What the hell is the matter with Mississippi and their elections all of a sudden?!
You’ll recall that two weeks ago, e-voting system failures — such as machines that wouldn’t boot up at all and votes that were counted twice — created chaos during Mississippi’s state primaries, leading one official to declare days afterward, as they were all struggling to sort out results of several close elections: “At this point there is no election…Everyone is baffled.”
Then, last week, we reported on the Jones County, MS election clerk who asked for, and received permission from, the county Board of Supervisors to remove the so-called “paper trail” printers from his county’s 100% unverifiable Diebold touch-screen voting machines because, as he told the board reportedly (with a straight face), “the voting machines record every vote and there is no way for them to be tampered with.”
(That Jones County Circuit Clerk, Bart Gavin, has still not replied to our request for comment hoping to determine whether he’s just hopelessly clueless, or something worse.)
And now comes this, from Rankin County, MS in advance of today’s Democratic gubernatorial run-off election…
If you are a Rankin County resident and read the Rankin County News or the Rankin Leader, you might not be aware that Johnny DuPree and Bill Luckett face each other in tomorrow’s run off election.
A sample ballot appears in the Aug. 17 edition of the weekly paper listing the Republican candidates for District 20 state senator, coroner, District 4 supervisor and state treasurer. The Democratic governor’s runoff, however, is not mentioned in the ballot or the front-page article about the runoffs.
Rankin County News and Rankin Leader Publisher Marcus Bowers said the omission was an oversight and not intentional.
“I was busy, and with so much going on, I forgot,” Bowers said today. Bowers said he may run a correction next week, even though it will be after the primary at that point.
Rankin County Democratic Party Chairman James Parker worries that the county’s turnout for the Democratic runoff will suffer as a result.
[Hat-tip @MaddowBlog on the Twitters.]
Perhaps Mississippi should just save a lot of time and money for everyone by just asking one person, let’s say, Jones County Circuit Clerk Bart Gavin or Rankin County News and Rankin Leader publisher Marcus Bowers, who should be named the “winner” of any given race. All this “voting” and “democracy” and stuff is clearly just becoming an inconvenience for everyone involved in Mississippi.
Off topic, sorry.
Anybody else wondering about Wisconsin’s exit polls in the last election? Just read them on DU under elections.
http://electiondefensealliance.org/http%3A/%252Felectiondefensealliance.org/wisconsindata
Surprise , they were off , all leaned to red.
One paragraph of the WI exit-poll report that Molly linked to was especially interesting.
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hacking down distractions
New Blog — Keep up the great work.
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Hello Brad,
Is that the newspaper excuse
. I think it is right up there with the classic
.
There are Democrats in MS! Who knew?
From Democracy Now!:
Democracy Now neglects to mention that this historic election will be conducted on 100% unverifiable touch screen DREs.
The article is from 2009. Of course no charges were brought against our homegrown Limbutt.
Interesting article, Cyndy Tyler.
Right-wing
trolltalk show host, Dale Jackson, announced, on-air, that “those who planned to vote for Democrat Laura Hall to wait until Wednesday to vote because of overcrowding at the polls. Hall lost the District 7 special election to Republican Paul Sanford.”Although Jackson also posted this announcement on WVNN’s web site using the state’s official seal, Niki Doyle of The Huntsville Times referred it as simply an “on-air prank.”
Here, on planet earth, we call it GOP dirty tricks that are intended to fraudulently disenfranchise voters.
Koch Industries’ “Americans for Prosperity” carried out similar dirty tricks entailing fraudulent absentee ballot mailings in advance of the recent WI Recall elections.
I’m disturbed, but not surprised, that the MS AG did not prosecute Jackson. I’m even more disturbed that so many of readers of The Huntsville Times found this “prank” amusing.
Is there no one in the Magnolia state left in government who desires democracy?
Ernie – FWIW, I believe that took place in Alabama, as opposed to Mississippi. Where, you’ll recall, they have even less interest in democracy than they do in Mississippi. Just ask their former Gov. Don Siegelman, as I did, about his 2002 “election”.
Duh, as in Huntsville, AL!
Wake up Ernie.
There’s two reasons why I’ll never move back to MS – the racism like the poll earlier this year that showed that 46% of MS Republicans STILL think that interracial marriage (like mine) should be illegal, and crap like the “it’s God’s will that we should stop people voting for liberals” stunt that you exposed in your article. But lest we forget, the conservatives are the REAL Americans, right? *sigh*