Elections: Fraud and Fatigue

The Canadians had their knickers in a twist last week about election irregularities. (The Canadians can say things like that because of their long connection with the British and because they know what ‘knickers’ are: we in the U.S.—at least the non-sports-minded—are more likely to be left wondering if that is the name of a new football or baseball team…the Des Moines Knickers, say.) The Canadians I know get very upset when there are charges of election fraud. I assume that election fraud is endemic in the U.S., of course, but I also assume that a lot of money will be involved.

In this case, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police served a warrant at the Progressive Conservative Party’s Headquarters and marched out with the Progressive Conservative Party’s computers and other records. None of the newspaper accounts explain how the Progressive Conservative Party (which is currently the main party running the country) continues to operate without its computers. My own day/week/month/year would be absolutely ruined if someone were to march in and seize my computers. Elections Canada, which sent the unmounted Mounties out on this mission, appears to be claiming that the Progressive Conservatives spent $1 million more on the last election than the $18 million they were allowed to spend, and that they achieved this by moving checks and cash back and forth between the Party and the candidates.

The Progressive Conservatives came to power on the hem of a previous knicker-twisting election problem, something called the “sponsorship scandal.” In that activity, it was the Liberals who were using fancy accounting and checks and cash moved here and there, and they were accused of improperly distributing about $100 million of $250 million of public funds with an eye to elections. That is a reasonable amount of money to be concerned with and, in large part, that led to the fall of the Liberal government. The PC’s were mighty pure about their own intentions at the time of the Liberal fall, so there is some irony in that they are now faced with charges of tiny fraud or whatever it is that Elections Canada is thinking of charging them with.

What strikes me, as an American, is how small the sums involved are. A Canadian expert on such stuff, is quoted in the news as saying, "There's always little nickel and dime stuff in every election, but this is not nickel and dime ... those are major sums, at least by Canadian standards." He’s talking about $1 million. Now granted that Canada’s population is only about 1/10th of the U.S. population, a dubious allocation of $10 million in a U.S. election would seem to me to be nickel and dime stuff. It cost the Republicans $216 million to elevate John McCain to candidate; the Democrats don’t even have a presidential candidate yet, and they’ve already spent over $289 million. Hard to imagine that all those funds can actually be accounted for if anybody was trying to see if it were all on the up and up.

In that light, I noticed a New York Times article this week about the final negotiations on the farm bill just about to issue from the Congress. One billion dollars was added in these negotiations for food stamps for poor people; another $1.8 billion was added in tax cuts for rich people, including tax cuts for racehorse breeders (Thank You, Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader. Maybe we could just give them food stamps instead?) This, of course, is all legal, what we cutely refer to as 'earmarks'; no fraud or corruption here. We save that for elections. I doubt that Canadians have the stamina for U.S. politics. I’m beginning to doubt that I have it, either.