Election law blogger Rick Hasen says only Republicans cry fraud... and then must take it back.

Yesterday, Hasen wrote:

Here's what I expect: With Prosser in the lead, the claims of fraud on the Republican side will stop. The Democrats will not raise claims of fraud even if they contest the election.

UPDATE: I already may need to take back the last part of this post: looks like Dems may soon start playing fraud card in WI Sup Ct race, focusing on the clerk who found the lost votes.

How simple life would be if your side stuck to neutral principles and the other side kept cranking out evidence of hypocrisy.

But let's be honest. This isn't really about hypocrisy and neutrality. It's about short-term and long-term interests. In any given race, the loser is hoping to change the outcome. So short term, whoever is down might want to go looking for fraud. Whoever is up is going to want to freeze the outcome right there. Long term, it's a different matter. We can see that the 2 parties have assessed their interests and the Republicans, for whatever reason, think the fraud issue works for them. Democrats want to say what Hasen said in that Politco column of his: that fraud is a bogus issue.

You can try to puzzle out why the 2 parties have assessed their long-term interests that way. It might be that there really is fraud, and it's predominantly on the Democrat side, and that's why Republicans want to expose it, and Democrats want to keep it covered up. It could be something else. Maybe Republicans think that it stirs up their people to get them fretting about how corrupt Democrats are, or they think that vigilance about fraud will deter some Democratic voters from trying to vote. Republicans might want to win support for photo ID requirements, with the ulterior motive that people with problems getting IDs tend to vote for Democrats. You can extrapolate the corresponding long-term-interest analysis on the Democratic side.

If the Democrats cry fraud in the Kloppenburg race, it simply means that the short-term interests are strong enough to overcome the usual long-term interests.