A full recount of Ohio’s votes in the recent presidential election has been ordered by a federal court, following lobbying by the Libertarian and the Green presidential candidates. I have covered the story here. There is no way a full recount could be completed by December 13, when the Electoral College has to formally cast its votes.
It occurs to me that it is a very strange way of promoting the Libertarian message to waste $1.5 million of Ohio taxpayers’ money. The recount is not going to change the overall result and could only conceivably cause the Libertarian candidate to finish behind the Constitutional Party or the Greens finish behind a local independent.
The real purpose is exposed by Badnarik’s musings about TV exit polls. He appears to be the only person not taking medication in the US to believe that the exit polls were right (Kerry win) and the ballot counting wrong (Bush win). This beats Dan Rather anyday:
From what I can see, there’s no reason to believe the exit polls were wrong, and fairly good reasons to believe that it was the election process that was faulty.
I can see some benefit to the Democratic Party in all this. Without spending any money, or attracting the tag of “Sore Loserman” from the 2000 election, the Kerry camp gets all the benefit of the Libertarian and Green lawyers trying to put their guy in the White House.
After Harry Browne’s idiotic statements following 9/11 I was ashamed that I’d voted Libertarian in 2000. I’ll never do it again, and all it takes is crap like this to further solidify that viewpoint. The Libertarian party proper is filled to the brim with nuts and whackos. They may be right about some things with regard to the role of government, but they invariably take things too far and make themselves look foolish in the process.
I’ll stick to trying to get the GOP to take more Libertarian-lite stances than ever throw in my lot with those jackasses.
I second that Scorpio. I like small government and am for legalizing drugs, but the libertarian party in the US seems to be filled with some very strange people.
It’s true, it’s true. I have Libertarian friends who have said that they are embarrassed and ashamed by stupid stunts like this, which make the entire party look like a bunch of bozos. The Libertarians will soon have the same problem the Democrats have: They’re driving out everyone except the nut-bar fringe.
How did Badnarik get the Presidential nomination, anyhow? (I’m not registered Libertarian, so I don’t know.) And wouldn’t the LP be better advised to go after local and state offices first, instead of trying to head straight for the top? If there’s a Libertarian Senator or state governor, I haven’t heard of it (though I’d be glad to be informed of one).
The nomination is handled via a run-off scheme. Aaron Russo seemed to have it out for Gary Nolan(?) enough to split the vote, leaving Badnarik in the driver’s seat.
As far as what the party ought to do, keep in mind that there are 51+ Libertarian Parties in the US. One for every state, the national, probably one in DC, and then numerous local ones.
I don’t think the national party has a lot to do with trying to get the presidential candidate elected. They just have the rules for choosing him, and then he has got to go raise his own money.
Geez, get over it already!
[insert brilliant sarcastic remarks about verifying that the process is working not being necessary here]
I’ve posted many examples of voting irregularities here. There’s certainly a large amount of smoke; whether that indicates actual fraud or just error it still needs to be looked into. Look into, for instance, Warren County.
Who would have thunk it that a semi-rural Ohio county would be at a “10” for threat of terrorism, and would need to lock down the building where they were counting the votes.
I am heartened to see strong evidence that not voting LP at anything higher than the state level (and that only for Treasurer) this year was well-justified.
Hank ditto for me. How exactly can this numb-nuts being saying they want to cut people’s taxes and then pull this crap?
I have met many local level LP types who are reasonable and decent but at the national level they are just pathetic.
My take, perhaps wrongly, is that Badnarik is really trying to expose the PROCESS in general, and that any attack against the status quo is justified. But if that is so, he should be demanding recounts in every state that was as close or closer than Ohio. Who’s to say that improprieties, if any, were exclusive to Ohio, and only by curly mustachioed republicans in top hats? Of course liberals/democrats can never brook accusations that they would stoop to trickery.
I live in Wisconsin, and it went Kerry by about 13,000 votes. And there were several unsavory plots hatched by the libs/dems in 2000 in the Milwaukee area (smokes for votes, students voting multiple times), and wonderful incidents in 2004 such as tire slashings of vehicles’ tires likely to transport Repub voters the next day (one of the perps the son of a newly elected State Rep, a Dem). Where’s the demand for a recount in WI? How many investigations as to whether, by acts of vandalism, some people were disenfranchised? Nope, not a word.
So if Badarik is trying to make a general point, he should carry through with it to it’s logical conclusion and demand recounts in all close states. That the process for electing Federal officials is highly flawed and self-serving/protecting. By just backing the Ohio initiative and not demanding any others makes him look biased.
