Vote fraud: We won one!

The Los Angeles Times reports the welcome news that the unpopular Republican mayor of San Diego, Dick Murphy -- who won a very controversial onionskin-thin victory over write-in challenger Donna Frye -- has resigned.

Frye would have won the November, 2004 election if several thousand write-in ballots, in which voter intent was clearly indicated, had not been tossed out by a court ruling in December. On those disputed ballots, the voters had written in Frye's name but had neglected to darken the nearby oval.

One can imagine how the radio rightists would have howled if the courts ruled against a Republican who lost under such circumstances.

Murphy's resignation comes in the wake of an SEC investigation of a $2 billion pension deficit. Although he has not been charged with any wrongdoing, he faced the likelihood of a recall.

Question: Was Murphy's election legitimate to begin with?

We learned from the Lehto study of Snohomish County, Washington, that paper ballots (absentee votes, provisionals) tend to agree with exit poll results, while electronic votes display a greater disparity. The "error," of course, always favors the Republican party.

San Diego is an optical scan county. The scantron-style ballots are fed into a central tabulator -- the "mother machine," as the should-have-been First Lady once called it. And who engineered that centralized counter?

You guessed it: Diebold.

This site offers an interesting view of Diebold's performance in San Diego during the primaries:

Also, after the Oct. 7, 2003 recall election, when Diebold's vote-tabulating software wrongly awarded 9,000 Democratic absentee votes to a Southern California Socialist, Diebold decided its computer was overwhelmed and replaced it. In the March primary, Alameda County workers eased the load on Diebold's computer by scanning absentee ballots one party at a time. But San Diego County fed its absentee ballots in as a mix, and Diebold's software misreported almost 3,000 votes. In the worst case, it switched 2,747 Democratic presidential primary votes for U.S. Sen. John Kerry to U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt, who had dropped out of the race. Diebold's latest explanation says its vote-tabulation software apparently could not handle results from multiple optical-scanning machines, processing ballots with large numbers of candidates and precincts.

Well, jeez. In November 2004, the ballots had a large number of candidates and precincts.

Frye was a write-in candidate; one presumes that her ballot count was more-or-less accurate, since her vote had a paper trail. But only Diebold knows whether Murphy's count was inflated.

At any rate: Good riddance.