Joe Miller (Image by zieak via Flickr)
When is it time to give up? Joe Miller doesn’t think he’s hit that point. But the only path he has to becoming Senator representing Alaska is to have every ballot he’s challenging get thrown out, and then have a manual recount that might give him another couple thousand votes.
But what galls me is that this is no longer about winning the election. This is about disenfranchising voters. For Miller to “win,” he has to find a way for the state government to ignore votes cast by people who wanted Lisa Murkowski to represent them in the Senate. In other words, he is actively trying to undermine democracy.
I am perfectly happy to support recounts, manual or otherwise, as long as the goal is to divine the will of the people. And I’m happy to support efforts to ensure that the people who vote are the people who are legally entitled to do so. But when the goal becomes disenfranchising voters, it tears at the very fabric of our society. I cannot and will not support that.
I’m sure this must happen with Democrats as well, but the only instances of which I’m aware are Republicans. It happened in Florida in 2000, Washington in 2004, and Minnesota in 2008. In every case, there was a Republican effort to disenfranchise voters. I’d like to know if there have been any Democratic (aside from Dixiecrat) efforts to disenfranchise voters. Can any of you point to one?
538 Refugees 
Michael, a Republican attempt to disenfranchise voters happened in Minnesota in 2010, too. Tom Emmer wanted the precincts to match the number of votes cast against the number of signatures in voting books that people sign when they come into the polling place. If the number of signatures was lower, he wanted excess ballots randomly selected and discarded. Of course, these challenges were to happen only in precincts where Mark Dayton had a big majority.
Mind you, there was no evidence whatever that there were any actual mismatches in the numbers. He just wanted to take the time to do the counts, and then disenfranchise as many voters as he could.
Are y’all telling me that the party of “we the people”, in actual fact, could give a fat rat’s patoot ABOUT the will of the people as long as THEY and THEIR party wins???
It’s interesting because the Freepers have the ABSOLUTE CONVICTION that elections are constantly being stolen from them by illegal Dem recounts… even though (as Michael points out) they are usually the ones who demand the recounts, use all means possible to draw them out, and struggle to disenfranchise voters by discarding votes where the intention was obvious.
Read the comments here. It’s really maddening. The Dems involved in a recount are always “stealing another election”… while Republicans are “fighting for democracy.”
I think that the title to Michael’s piece says it all.
And Joe lost to a WRITE-IN candidate.
Tom Emmer challenged any ballot where an individual voter had not voted for ANY governor candidate, but HAD voted in the other races on the ballot, with Emmer claiming that the voter INTENDED to vote for Tom Emmer.
But as someone commented in the local newspapers here, the recount is to determine a voter’s intent, not to determine the voter’s intelligence.
I love that picture of Joe. Looks like he has been on a three week bender.
@Numero Siete: Are you saying that he hasn’t? 🙂