What's
the matter with Alaska? Might as well be Kansas. Maybe we'll uncover
some received wisdom about the Frontier state during the Sarah Palinfest
that is coming to TLC next Sunday.
The latest wingnut to emerge from the glaciers is Joe Miller, who has now decided to evoke the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore to force the state to stop counting votes. Y'know, because if they counted all the votes, he'd, like. . .lose. And Miller doesn't want to lose. So he just wants a judge to make them stop counting legal votes so he can be a senator. Or not count the ones that have spelling mistakes. So under his rules, if you can't spell a candidate's name, you don't get to vote.
Wow. Makes the Jim Crow laws seem righteous by comparison.
Gee, that would be some activist judge who would decide in his favor, wouldn't it? Some serious legislating from the bench. I thought the Teabaggers hated that kind of thing.
The hypocrisy never stops. Read on! Jesse Zwick writes in the Washington Independent ...
"GOP Senate nominee Joe Miller has officially filed suit in federal court against the Alaska Division of Elections' announced rules for counting write-in votes that may be credited to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R). The suit challenges the rules on a number of grounds. The main argument is that only a correctly spelled ballot, as opposed to a looser standard of "voter intent," should be used to judge whether or not a ballot should be accepted, but Miller's campaign also makes the claim, flagged by TPM's Josh Marshall, that misspelled Murkowski ballots should in fact be interpreted not as votes for the senator but as protest votes against her. From the suit:[T]he new policy makes no provision for the many voters who cast protest votes. Prior to the election, people commented on radio stations and in the comment sections in blogs and newspaper stories that they would deliberately incorrectly write-in a variation of "Murkowski" as a protest. They did so knowing that Murkowski was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a "spelling bee" campaign, replete with wrist bands, pencils and tattoos, all to educate the voters on proper spelling. Why was this done? Because even Murkowski had read the law and knew that it required proper spelling -- "No exceptions." So protest voters were trying to send a message to the candidate. The state has failed to create any guideline or standard that would account for the intent of the voter who intentionally cast a protest vote.
Marshall finds this argument pretty laughable, and at least from a legal standpoint, it would seem unlikely to hold water. Elections law expert Rick Hasen, however, thinks that Miller's camp does have a few good arguments it could make -- the most promising being a 'due process claim' that argues the candidate's rights were violated by a change in elections rules in the middle of the election."
