It's ok to steal in Japan

The Wall Street Journal has a good editorial about the recount in the Minnesota Senate race. Why do we see, over and over again (Florida Presidential race in 2000, Washington Senate race in 2004, and now in Minnesota), that in close elections where Democrats are in control, they are able to magically find votes just in the nick of time, appearing in the back seats of cars, or Democratic precincts? But, as they say in Casablanca, the establishment is as honest as the day is long. It's only conservatives who engage in fraud by demanding things like photo id.

A liberal acquaintance at work who is very proud of his Master's degree in political science informed me before the election that adding phony votes in an election is morally superior to blocking valid votes. My opinion is that they are both vote fraud. He claimed that when adding a spurious vote, the proportional count is changed by 1/(n+1) (where n is the number of legitimate votes) whereas the proportional count is changed by 1/n when deleting a legitimate vote. Hmmm. Well 1) there's no proportional count in this country, 2) if it's merely about the effect each incremental vote has, then by that logic, stealing Japanese money is not as evil as stealing American money, since the dollar trades at about 95 yen.