Throwing the voters out.

WHEN Ed Rollins mentioned the words "walking-around money" at a press conference explaining Christine Todd Whitman's 1993 gubernatorial victory, there was a firestorm of national outrage. Whitman had to beat back calls for her to step aside, and a small-scale investigation was immediately mounted to discover if there was anything to Rollins's claim that black people had been paid not to vote. The hair-trigger reaction of the media and political culture to Rollinsgate is in marked contrast to the silence that has greeted two budding vote-fraud scandals in which more and more evidence suggests federal elected offices were stolen.

As Rollins discovered, paying black people not to vote -- or even saying you did -- is an (almost) unforgivable political sin. But paying black people to vote often, as clearly happened in Louisiana last November, is fine. As Rollins learned, any underhanded means of electing a Republican is subject to the strictest, accusatory scrutiny of the media. But signing up non-citizens and illegal immigrants to vote, flouting campaign finance laws, sending vans into poor neighborhoods to ferry around residents to get them to vote often, isn't worth worrying over -- as long as it's in the service of liberal Democrats.

This hypocrisy may soon be strained by the weight of evidence Bob Dornan and Woody Jenkins have accumulated in their respective electoral challenges. Harold Johnson details in this issue (p. 26) how the Los Angeles Times (braving protests from "Hispanic" groups) has already found some five hundred illegal votes in Dornan's nine hundred-vote loss to Loretta Sanchez; it is safe to surmise now that there are more than enough illegal votes to account for Sanchez's margin of alleged victory. Meanwhile, Woody Jenkins has filed more evidence with the Senate Rules Committee, including yet more transcripts of interviews with people involved in vote-buying, to suggest widespread fraud in his narrow loss to Mary Landrieu.

Indeed, in the back-and-forth of Rules Committee filings between the Jenkins and Landrieu campaigns, Jenkins has scored points recently. Specifically, he has knocked the legs out from under a key piece of circumstantial evidence in Landrieu's favor. In her request for a summary dismissal, "Senator" Landrieu maintained that both candidates in the hotly contested New Orleans D.A. race between the machine-supported incumbent Harry Connick Sr. and black challenger Morris Reed would have employed poll watchers on Nov. 5, making widespread fraud impossible.

But in an affidavit, Morris Reed says his "campaign did not finance, recruit volunteers, or assign individuals for the position of poll-watchers." In fact, Reed wrote to the Justice Department last October requesting that it send observers to monitor the elections. He wrote of New Orleans's top election official -- a supporter of Connick -- that there are "serious questions about whether he can discharge his official responsibilities fairly and impartially." Reed says today that "there is no doubt in my mind that there was fraud utilized in this election."

Rep. Billy Tauzin (R., La.) is calling on the Justice Department to undertake a criminal investigation of this fraud. But, in the end, the fate of both cases will depend not so much on the evidence of wrongdoing as on the willingness of Republicans to stand up for themselves -- and here there's cause for concern.

Dornan is an outspoken conservative who lost to a Hispanic woman. "Senator" Mary Landrieu, meanwhile, is nice and cute, a fine addition to the Senate club. Even if congressional investigations confirm the worst, attempts to call new elections in either case will provoke screams from Democrats and the media. But the GOP should have the fortitude to withstand the noise. Over the course of their year-long retreat, Republicans have seen fit to throw many of their principles overboard. But free and fair elections shouldn't be allowed to go the same way.