may never know.) I mean that there will be sufficient uncertainty about the honesty of the vote count that much of the world and many Americans will have serious doubts.

How might the election result be suspect? Well, to take only one of several possibilities, suppose that Florida – where recent polls give John Kerry the lead – once again swings the election to George Bush.

Much of Florida's vote will be counted by electronic voting machines with no paper trails. Independent computer scientists who have examined some of these machines' programming code are appalled at the security flaws. So there will be reasonable doubts about whether Florida's votes were properly counted, and no paper ballots to recount. The public will have to take the result on faith.

As Krugman notes, once one combines the voting machine issues with Governor Jeb Bush's attempts to disenfranchise (via the manipulated 'felons' list) and intimidate Black voters (a traditional Republican pastime here), a close pro-Bush Florida outcome will inevitably be subject to doubt. Krugman proposes that voters be given paper ballots on request to create a paper trail.

That seems very reasonable, except for one thing. I'm actually more worried by something Krugman left out: old fashioned absentee ballot stuffing. We have a lot of that down here in Florida, and we catch a few of the perps every election. Or rather, we used to catch them. Now that the Jeb Bush and the Republican legislature have abolished the witness requirement for absentee ballots, there's no longer going to be any way to tell if one person is responsible for a suspiciously large number of votes —so it's going to be open season on ballot fraud. And the more that people turn to paper in fear of electronic voting the more that 'noise' will camouflage the work of the ballot-stuffers…

All of a sudden, the conventional wisdom is talking Bush loses and the edgy folk are talking Kerry landslide. Even Howard Kurtz is hedging his bets.

This is a common euphoric moment between the challenger's convention and the incumbent's. It's the bounce, stupid. Remember how Gore was way up in the polls at this point four years ago?

I still think the fundamentals are there for Kerry to pull it out, maybe by a lot, but this euphoria is way premature. First, it's highly likely that the Republican convention will produce a Bush bounce (do I hear anyone predicting the 15% the Bushies predicted for Kerry?). Republicans are good at TV events, and they are working hard to put their more sensible, moderate wing front and center while keeping the frightening types in the closet.

If the post-convention bounce is likely, the next thing is a dead cert: there is one absolute constant in the Bush family M.O. when threatened electorally—go deeply negative, ideally via surrogates. I first saw this in action in the Republican Presidential primary in Connecticut in 1980, when for a time it looked as John Anderson might carry one of GHW Bush's several home states. All of a sudden anonymous fliers, mass telephone calls, and ads on small radio stations blanketed the state making false allegations against Anderson such as that he wanted to eliminate social security. And all of a sudden GHWB's poll number bottomed out.

Indeed, it looks to me as if the smear campaign is already well under way. If the Kerry people know how to respond to this beyond posing with generals and other veterans (which is good, but not enough), they've yet to demonstrate it. It's always possible the voters will rise above this sort of smear, or that the press will treat it sufficiently critically to defang it, but 'hope is not a strategy'.