Gutless leadership or just bad advise? Why don't the Republicans fight hard enough?

Remember Norm Coleman and Al Franken in the U.S. Senate race in Minnesota in 2008?  Compare the events there to what happened in Florida's 18th Congressional District in 2012 between Republican Allen West and Democrat Patrick Murphy. Both races were decided by large numbers of absentee ballots that were mysteriously found and counted with no consideration given to what those votes represented. The elections were not rigged, the counting was rigged. And Democrats love counting absentee ballots, they have turned it into a science for stealing elections.

The major difference between the Minnesota race and the Florida race was the number of lawyers brought in to represent the candidates and the number of court battles that followed. In 2008, Republican Norm Coleman was ahead of his Democrat challenger, the ex Saturday Night Live comedian Al Franken when the counting started. After all the votes were tallied, Norm Coleman led Democrat Al Franken by 215 votes – well under the one half of one percent margin that triggers a mandatory recount according to state law. The recount did not begin until November 19, and finished on December 5, with ballot challenges and other matters yet to be totally resolved. Then bundles of absentee ballots began to mysteriously turn up that someone claimed had been misplaced in desk drawers. The Democratic Party flooded Minnesota with hundreds of lawyers who began to churn out a tidal wave of court challenges to delay the counting and invalidate votes for the Republican. The Democrats were having a field day in their daily court battles arguing which ballots could be counted and which could not. In the end it turned out that Al Franken won the state by merely 312 votes and it was later discovered that over 320 convicted felons had voted in Minneapolis, which was against the law. As a side note to this travesty, the final vote tally showed that the Libertarian candidate Charles Aldrich had picked up 13,923 votes, way more than enough to make Republican Coleman the winner if the Libertarian's had not run a candidate. And in 2012 the Libertarian candidates in 9 voting districts across America spelled the difference between a Republicans loss and a Democrats win.

In Florida, Tea Party favorite Allen West was ahead of his Democrat opponent by some 2000 votes when all of a sudden a huge block of votes turned up in St. Lucie County after which the Democrat Elections Commissioner admitted mistakes were made in the tabulations. But the Democrats learned to do something new in 2012 that they hadn't done in Minnesota in 2008. Avoid an official recount. When the difference between the vote count exceeds a certain percentage there is no legal call for an official recount. Like Minnesota and other states, an official recount in Florida is only done when there is less than .5% difference in the tally. So instead of small numbers of fraudulent votes they went after huge numbers. Numbers so large that in St. Lucie County it was reported that the total number of votes cast was 144% of the number of registered voters. But still the initial court challenges made by the Republican lawyers never addressed this obvious irregularity. And the number of legal challenges the Republican Party made were barely noticeable compare to what the Democrats did in Minnesota when they delayed the final vote tally for more than eight months.

So where was the Republican Party during this brief flurry in Florida? No one from the National Republican Party had jumped in to defend Allen West. There were no carloads of lawyers arriving in Florida to back up Republican Allen West's contentions that the election was a fraud. And as far as Allen West goes, for a man with such a distinguished military career, a genuine warrior, he made only two court challenges and then conceded the election when the courts ruled against him. So the Democrats had won because the Republicans hadn't fought hard enough. Or maybe Allen West just listened to the wrong advise. Just like Mitt Romney did.

My name is Nelson Abdullah and I am Oldironsides.