Redstate

By Erick Posted in Elections — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Markos Moulitsas, better known as Kos, has become a regular contributor to the Guardian, one of Britain's lefty newspapers. I am no fan of fisking, but some of the drivel in his column today is worth noting. He does a brilliant job of misleading to make his point that evil Republicans are out to destroy the election.

Read on . . .

First up, Kos says that folks in Broward County, Florida are already having problems voting. Then he says, "The person in charge of elections is the secretary of state, Glenda Hood, a Republican." How scary. The Secretary of State in Tallahasssee is, at the opposite end of the state, participating in a conspiracy to disenfranchise people. Perhaps Kos should have pointed out that each county in Florida has an elections superintendent and elections board that is responsible, on the local level, for the elections. Broward County's Board of Elections is predominately Democrat and it was that partisan group that is responsible for the trouble on the local level. Notwithstanding that, what was the evil, awful trouble Kos alleges Glenda Hood brewed? Well

Broward County had 14 voting sites but several of them had trouble linking polling station laptop computers with the supervisor's office, said Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Glenda Hood. The computers are used to confirm voter eligibility. Workers used paper lists and called the supervisor's office in Fort Lauderdale to verify eligibility, Nash said.

Broward elections officials did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Perhaps if the Democrats in charge on the ground had gone on the record, Kos would have more accurately cast his blame. In any event, the situation was resolved and voting continued.

Kos goes on to complain about voters having their registration forms rejected because they signed the voter registration form but didn't check off a box saying they were citizens. Hello? Don't we want people to specifically affirm they are citizens when the vote? There is a pending lawsuit on the matter pushed by unions in Florida.

With the election looming, U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King of Miami urged quick work in a lawsuit against Florida's largest counties over the rejection of more than 10,000 voter registration forms that officials say were improperly filled out.

Nearly 45 percent of the challenged forms in one county, Duval, came from blacks.

The lawsuit challenges state rules that let counties disqualify people who provided a signature affirming their eligibility to vote but failed to list an identification number, such as from a driver's license, or failed to check boxes affirming they were citizens, were mentally competent and were not felons.

A coalition of unions named Hood and election supervisors in Duval, Orange, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties in the suit.

So, people can just sign their form, but leave out some crucial information. Is it a bit odd that Kos wants to challenge the integrity of the process in states that are allegedly being hurt by Republican activities? Well, if that is not enough, Kos turns his sights on Milwaukee where as Kos tells us

The Republican in charge of ballot printing in Milwaukee County, one of the most heavily Democratic in this important swing state, has ordered the printing of 250,000 fewer ballots than election officials asked for in this high-interest race. In fact, the 679,000 ballots the county had offered to print is less than the total used in the 2000 election.

Well, if you are just hearing about this and are outraged, how about I paint the rest of the picture Kos might have been too busy to paint. See here.

In a letter sent to City Elections chief Lisa Artison, Walker said that he had "serious questions" about the need for that many ballots when the city reported having 382,000 registered voters in September.

Walker said that having excess ballots around was troublesome in light of possible illegalities in current voter-registration drives - already under investigation by the district attorney - and potential "chaos" at understaffed polling places where voters could grab ballots.

Milwaukee wanted 297,000 more ballots than it had registered voters. Is there a toilet paper shortage or just an overflow of dead people dying to vote? By the way, while Walker is a Republican, the Milwaukee mayor demanding the ballots is the State Chairman for Kerry's campaign.

Kos does point out suspicious activity in Nevada and South Dakota that is legitimate. He fails to point out that part of the investigation in Nevada is over whether the group hired by Republicans was actually a lefty group out to get the Republicans. There are credible reports of that. Kos also wastes his time on New Hampshire where, horror of horrors, a Republican dirty trickster from 2002 is supporting Bush in 2004, with no evidence of dirty tricks. (Throwing that one in the list was rather lame, Kos.)

What is most telling is what Kos has failed to mention.

In Michigan and Ohio, lefty groups have gotten Clinton appointed federal judges to say voters can cast provisional ballots anywhere in the state, even if they don't live in the area, and have their votes counted -- talk about disrupting the integrity of the process.

In Ohio, the NAACP Voter Fund hired people who paid registration collectors in crack cocaine to register voters. The crackheads made up the registrations.^1.

In some parts of Ohio, lefty groups like ACORN and ACT are turning in voter registration forms for more people than actually live in the areas. In the past few days over 25,000 voter notices have been returned to boards of elections because the registered voter does not either exist or live where they claimed to live when registering.

Across the nation, lefty interest groups are running to court in efforts to corrupt the process and contaminate the integrity of the election. That the Republicans are trying to enforce rules passed democratically that the lefty groups now want subverted probably isn't relevant to a lefty like Kos. For the average non-lefty American (and Brit) that side of the story should be told.

^1.Please note the irony here that a former New Hampshire political dirty trickster is condemned for helping this year without dirty tricks, but crackheads, illegal aliens, and felons should by no means be denied the right to help the Democrats and vote for Kerry.