RNC Chairman Steele Says Democrats “Hijack Elections”

Someone over at ThinkProgress has more time than good sense and was listening to Hugh Hewitt’s show last night when he interviewed RNC Chairman Michael Steele.  Steele got confused and… well let’s just let TP tell it:

Hugh Hewitt asked RNC Chairman Michael Steele what he planned “to do to prevent strategic chicanery” of Democrats voting in open Republican primaries in 2012. Misunderstanding the question, Steele replied that he agreed with Hewitt that election fraud was a “frightening concern” because he believes that Democrats can now “basically hijack elections at their whim”

Yes folks, that’s the running theory in the Republican Party right now: the Democrats are part of a vast conspiracy that is somehow rigging elections.  Pause for a moment and let that sink in.

Is Steel out of his mind?  Has he ever seen a Democrat, much less a Democratic convention?  It would be easier to get the entire Republican Party to dress in matching “Barack Obama Is A Muslim” T-shirts than it would be to get three Democrats to agree on pizza toppings.  This is not a party that works well together at all, least of all one that works together from the shadows.  Steele’s allegation goes beyond “implausible” and right out into the realm of “paranoid delusion.”

But that is not to say that American elections are impervious to subverion.

When Democrats charged election fraud in Florida following the shennagins that went on with the ballots there during the 2000 Presidential race, the Republicans dismissed the suggestion as absurd.  Never mind the fact that the infamous butterfly-ballots where illegal under Florida law.  Never mind the stopped recounts and the curious fact that Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, was pulling double-duty as the co-chair for the Florida Bush Campaign.  The Republicans assured us everything was legit.

When Democrats suggested much the same thing after the 2004 race in Ohio the notion was again dismissed.  Never mind the oddly skewed exit polling data – data that is generally regarded as a among the most accurate polling possible in an electoral cycle; the GOP said everything was on the up-and-up.

So now along comes Steele.  Republicans have had the better part of a decade to run the nation into the ground since the 2000 debacle in Florida and by most accounts they’ve done a pretty fair job of it.  The economy is a twisted wreckage, two wars smolder over seas, the United States is openly mocked by our allies and yet Mr Steele can not for the life of him work out how the Democrats could possibly have picked up seats in 2006 and 2008.

Fraud he concludes.  It must be fraud.

What we heard on Hewitt’s show was a 50-year-old man and chair of a national party crying like a little kid who has realized he can’t catch the ball and has decided to blame someone else for it.  In crying election fraud, however, Steele detracts from the very real and very serious concerns that many Americans have about our voting system.  There has never been a conviction nor a plea-bargain nor even the slightest shred of evidence of a single fraudulent vote cast or altered by Steele’s imagined Democratic conspiracy but weaknesses in American voting systems, election procedure, and counting practices do put thousands of American votes at risk every time we hold an election.

If Steele and his party want to take their ball and go home that is their prerogative but they have no right to take from the legitimacy of serious election reformers for the sake of a partisan temper tantrum.