Posted on 02/14/2008 7:19:10 AM PST by ecurbh
Mike Huckabee's campaign grabbed headlines in the days approaching the "Potomac primary" by lacing into the leadership of the Washington State Republican Party after John McCain eked out a modest "victory" in that state's February 9 precinct caucuses. The "loss" contrasted with Huckabee's strong showing earlier that day in Kansas, thus his campaign promptly called the Washington results into question. The caucus results have now been examined and updated without ultimate change to the leader board, but the episode has revealed more about Huckabee and his Ed Rollins-led campaign than anything else.
At the crux of the original contretemps was the decision by Washington State GOP Chair Luke Esser to project McCain the victor with results from 87 percent of the state's precincts tallied. The resulting late-night, imprecisely worded press release, however, gave Huckabee's campaign the wrong impression. They immediately leaped to the conclusion that Esser had ceased counting "votes," wouldn't be tabulating further results, and arbitrarily declared the contest over on an apparent whim. None of that was actually true, but it didn't stop Huckabee or his campaign staff from publicly repeating those myths in the next few days.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
So you are ok with clergy in the oval office as long as they agree with you.
Look, in a state where the Dems are electorally the most corrupt in the country, the Reps can’t be far behind. Trusting the Republicans to count votes in Washington state is like trusting an alcoholic to stay out of the liquor cabinet.
A 9% lead with 87% reporting is a pretty large number of votes. His staff would have also have had the precinct by precinct breakdown, so if there was a significant amount of vote fraud in a particular precinct it would have been noticable, and the Huckabee campaign likely had observers in most of the precincts that they could contact for more information. Checking that the counting was still continuing couldn't have taken more than a quick phone call if his staff is remotely organized.
If the precincts were reporting one number and those numbers were getting modified when passed on, it would get noticed by the people working the precinct.
I'm not saying that vote fraud can't happen, but it is really hard to do on a wide scale, and pretty easy to detect if done on a wide scale. If they were falsifying the vote by as many votes as he was losing by, there would be a lot of evidence of it, and all he needed to do was take just a little time to look for it. I find it hard to believe that his staff wasn't already looking for the possibility of it.
So him just shooting off his mouth like he did shows that he's either an idiot that has no business running for President, or he's playing the dishonest populist political play of alleging corruption when there isn't evidence of it just to gather support and sympathy from the conspiracy theory types.
Sorry, Washington State is right up there with the top level election cheats thanks to the way the Grigoire votes were dealt with, so 9% ain't nothin' (ya dig!?)
bump for later
No. That's actual evidence of a problem. That's the kind of thing Huckabee didn't bother to look for before shooting off his mouth.
Sorry, Washington State is right up there with the top level election cheats thanks to the way the Grigoire votes were dealt with, so 9% ain't nothin' (ya dig!?)
Nine percent of a precinct is possible without it being too obvious. Nine percent of the total with 87% of the precincts reporting in, isn't possible without it being noticeable, not that Huckabee appears to have actually been looking for real evidence of a problem before making his claims.
Look, Washington State has a real problem. It simply cannot be defended.
Curiously, Huckabee and Hillary are at about the same distance behind the lead candidates of their respective parties.
I thought Hillary and Obama were basically neck and neck in delegates where as Huckabee is very far behind McCain like 814 to 215 .....
http://www.thegreenpapers.com/
On the Sunday before Super Tuesday, Romney was quoted as agreeing with talk show hosts saying, "We really can't afford John McCain as the nominee of our party." Ten days later he would endorse McCain.
On Super Tuesday evening Romney said that the one thing they learned from the election results was that they would continue on. Three days later, he would suspend his campaign ( Because we are at war ya know ). Seven days later, he would end his campaign, for real this time.
This is not graceful, it is schizophrenic.
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