David Weigel reports on how Fox News is breathlessly reporting "Non-citizens caught voting in 2012 presidential election in key swing state" of Ohio.
After every election, we seem to hear the losing side screaming, "Fix!" At a party a few months ago, I got into a brief, pointless debate with a Republican who didn't believe his side ever lost an election fair and square. It was always dead people and busloads of illegal aliens who threw the contest to the Democrat. The Fox News story seems calculated to feed that belief, trying as it does to not call attention to this fact: We're talking about 17 votes in a state that Obama won by 166,272.
They might also have reminded readers that Obama beat Romney by 126 electoral votes…so he would have won without the 18 electoral votes of this "key swing state." In fact, Obama could have lost Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and California (!) and still won. He got more electoral votes than the number Dick Morris insisted would constitute a Romney Landslide.
In truth, charges of rigged elections have a way of collapsing for lack of evidence. Democrats complained that George W. Bush stole the vote in Florida in 2000…but at least there was some actual evidence of that, mostly in the form of qualified voters who were not allowed to cast ballots. My guess is that if there is Massive Voter Fraud in this country, as we keep hearing, it's in denying ballots to people who should get them but who, for geographic and/or racial reasons, seem likely to vote against the party that controls the determination of voter eligibility. That's how you rig an election, people.
Beyond that, as Weigel points out, there are all sorts of anomalies with the vote count that no one cares much about. These are all the incidents of sloppy, inaccurate tabulation and handling of the ballots. You would never for a minute entrust your savings to a bank that handled money as recklessly as we handle ballots in this country. But no one cares about those problems because, I guess, what good is an inaccurate vote total if you can't control it to go your way?