Letter I sent to Kerry-Edwards Online.

[library_max]

(I had just received one more thanks-for-your-support message and it was one more than I could stand. Hence the following reply)

Dear Senator Kerry,

Now that Election Day is upon us, the temptation must be very great to sit back and relax. And you've earned a break - you've run a great campaign and we're all very proud of you.

But there's just one more thing we need you to do before you can relax. We need you to make sure that all the votes get counted. Democrats all over the country were forced to use provisional ballots because their registrations were purged from the voter rolls or because they didn't want to risk black box voting. It will take days, probably weeks, before all those hundreds of thousands of provisional ballots are counted. Absentee ballots also, including those of our men and women in military service in Iraq and elsewhere abroad, will not be counted by the morning after election night.

Simple respect for the sacred act of voting would require that we count all the votes and not treat the election as decided until all those votes are counted. But after 2000, and the many horror stories we have heard this year of Republican electoral chicanery in battleground states and the prevalence of paperless electronic (black box) voting, it is particularly important to wait until all the votes are counted and all the issues and questions are resolved before declaring a winner. We don't want another Presidential election decided with an asterisk, no matter who ends up being the actual winner.

For that reason, it is absolutely essential that you not concede the election until all the votes have been counted and all the issues and questions surrounding the recording and tabulating of votes have been resolved. This does not necessarily involve legal action, simply withholding your concession (should you appear to have lost) until all the absentee and provisional ballots have been certified and counted. By that time, allegations of error and fraud (if any) will have had time to surface and either develop into prima facia cases or be answered and refuted with facts.

We know that George Bush will avail himself of any and all possible remedies if it appears that he has lost the election. We ask only that you do the same. Not only out of respect for the millions of Democratic voters who have supported you, but for the electoral process and for the country itself. We need a clear and unquestionable outcome this time, not another asterisk.

By the way, my email has a bad habit of delaying messages by several days, sometimes a week or more. I hope this reaches you, as intended, before Election Night. We are all depending on you to stand up and do the right thing for us, even if the news networks don't like it. We know you won't let us down.

[BayStateBoy]

1. Great. I told them we need recounts

1. The soul of Democracy is the truth. We need to validate the results irrespective of outcome especially with so many smoking guns.

2. If we don't legally challenge, the doors will be flung wide open to massive fraud in the future because the Repugs will know that they have a free ride. We will have promoted fraud. DNC=DOA.

3. It's a matter of honor. Our candidates said that every vote would be counted. Unless the Smutboat Vets were correct, John Kerry and the DNC needs to step up to the plate and get the votes recounted.

4. Bush may well have won OH but I doubt he won FL. Doing a recount regardless of the results will unlikely alienate those that voted for Kerry-Edwards, and those others are lost souls most of them anyway.

5. We can link the recounts to some sort of "values" or moral stand. It's the Democratic way; after all the history of voting in America is the history of recounts (and rigged elections). Also, since tampering with a federal election is a felony we need to take the law and order stand. With a little imagination, it could be done.

6. Irrespective of the final voting tallies, we would gather ammunition to go forward to try to eradicate those voting methods that leave no paper trail. Great way to turn the spotlight on that problem.

7. Of course it will create "controversy," but the anger is already building and we owe it to 55 million+ Americans. I think Chimpie's popular vote plurality is an Electoral WMD and this is the way to prove it.