NORTH CAROLINA - BANANA REPUBLIC
You half expect the three Democratic members of the NC State Board of Elections to be dressed in green battle fatigues reminiscent of 20th century latin american dictatorships - think Daniel Ortega. In the race for Commissioner of Agriculture, a Republican, Steve Troxler, received 2,287 more votes than the Democrat, Britt Cobb. In most democracies, we call that a "win."

But, there were 4,438 votes "lost" in Carteret County. If you were going to commit voter fraud - and I'm not saying that's what happened here - and you wanted to hurt Republicans, this is the kind of county where you'd like to lose a few ballots.

In Carteret County, George W. Bush won 69% of the vote (he only got 56% statewide), Gubernatorial candidate Patrick Ballantine(R) got 53% (he only got 43% statewide), and Senate Candidate Richard Burr(R) got 63% (he only got 52% statewide).

So, faced with their Ag candidate losing, the Board considered whether to allow the 4,438 who's votes were lost (apparently, the voters are identifiable) re-vote. In that scenario, if Democrat Britt Cobb were to close the margin and win, he'd need to get 75.8% of those votes. In a county where he could get only 40% on election day, that seemed too steep a hill. So, Democrats decided that maybe they'd just let Carteret Co. as a whole revote - not just the voters whose votes were lost, but the whole county - regardless of whether you voted on election day.

Under that plan, if turnout were the same as on election day (and it wouldn't be), Britt Cobb would need to get 54.8% of the revote in order to win. Not bloody likely.

So, the State Board decided the best chance would be to rerun the whole election througout the state, at a cost of over $3 million. A new election requires the vote of 4 out of the 5 members of the Board of Elections. But the Dems decided that they wouldn't call it a new election, merely an amendment to their court reversed order to revote Carteret Co. That trick meant that the 3 Dems (Larry Leake, Genevieve Sims and Robert Cordle) alone could dictate a new election. Screw the rules, we lost so we won't a do over. You can almost hear the whining. If getting Cobb 55% or 75% of the Carteret Co. vote was impossible, surely it would be easier to get 50.00000001% when George Bush and Richard Burr aren't on the same ballot.

Now, even the mainstream NC press is getting the picture of this corrupt effort.

The Charlotte Observer says:

It also looks -- to Republicans and many Democrats, too -- as though the State Board of Elections:

• Is bent on keeping Republican Steve Troxler from winning an election he was leading and almost certainly would have won if 4,438 missing Carteret County votes had been properly recorded Nov. 2;

• Is about to disenfranchise 3,330,107 North Carolina voters by exchanging their legitimate votes cast on Nov. 2 for newer ones from as few as 10 percent of the likely voters -- meaning that instead of 4,438 votes not counted, there could be something like 3 million votes discarded; and

• Will soak the taxpayers for $3 million the state doesn't have to accomplish this shameful charade.

The Winston-Salem Journal says:

Cobb's remedy is to hold a new statewide vote. Such a vote would cost the state more than $3 million and would produce an unacceptable winner. That's because the turnout would likely be much lower than that of Nov. 2.

The board should declare Troxler the winner because he almost certainly won. The arithmetic tells the story. To have covered his 2,300-vote deficit with the lost Carteret County votes, Cobb would have had to outpoll Troxler by about a 3-to-1 ratio there. That would have been an improbable Democratic landslide in a county that leans Republican.

. . . He can do his state an even bigger service now by conceding the obvious: He lost.

If Cobb doesn't concede by the time the board meets again, it should declare the obvious. Troxler won the commissioner's race, and he should be inaugurated in January.

No surprise, The News & Observer is still trying to figure out how to spin this thing for Cobb.