The electoral process is a farce IMO. The whole process is anti-libertarian in my view. The concept of Democracy infused into a Federal landscape of a majority vote of people who care to even bother, to unleash trillions of dollars of confiscation and Force, is counter-intuitive at least from an individualist/libertarian view. The Feds have all but used the Constitution as toilet paper, bastardizing the Commerce Clause into Federal control over most everything. One vote out of 110,000,000 is statistically meaningless, regardless of the relative strengthening due to the electoral college structure. And yet the masses are conned to turn out and ‘make their voice heard’ between candidate 1A and candidate 2A.
Maybe what Badnarik is doing makes a little more sense if it is put into a particular context. I’m not sure if non-Americans are aware that third party candidates are not even invited to debates (they are technically private invitations). Folks like Badnarik point out how much public money is spent on bringing these events off (security, etc). Third parties are effectively shut out of the process, so how can they even hope to change anything? This Ohio case might be an attempt to bring the whole crock to light. I just wish Badnarik did not hold the line on Ohio alone. If he wants to make a statement, keep it consistent. Don’t just join a smear campaign against only one side.
Mary in LA: Badnarik was a “darkhorse” candidate if you will; I wrote about his nomination here(Link). Nobody thought that he had any chance to get the nomination going into the convention. There are no Libertarians in the US Senate or House of Representatives; however, the LP puts more candidates in local races than the Greens or any other third party. The presidential candidate is there as a sort of “loss leader” for guys further down the ballot.
What’s odd is that Badnarik seems to be offering a false dichotomy: either the polls were wrong or the results were fraudulent. But the results themselves were well within the 95% confidence interval of the exit polls.
Thank you, Jay, Chris, and all!
The parties asking for recount in Ohio are stark raving mad. I have lived in Ohio for most of the last half century. The state has reasonably honest elections. The elections are run by county election boards which are bi-partisan.
The last state-wide recount was about 18 years ago in an attorney general race. The recount resulted in a net change of less than 500 votes state wide. I doubt that this recount will produce a more dramatic shift. But if it were 100 times as large, it could not affect the result of the election as the certified margin exceded 100,000 votes.
I note that the legislature is considering raising the fee to request a recount to better reflect its cost, but that measure cannot be adopted in time to bring down the curtain on this farce.
First about that last recount:
“we had an attorney general race in 1990 that after they did the recount there was about 146 ballot difference in the total count.”
Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell on Fox News 12/6
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,140772,00.html
Second, about the cost of the recount. It will be on the order of $US 1.5 million. The statutory fee of $US 10/election precinct covers about 10% of that. An increase to $100/precinct would seem to be in order, but irrelevant to this recount.
Maybe so, but the nut-bar fringe is only getting larger in the GOP. ( i.e. the Theocons).
What’s a moderate to do?
Hmm. Just a thought and something that struck me as I was reading the comments, perhaps the Libertarian ideal will only exist and work right at the state and lower level, influencing the federal level on up. It seems that the old adage of power corrupting sticks very true with the Libertarian canditates at the Federal level as well.
The voices of many at a lower level can affect and effect those smaller at a higher.
Meh…maybe I’m wrong but who knows. It’s 2am here and I’ve been up for 23hrs.
I attended a Libertarian Party meeting yesterday, and asked a member of the Libertarian National Committee what he knew about the Ohio recount.
If I understand this right, there was some sort of brouhaha over Nader not being allowed on the Ohio ballot, and somehow in striking his name from the ballot they also incorrectly struck the names of all third party candidates, including Badnarik and Cobb, even though they were legally on the ballot in Ohio.
The recount effort is being funded by the Kerry campaign, quietly – lots of money left over in his war chest, apparently- through the people who requested the recount (Greens and Libs). No tax payer money is involved, please note. The recount is not going to give Kerry the White House, but it is a way to stir things up without making Kerry look like a ‘sore loserman’.
The function of third parties in the US has historically been to bring ideas into the mainstream. By running candidates on the Libertarian ticket in the US, at any level, we are educating people about libertarian issues.
Also, a person does not have to be a member of the LP to be a Libertarian candidate- I ran for a county level office and am not a dues paying member because I don’t want to sign thier pledge. Running at a local level is a fun way to talk up libertarian issues. We got lots of good media coverage, especially when Michael Badnarik came to town for a couple of days. Though I do not agree with the guy on some issues, I am impressed with his energy and dedication. He and his assistant spent a couple of years sleeping in people’s guest rooms and being passed from state to state to further the cause of liberty.
Just as in other countries, there are libertarians here (be they members of the LP or not) who are nuts and cranks, and then some of us are merely idiosyncratic. 🙂