I count my vote for Barbara Boxer in 1992 as one of my best ever, right up there with voting for Wayne Morse in 1962 (That'll get them checking their history books!) and I was pleased to vote for her again this year. And clearly there were serious problems with the vote count last year in Ohio and elsewhere. And the use of electronic voting machines without auditable trails and with "proprietary" codes should be outlawed.

But...

Even if the vote in Ohio turned out to be a fraud and Kerry actually won there, he still lost by about 3,000,000 votes (though he got mine). What is happening here, I think, is that for perhaps the first time in our history we are paying some serious attention to fraudulent voting, but I think Dougie had it right. We lost. To defraud enough votes to change the results would have required fraud on a Ukrainian scale, and they couldn't even get away with it there. To base accusations of fraud on what people SAID they did after leaving the polling booth is to put more faith in polls than in elections, a risk I am not ready to take.

Assuming fraud in the lections relieves us lefties of the responsibility of figuring out where we went wrong. If we assume our principles are valid, and I do, we need to figure out how to do it right next time. Crying foul does not aid us in this process.