First Principles

In a word, no, in spite of ridiculous and baseless allegations from various folks, including these national Ron Paul folks who make the accusations pretty directly.

I take these allegations a little personally, since I was in the counting room in Washoe County.  So let me just say for the record that in Washoe we counted every vote we could.  Observers from every campaign were in the room.  Ron Paul supporters easily outnumbered any other candidate’s in the room, and at least 50% of the counters for most of the count supported Paul.  Second to Paul supporters in number (at least visibly) were Gingrich supporters.

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The ways such ready and baseless accusations of fraud are stupid are countless.  When it’s so obviously unsupported by fact, you lose credibility.  You invite people to assume your candidate shares your propensity to be a whiny, sore loser, and no one wants a whiny sore loser to be the President of the United States.  (See Gingrich, Newt – collapse of Republican support after Nevada of.)

You don't want your candidate to be remembered like this, do you? This tactic is similar to nerds whining to their date about how other girls don't appreciate "nice guys", and in the end has about the same success rate.

You help ensure the inevitable wounds that a hard fought primary battle inflicts within a party don’t heal by the General Election.  And you don’t learn from your own mistakes, which hurts any future run that candidate may make, as well as the prospects for the movement the candidate supposedly represents.

But the worst, most insidious thing about these allegations is that they attack the heart of the entire system of elected government.  Think about it – if our elections really were fraudulent on a regular basis (not that there aren’t some that ARE), why would anyone bother voting?  Why would anyone bother following laws that were illegitimately passed by an illegitimate government, or seek legal remedy for a fraudulent election from the same people who were fraudulently elected?  Indeed – why wouldn’t a free people take up arms against such a government?  It doesn’t take a majority of people who believe this way to do real damage – indeed, it doesn’t even take all that many individuals.

Voter fraud is an incredibly serious charge with incredibly serious consequences to society if shown to be true.  And that means that unless you have solid, real proof that such fraud took place, you should quite frankly shut the hell up before you’re responsible for some real damage to the very fabric of our society.

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I also have to say – most people tend to assume that other people react to various situations in the same way that they themselves would act in that situation.  You can tell a lot about a person and his motivations by the conclusions he jumps to about others.

So when you have someone who immediately and automatically thinks everyone who counts votes is acting fraudulently, you have to wonder how they would ever act if anyone ever let them count the votes.

The bottom line is that any person or group who casually throws around evidence-less allegations of voter fraud ought to be shunned, and treated as the enemies of liberty they truly are.  And any serious candidate should immediately and loudly repudiate such nonsense done in their names.