It's Not Quite Over in Ohio

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, who wrote a good book on election fraud, has this to say in today's OpinionJournal.com Political Diary regarding ongoing efforts to overturn the Ohio results:

Bloggers and pundits who believe Republicans stole the 2004 election continue to spin their conspiracy theories. Yesterday, they apparently convinced Green Party candidate David Cobb and Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik to demand a recount of the votes in Ohio. Conspiratorialists are now trying to raise $110,000 to cover the costs of recounting all of Ohio's approximately 9,000 precincts. In a separate move, Ralph Nader is asking for a recount in New Hampshire, claiming that John Kerry conceded too quickly last week and reneged on his promise that all votes would be counted.

Democratic consultant Joe Trippi, who served as Howard Dean's 2004 campaign manager, says the Kerry people are under pressure from major donors not to ignore the Internet conspiracy theorists. "If they dismiss them, they risk seeing them walk away from future giving to the Democratic Party," he told me.

That helps explain why the Kerry campaign agreed this week to send attorneys to Ohio on a "fact-finding mission" to gather data from election boards about uncounted ballots and other unresolved issues. But Kerry advisers caution they don't expect to find anything dramatic. "No one would be more interested than me in finding out that we really won, but that ain't the case," Jack Corrigan, the lawyer who led Mr. Kerry's army of Election Day attorneys, told the Boston Globe. "Unlike 2000, there is no doubt that they actually got more votes than we did, and they got them in the states that mattered."

One of the main pieces of evidence cited by Internet bloggers is the fact that in about two dozen Florida counties, President Bush received far more votes than the number of registered Republicans. In Lafayette County, for example, Mr. Bush won 74% of the vote even though 83% of residents are registered as Democrats. But Lafayette County Supervisor of Elections Lana Morgan points out that her county is in the Bible Belt and routinely votes for Republicans. Bob Dole carried the county in 1996 even as he lost Florida to Bill Clinton.

But no amount of debunking will wipe away doubts about the 2004 election. The danger is that the conspiracy theories will prompt people to ignore legitimate complaints about outdated technology, voter fraud, poor voter education and poorly written and contradictory election rules. Everyone should realize how close the country came to another Florida-style litigation hell. "If the margin in Ohio had been 36,000 votes rather than 136,000, we would have seen another post-election meltdown," says Dan Tokaji, a law professor at Ohio State University. It's incumbent upon both Congress and the state legislatures to revisit our election laws early next year before memories of this year's near miss fade again.

Actually, the fat lady has sung in Ohio, but if this will keep the Dems occupied for awhile, it can't hurt.