Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Wrath Of The Spellbinder

In the continuing saga/national embarrassment that is the Alaska Senate mess, Joe Miller is now suing to eliminate any write-in ballots where Lisa Murkowski's name isn't spelled precisely correct.

Miller is asking a judge to stop the state from making a judgment on a voter's intentions if the voter wrote in something other than "Murkowski" or "Lisa Murkowski." State law allows no leeway for other spellings, his lawsuit says.

Despite the lawsuit, the state is preparing this morning to start checking and counting the more than 92,000 write-in ballots cast in last week's election. Gail Fenumiai, the state's elections director, said she plans to start this counting at 9 a.m.

The state counted about 27,000 absentee and early votes Tuesday, according to Fenumiai, with Miller gaining on the write-in total by about 2,100 votes. At the end of the day, Miller remained 11,333 behind the write-in total. 

At the beginning of the day, Miller had been trailing by 13,439 votes.

The Murkowski campaign reacted to Tuesday's lawsuit by accusing Miller of trying to toss out legitimate votes for the eight-year incumbent. "They're trying to discount as many votes as possible from Alaskans," Murkowski campaign manager Kevin Sweeney said.

Miller's lawyer, Tom Van Flein, is asking a federal judge for a hearing this afternoon.

I still stand by my theory that Joe Miller is making his case for overturning the 17th Amendment by making this particular direct election of a Senator so god awful that the country will gladly go through the entire process to not only get a two-thirds vote in the House and Senate but then have three quarters of the states ratify a Constitutional amendment just to prevent this from happening again in six years.
 
It's a devious plan to make us so despise statewide Senate recount nonsense that we're actually willing to hand it over the process to state legislatures and make them fight it out just to gain respite.

You laugh now, but the guy did run on repealing the 17th Amendment, after all.

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