Thursday, August 9, 2018

Last Call For Counting Coup

Our old friend Kris Kobach is in a razor-thin primary fight for Governor of Kansas with current Governor Jeff Colyer, and with fewer than 100 votes now separating him from his opponent, keep in mind that Kobach has not recused himself as Secretary of State yet, meaning he's technically overseeing his own vote counting and an inevitable recount.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s lead over Gov. Jeff Colyer in the Republican primary has shrunk to only 91 votes after election officials discovered a mistake in the listing for one county’s results in the state’s tally of votes.

The lead is minuscule when compared with the 311,000 votes cast.

The final, unofficial results posted on the secretary of state’s website show Kobach winning Thomas County in northwest Kansas, with 466 votes to Colyer’s 422. But the tally posted by the Thomas County clerk’s office shows Colyer with 522 votes, or 100 votes more, a number the clerk confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday.

Bryan Caskey, state elections director, said county officials pointed out the discrepancy Thursday following a routine request for a post-election check of the numbers to counties by the secretary of state’s office.

County election officials have yet to finish counting late-arriving mail-in ballots or provisional ballots provided to voters at the polls when their eligibility wasn’t clear.

“This is a routine part of the process,” Caskey said. “This is why we emphasize that election-night results are unofficial.”

Thomas County Clerk Shelly Harms said it’s possible that her handwriting on the tally sheet faxed to the secretary of state’s office was bad enough in the rush of primary-night business that the number for Colyer wasn’t clear.

“They just misread it,” she told The Associated Press.

Colyer’s campaign said Thursday that it had set up a “voting integrity” telephone hotline after it had received “countless” reports of voters experiencing issues at the polls.

Kobach is the state’s chief elections officers and told reporters Wednesday that he knew of no reports of irregularities outside of a long delay in the reporting of results from Johnson County, the state’s most populous county, because of issues with its new machines.

“We’ll certainly be going through the results county by county,” Colyer spokesman Kendall Marr said.

No matter how you look at it, for the most vocal critic of voting procedures in the US, a man who screamed about "massive widespread voting fraud" for years and did everything he could to remove as many Democrats as possible from the voter rolls to be in charge of his own vote count is insane.

But that's the GOP for you.  Anything that actually would be even remotely humbling like this, they could not give less of a crap about.

When Colyer manages to lose, I wonder what he'll do?

I know what Kansas should do, and that's vote for the Democrat in the race, Laura Kelly.

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