In the likely event that some races in the upcoming election will be decided not by voters but by vote-purging, it must be made clear to all Democratic candidates in all races where this is likely to be a problem: Should your opponent "win" with a margin smaller than the apparent number of illegitimately purged voters, you are not allowed to concede under any circumstances. It is your absolute duty to keep your team composed, organized, and on-task challenging the result through all available means, and to withhold concession regardless of the official outcome of those challenges if the facts prove that the result was illegitimate. Failure to abide by this basic responsibility to the American republic and to your own voters forfeits any future leadership role in the Democratic Party.
Let me be as clear as I possibly can about this: All that matters is how the voters voted, and candidates who would lead us are not permitted to act on any basis other than that. You will not concede because you feel demoralized, or because you want to appear magnanimous; you will not concede out of fear of being called a "sore loser" and mocked by the corrupt pundit class owned by your opponents, as you invariably will be if you simply do your duty; you will not concede due to the inundation of spam emails, fake Tweets, and Xeroxed letters from paid GOP employees pretending to be outraged citizens accusing you of costing taxpayers money for daring to uphold democracy; and you will not concede even if the Supreme Court rules 5-4 that it is constitutional to rig elections so long as the outcome favors Republicans.
Courts do not have the authority to make election-rigging legal. Purging legitimate voters is not some mere end-run tactic like gerrymandering or campaign finance anarchy - it is a direct assault on the democratic process by government denial of guaranteed rights. This wages war on the very foundations of the Constitution and even more basic than that - on the inalienable, fundamental right of the people to determine the composition of their government, and courts no more have the authority to rule out our inherent rights than they have the authority to rule the Constitution unconstitutional.
If the facts are unchallenged and your opponents rely solely on their corruption of the judiciary to win, you will not concede. You will not concede the invasion of this country's institutions by treasonous criminals simply because you feel pressured, or because your glib narcissist peers in politics would think you've gone mad if you behaved as a patriotic statesman rather than an idle aristocrat playing just another game with no consequences. The concession is not yours to make in the first place - if We the People elect you, then consider yourself drafted: The only difference between having your election recognized officially or overthrown by a rigged result is what kind of battle you're commanded to fight.
As it stands under the status quo, there are no consequences whatsoever for successfully rigging an election, even if the fact of it is plain and demonstrable. Politicians are expected to concede because the machinery of state has determined to grant their opponent the office, regardless of whether or not the voters have consented to this decision, and the result is that a criminal wields both legal and political authority. That is unacceptable. A fraudulent election must deeply compromise the ability of the perpetrators to make use of their stolen offices by denying them the cooperation and moral authority of the people - both the voters and the leaders - whom they've robbed. Republicans would probably still consider the price worthwhile, but at least there would be a price to their shenanigans. At least we would not be meekly collaborating in our own subjugation.
We will not go through the Wilderness Years of 2001-2006 again, even in microcosm on the level of downticket races. You will bear the slings and arrows from the Republican-owned media muppet circus, and you will lead even without official authority, serving as a constant thorn in the side of whatever unfortunate bastard has made the mistake of stealing office on your watch. We have no more need of plankton in this country - no more need of self-satisfied cowards who go with the flow in comfort to avoid all confrontation and responsibility, but are happy to passively accept office whenever Republicans happen to allow it through incompetence or strategy. The Ship of State is not a cruise liner anymore, and only working crew are welcome aboard.
A candidate who would concede a plainly rigged election is not someone who actually intended to win in the first place, but someone who - at least inside themselves - is a mere supplicant asking their opponents for permission to assume an office the American people had already granted them. We have no use for such people, so any Democratic candidate who intends to do so should plan on either announcing their retirement from politics immediately after their concession speech or declare their intention to switch parties, because they have no future in ours. This is the Democratic Party, ladies and gentlemen. The Democratic Party. We defend democracy from its most determined enemies, so the leadership of such an organization is no place for people who can't even defend it from their own fecklessness. If you concede, it better be because the voters rejected you, not because Republicans are ruthless.
In fact, you're not to concede to a rigged vote even if the Party leadership tells you to - let us deal with them, and you just do your damn job as a leader chosen by your constituents, regardless of who has the nameplate on his/her desk. You asked people to trust you with authority, so in the event they give it to you and it's denied official recognition by the criminal elements specifically rejected by the voters, then you have to repay that trust by being out in front anyway the whole time that office is being occupied by a thief.
Obviously it would be easier with a taxpayer-funded staff and official privileges, but you would not be without resources if you convince the Democratic base that you are serious. Style yourself as a whatever-in-exile, connect with your constituents where they live, serve them in all the ways the fraudulent officeholder does not, and prove with every word and action that you carry greater authority without office than the asshole the GOP appointed carries with it, and you would gradually win the respect of people outside of the partisan core while limiting the damage the Republicans could inflict through their crime. Eventually, the crime would be rectified - the system invariably fears to have any kind of authority existing outside itself, and ultimately would rather bring authoritative outsiders inside where they can be more easily monitored and controlled. And once that happens, you would be far stronger in office than any mere politician, because you would have the aura of heroism.
