November 14, 2002
The Oglala Sioux's Senator
Wall Street Jounal

The Oglala Sioux's Senator Republican John Thune threw in the towel on his South Dakota Senate race yesterday, notwithstanding the suspicious circumstances under which he lost by a mere 524 votes. We think that at a minimum he owed his many supporters a recount.

If nothing else, a recount would have put on the public record the dubious details of how he lost, if that's the word for what happened. Under state law the close margin entitled him to a recount, and these have been common in South Dakota's closely fought elections. Democrats Tom Daschle and George McGovern both used them to secure victories to Congress.

Moreover, Mr. Thune clearly thinks there was something fishy about last week's vote. "Are there questions that need to be answered about the outcome of this election? I believe there are,'' he noted in yesterday's statement. "Did things happen that shouldn't have in some polling places around the state? I believe they did. Some of these issues would be resolved through a recount. However, others, though unethical, would not be righted through a recount.

"Allow us to translate: Yes, Mr. Thune thinks the election was probably stolen, but he'll have a hard time proving it, won't win in the end anyway and along the way he'll be so beat up by Tom Daschle's political machine that he'd never be able to run for statewide office again. He's only 41 years old, so better to walk than fight. That may sound cynical, but what else are his supporters to make of that ripe phrase, "though unethical"?

We know, for example, that Mr. Thune was leading all during Election Night, until late Wednesday morning when results flowed in from Shannon County; suddenly he trailed by about 500 votes. Last minute landslide precincts are suspicious on their face, a legendary practice in places like Chicago.

But Michael New, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-MIT Data Center, has inspected the South Dakota Secretary of State's Web site to discover other striking facts: While Democrat Tim Johnson ran statewide about 12 percentage points behind what Mr. Daschle got in his 1998 Senate victory, in Shannon County Mr. Johnson ran about 12 percentage points ahead. He got 92% of the vote compared with Mr. Daschle's 80%. Nowhere else in the state did Mr. Johnson improve his vote share relative to Mr. Daschle.

Senate voter turnout was up 27% statewide for this year's close contest compared with 1998, but in Shannon County turnout increased by 89%. Again, no other county in the state showed comparable turnout increases. Shannon County is largely Indian country, home to the Oglala Sioux nation, and is heavily Democratic. But Mr. Thune managed to receive only nine more votes there than did Mr. Daschle's opponent in 1998, notwithstanding the much larger turnout.

Mr. New points out that this is just a 4% increase in GOP votes over 1998. In the other three South Dakota counties where Indians constitute more than two-thirds of the population, Mr. Thune gained between 23% and 43% more votes than the GOP candidate in 1998. The Oglala Sioux would seem to give new meaning to the phrase "bloc voting.

"As Mr. New concedes, "this could all be a coincidence." But "this trifecta of late results, high turnout and unusually strong support for the Democratic nominee should, if nothing else, arouse suspicion."

By the way, we're told that Mr. Thune's lawyers have affidavits from about 50 people attesting to voting irregularities, including from four Indians saying they were each paid $10 to vote. Then there's this week's report of the pending arrest of Becky Red Earth-Villeda, also known as Maka Duta, for allegedly forging absentee-ballot applications. She'd been hired by the South Dakota Democratic Party to recruit voters and denies the charges. But how many smoke signals does it take to wonder if there's also fire?

We understand Mr. Thune is reluctant to risk his future career by seeming ungracious, but he also has an obligation to his thousands of donors and volunteers and especially to the principle of honest elections. Every phony ballot is one that cancels someone else's franchise. And we doubt Mr. Johnson would have turned the same cheek. Virtually at the moment Shannon County's results were reported Wednesday, Mr. Johnson was declaring that the election was over and that "Every vote was counted, every vote was counted correctly."

Happy simply to have regained Senate control, Republicans are letting Mr. Thune walk away from an election challenge, much as John Ashcroft did in 2000. But the world should know that Democrats won at least two seats in highly suspicious, if not crooked, fashion. First they changed the election rules in New Jersey to throw Bob Torricelli over the side once he fell behind in the polls. And now we have Tim Johnson's miraculously large and last-minute Oglala Sioux turnout. And the Democrats still lost the Senate.