Monday, February 18, 2008

Where's the Outrage?   [Byron York]

I'm sure you've noticed stories like this one, in which some areas in New York City appear to have grossly undercounted votes for Barack Obama on Super Tuesday primary night.  The New York Times reported finding 80 election districts in the city, some in Harlem, in which "Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district."  Recounts revealed that Obama had, in fact, received lots of votes.

So where are the cries of disenfranchisement, or at least attempted disenfranchisement?  Where are the conspiracy theories?  The outrage?  And for that matter, where are the cries of outrage that many Democratic party officials appear determined to deny the states of Florida and Michigan representation at the Democratic National Convention?  One-point-seven million people voted in Florida's Democratic primary and 595,000 voted in Michigan's Democratic contest.  As things stand now, they will have no representation at the convention.  (And while those voters are silent, each state's superdelegates will be able to vote however they choose.)

This is a party that went bonkers over the supposed – never proven or even convincingly alleged – disenfranchisement of a relatively tiny number of voters in Florida in 2000.  This is a party in which some imagined conspiracies in Ohio in 2004 in which Karl Rove somehow personally hacked voting machines to assure George W. Bush's victory.  And now black votes are ignored in New York, at least initially, and more than two million votes are ignored in Florida and Michigan, and are we hearing outraged accusations of malignant forces at work?  If so, it's a pretty quiet outrage.

02/18 07:13 AMShare