Civics Lesson: Accept Loss Gracefully
This, from the baseball Crank, nicely sums up the events that served as the catalyst for me to abandon the Democratic Party in 2000.
There are, to be sure, opportunities for ballot fraud and other shenanigans before and during an election, and the system has to provide some remedy for those, at least in provably serious cases. But before 2000 there was an ethos – not always respected, by any means, but to which politicians (most famously Nixon in 1960) at least needed to pay tribute – that the loser of an election did not open a second scorched-earth front designed at refighting every ballot that could conceivably be quibbled over, and that you needed a really serious reason to try to overturn the Election Day Count. That is Al Gore’s lasting legacy to our democracy, and it’s a deeply malignant one.
via Baseball Crank.
As the Crank points out, because of this, citizens now have significantly less confidence in our electoral process than we had before, and the never-ending process of election challenges since then — see the situation currently in Minnesota, just continue the damage.
