I know everyone wants to cry foul and it’s a lot sexier to push the stolen election theme.
No, we don't want to cry foul. We'd much rather have an honest election where ballots discovered late are consistent with the ones that are tallied on election night—instead of breaking in the Democrats' favor
every time there's a close election.
2004: Dino Rossi leads the vote total on election night. Christine Gregoire recounts twice until she gets a lead, then they quit, declaring her the governor of Washington.
Spring 2009: James Tedisco leads a race for a Congressional seat on election night; recount after recount, Scott Murphy, the Democrat, ends up in the seat.
Fall 2009: Bill Owens narrowly leads a race for a Congressional seat on election night. He expands his lead after a recount. Oh, by the way... Owens was a Democrat.
And now we have Sinema in 2018, pulling out just enough ballots to win, and boom, the recount is over.
Around the country, recounts always favor the Democrat. There's a systemic problem here. We have no way to timestamp ballots to ensure they were cast before polls closed, among many other holes that can easily be exploited.
It has very little to do with the candidates themselves. We'd like to think that with a little better strategy, we can turn things around next time... but this WAS our next time, and the same things keep happening, no matter what.
We WANT to believe our elections are honest, but the more I see this, I just can't.