By Foreign Standards

The NYT sends out a morning email, which this morning is trying to browbeat Trump into conceding the election. (Gore, of course, didn't concede in 2000 until mid-December, which they fail to mention.) "A president is trying to undo an election result: How would you describe that situation in another country?"

Well, if a President in a foreign country were asking for recounts and audits of suspicious votes, I don't think I'd call it anything except the election process playing out. Those are ordinary enough things in close races or races with questions about their conduct.

Fair enough, though: what would we say about an election like this if it happened in a foreign country? It happens that the State Department had a report on an election in Ukraine that it called "rigged." Streiff at RedState, a fellow I've met once and know to be a veteran of unimpeachable taste in Scotch, reports.

You can read the State Department report in their official archives here. Among the reasons they thought the vote was rigged were "Illegal Use of Absentee Ballots (massive electoral fraud was committed through the illegal use of absentee voter certificates).... Opposition Observers Ejected.... North Korean-Style Turnout in the East: (Turnout in the pro-Yanukovych eastern oblasts was unnaturally high)... Mobile Ballot Box Fraud.... Computer Data Allegedly Altered To Favor Yanukovych..."

So basically everything that Trump's lawyers have sworn affidavits for in their appeals to the courts, in other words.

Apparently we call that "rigged."  Well, G. W. Bush's State Department did, anyway.