The Democrats Lost Ugly

A week after the big Republican win in the off-year election and the evidence is accumulating: The Democrats lost ugly. Consider just two cases.

First, South Dakota. As Byron York reports on NationalReview.com, up until 6:38 a.m. on the morning after election day, it looked as if the Democrats had lost the South Dakota Senate race. With 838 of the state's 844 precincts reporting, Republican challenger John Thune led Democratic incumbent Tim Johnson by more than 1,000 votes. Then something odd happened.

Six precincts that normally report early delivered their results very late. And guess what? All six reported unprecedentedly massive votes for the Democratic candidate - so huge, in fact, that they sufficed to counterbalance Mr. Thune's majority in the other 99.3% of the state.

The six late precincts were all located in one county, Shannon County, site of a large Indian reservation - and also the site of many past allegations of voter fraud. In 1998, with Thomas Daschle on the ballot, Shannon County reported 1,599 votes, 79% of them Democratic. This time, Shannon reported 3,118 votes, 92% of them Democratic. The Shannon County late surge pushed Mr. Johnson over the finish line. At 10:22 a.m., Mr. Johnson was declared the winner by 527 votes out of 334,435 cast.

In other words: A fraud-prone Democratic-controlled county delayed reporting its results until the tally was complete everywhere else in the state, by which time it was clear that the Democratic candidate needed 1,000 more votes to win. The county then delivered almost 1,600 more ballots than in 1998, virtually every single one of them marked for the Democratic candidate. Curious, no?

Next, Arkansas. Democrats were widely expected to pick up a Senate seat in Arkansas. The incumbent Republican, Tim Hutchinson, was a Baptist minister and a founder of a Christian school who voted to convict President Clinton in the January 1999 impeachment trial. Six months later, Mr. Hutchinson divorced his wife of 30 years. In the summer of 2000, he married one of his former staffers.

Arkansans take a dim view of this kind of behavior, and all through 2002, Mr. Hutchison trailed in the polls. His Democratic opponent, Attorney General Mark Pryor, the son of a popular former governor and senator, presented himself as a Christian family man in television commercials: One showed Mr. Pryor leafing through a Bible, then cut to a shot of the entire Pryor clan gathered around the family table, heads bowed in prayer.

Forty-eight hours before election day, however, the Drudge Report posted a story about a potential ethical problem of Mr. Pryor's own: He had for some months employed a Mexican-born housekeeper and paid her in cash. Was she a legal immigrant? Had he paid the required taxes?

On the Sunday before election day, Mr. Pryor denounced Drudge's story as an "11th hour smear." He said that his housekeeper had provided him with evidence that she was a legal resident of America and that she had not worked for him long enough for any payroll taxes to be due. He backed his story up with an affidavit from the housekeeper herself. Arkansans believed him, and Mr. Pryor won 54% to 46%.

The following morning, the Arkansas Times ran this item about a story about to be printed in a Little Rock Spanish-language newspaper:

"The woman now tells El Latino editor Michel Leidermann that she was indeed an illegal worker when employed by Pryor for about six months in 1999 and that she told his wife this at the time. ... She says she was encouraged by Pryor in-laws to sign a statement absolving Pryor and that she did so because she was unnerved by being the center of controversy."

There is of course no proof that Mr. Pryor or anyone close to him in fact induced the housekeeper to swear out a false affidavit. Inducing perjury is a very serious crime. On the other hand, another famous Arkansas politician made something of a specialty of it - and it took him all the way to the White House.

South Dakota and Arkansas are not the end of the story. There are troubling accounts of voter fraud and ballot manipulation by local Democratic officials throughout the country. The Alabama gubernatorial race will turn on whether 7,000 allegedly bogus ballots from Democratic precincts are accepted or rejected by the state courts.

Nobody should prejudge any of these cases. But when sour-grapes Democrats try to explain away their defeat in 2002 by pointing to a Republican advantage in money and airtime, it's worth remembering that the Democrats went into this election with some special strengths of their own: control of many local jurisdictions were elections are still won or lost the old-fashioned way - in the dark, when nobody is looking.