Now, on the Presidential front, things are looking pretty nice right now, but even so we should be prepared. I would say exactly the same things to President Obama, if not in even stronger terms: Should Mr. Romney "win" entirely through the disenfranchisement of voters, your duty not to concede under any circumstances would be the most profound and most costly. Al Gore should not have conceded in 2000, and whatever costs to the republic he feared from accepting the mantle of President-in-Exile were exceeded a thousand times over by the horrors of the Bush regime. You witnessed that history unfold just as the rest of us did, and you know we cannot afford to repeat it.
Had Gore dismissed the conclusions of the lawless, nakedly partisan 5-4 Supreme Court decision handing George W. Bush the presidency and set up his own Shadow Executive to comment on, obstruct, and mitigate the damage inflicted by the crimes of George W. Bush, how likely would something like the invasion of Iraq and the mass-torture of prisoners have been? The furious energy and assertive citizenship only later catalyzed by internet phenomena like Daily Kos in the second half of the decade might have been brought to bear far earlier, and disrupted some of the worst of the outrages.
But Gore couldn't see it - his whole, long career had been spent surrounded by aristocratic politicians for whom this is only a game, and to whom concession is merely an acknowledgment that one has been outplayed regardless of how the result was achieved. He read the editorials and heard the calls to "accept the inevitable" and move on, not seeing them for what they were - the empty-headed opinions of people merely speaking to institutional etiquette and social complacency rather than reality. He looked at George W. Bush and saw an asshole he disagreed with profoundly, not a psychotic monster who was going to eviscerate every foundation of American civilization, economic and political. "We'll get them next time," he likely thought, complacently - as did many ordinary Democrats.
Gore did not understand that Republicans had become a far more toxic form of criminal than the ordinary thieves and hypocrites he was accustomed to seeing in politics, and thus did not understand that he was called upon to become a more serious form of leader than just another candidate for office. And thus, following the Supreme Court decision, he left office and faded from view for several years while America wandered in the wilderness and the Darkness gathered around us. I don't say he betrayed us, because I don't think he knew what he was supposed to do - despite the fact that I saw it clearly even then, as a teenager - but history had called him to a level of duty he had never known before, and he couldn't hear the call. That was just one of the first cases of weakness among the best people of this country that heralded years of tragedy and atrocity from the worst.
Gore found his voice again later, but it was too little, too late. I have a far greater estimation of Barack Obama than I've ever had of Al Gore, and the facts of his meteoric rise to the Presidency from an obscure background and relatively compressed political career make me hopeful about his understanding of certain fundamental realities. If Mr. Romney is declared the victor entirely by virtue of purged votes, and the result upheld by partisan courts rendering lawless opinions like Bush v. Gore, then I would hope President Obama would more follow the example of Charles de Gaulle than Al Gore, at least in terms of refusing to surrender when immediate convenience and the opinions of weak or corrupt people would suggest it.
Now, if this unlikely scenario unfolds, that doesn't mean the President should refuse to leave office - no one will deny that defying a fraudulent election would be a slender tightrope for an incumbent to walk given the dangerous precedents that lay on either side of the line. Republicans should have no precedent by which their criminals could refuse to leave when legitimately thrown out of office. But neither should he concede, attend the disgraceful inauguration of a fraud, or refrain from behaving as President in whatever unofficial capacities are practical and can maintain constituent support.
And if, in that event, the Tea Party terrorists (tea-rrorists?) took this otherwise civil resistance as a signal to act on their fantasies of armed revolution and attempt to impose by force the authority their seizure of offices had failed to acquire by fraud, then a President-in-Exile would at least have the organizational base from which to defend the American people. But again, I'm not saying any of these circumstances are likely to occur on the Presidential level - merely that a number of possibilities exist which must be examined and their implications acknowledged.
While our chances for retaining the Presidency look good even in the midst of all these shenanigans, that would be cold comfort if it's to be four more years of gridlock with a House and Senate completely under the dominion of corrupt monsters who would block all nominees and all legislation sent to them while America's situation deteriorates. We will deal with that if necessary, but it's certainly not necessary to help them achieve that result by cooperating with their attempts to rig downticket races. A purged vote is a purged vote, so even if Obama has more than enough support to overcome the loss, that doesn't mean it wouldn't give the GOP more seats in Congress and protect some of its incumbents who might otherwise fall. We must not allow that. Every seat that the voters give to us, we must demand.
The Republican attempts to rig this election are well underway and well-documented here and elsewhere, and we must know exactly what we intend should they succeed. We must ensure that our leaders accept those intentions regardless of what they feel to be in the best interests of their personal political convenience, and know that there will be no career for them in this Party's politics if they concede a rigged vote regardless of what pressure is brought to bear on them. They must understand that even if they secured the support of the machinery for a later race, and even if they don't face a strong primary challenger, they will get no financial support from the blogosphere and the small donors it enables, and no volunteers from among activists. We will not donate to or work for candidates who surrender in the face of victory - only those who make the absolute most of our efforts, with or without the nameplate at the end of the day.
PS: I would hope that Democratic poll workers are planning to keep a running photographic tally of all votes that are purged so that we know exactly how many there were for which candidate. If this is not being planned, we had better put it in motion to be ready for November, and to hell with every obstacle that might interfere with such a basic necessity of ensuring a real election occurs.