Free Republic

WASHINGTON - The nation's election officials have been warning for months that the sheer volume of ballots sent by mail will delay this year's general election vote count. But there's another reason results are likely to be later than usual this year: Some states lag in how they handle mailed ballots before the tabulating ever starts. A mail-in ballot cannot be counted until election officials verify that it was returned by a registered voter. The ballot is in an unmarked envelope, which is mailed inside a larger outer envelope with a place for the voter's name and signature. The name...

U.S. Rep. William Delahunt blew nearly $560,000 in campaign cash last year - much of it on lavish meals and a family-friendly payroll that includes his ex-wife, son-in-law and daughter - stoking speculation the Quincy Democrat is emptying his war chest and won’t seek re-election. -snip- Delahunt told the Herald last week that he was still weighing whether to seek re-election, but Democratic Party sources have privately indicated his departure is anticipated - and expected to draw a host of candidates-in-waiting out of the woodwork.

My secret sources have discovered another bizarre twist in the ongoing Climategate scandal: Breaking! Al Gore Demands Partial Recount of Climate Data As the impact of the global warming scandal widens, Nobel Prize winner and long time spokesperson for the movement demanded a partial recount of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data. In asking for the partial recount, Mr Gore asked that any data tending to show global cooling should be re-counted while data tending to show global warming be left as it is. When asked whether this would tend to skew the data in favor of global...

This report (link), hot off the press, signifies a victory for Norm Coleman in the election contest with Al Franken: the court hearing the contest has ruled that "all absentee ballots that complied with state law should be counted, along with those where errors occurred through no fault of the voter." Franken has been trying to prevent a number of ballots that complied with state law from being counted.

Retired bank president Christine Jennings of Sarasota, Fla., is optimistic about her chances in the 13th District congressional race. Polls show her ahead, but she is worried about those electronic voting machines that a third of the country is using this year. "There are too, too many things that can go wrong with them," she told "20/20." She's skeptical because two years ago, Jennings ran for and lost the same congressional seat. She got the most votes, but the machines in her hometown recorded thousands of ballots that registered no vote on election night. She lost by a razor-thin margin....

AP: The Omnipotent, All-Merciful Lord God Barry Hussein Obama, Ruler of all he sees, today jumped out to an early lead over his weak and corrupt Republican opponent, the vitriolic and stupidly mundane Sarah Palin. Obama's Minister of Elections, Shaheed Mustafa, convicted felon and former head of ACORN, stated that the Most Merciful Lord God Obama, by virtue of millions of fraudulent registrations in Ohio, was ahead in early voting by almost 3 billion votes, considered to be an insurmountable lead. Mustafa conceded, however, that with almost 4 more years of early voting to go, the backwoods hick Palin might...

When Chicago GOP's Tom Swiss alerted IR to the possibility that Cook County was sending voter registrars to a huge immigration rally this weekend, it reminded us of the serious allegations we ran across in 2006. In August of 2006, we first realized the heated nature of registering illegal aliens to vote while working on a registration drive among churches in the 6th CD. When IR questioned a report in the Chicago Tribune about Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-4th CD) encouraging illegals to register to vote, a blog controversy erupted as Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Refugee Rights blasted us for...

If only those were just hanging chads they were talking about on the Senate floor Wednesday afternoon. Republican Sen. Carey Baker of Eustis proposed an amendment to a transportation bill that would have cracked down on an increasingly popular accoutrement on trucks: hanging sacks - dubbed “truck nutz” — that very realistically resemble male genitalia. His proposal is to make it a violation worthy of a $60 non-moving violation to have the testicular feature on your car, which are most commonly found hanging down from the trailer hitches of pickup trucks. It’s just like the state’s existing regulations against obscenity...

Florida Could Face Another Election FiascoFri Nov 3, 11:23 PM ET Six years after the Election Day standoff and hanging chads of 2000, Central Florida voters could once again find themselves experiencing voting chaos. The WESH 2 I-Team has discovered that new problems at the polls could plague Tuesday's election. Touch-screen computers and optical scan voting machines were supposed to fix what ails the Florida election process, but there were problems during September's primary. "Three of the results tapes for three of the touch-screen precincts have never been found," said Susan Pynchon of the Florida Fair Election Coalition. During an...

Elections: If missing smart-cards and multiple ballot-casting buttons aren't enough trouble from electronic voting machines, the one complication we don't need is a foreign predator at the controls. Think it can't happen? Well, it already has, with Smartmatic, an electronic voting firm that owes its presence in U.S. markets to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez's abundant cash. Until 2004, Smartmatic was a little-known startup in Boca Raton, Fla., run by two 30-year-old Venezuelan engineers who claimed their only motivation was to prevent another 2000 Florida hanging-chad controversy. They were worth at most $2 million and operated out of one of their...

Thoughtful Democrats — the rarest birds on the endangered species list — might want to ponder this: "Another hanging chad has dropped. His name is John G. Roberts Jr., and he undoubtedly will turn out to be opposed to abortion rights, affirmative action, an expansive view of federal powers and a reading of the Constitution that takes a properly suspicious view of the state's embrace of religion. You hang enough chads, and you get to change the Supreme Court." That's not moveon.org, or the wilder shores of the Internet. That's Richard Cohen, big-time columnist in that bastion of mainstream media,...

Ed Ball, the legendary curmudgeon who ran the St. Joe Company every day and the State of Florida most days, always accompanied his hoisted bourbon glass with the same toast: “Confusion to the enemy!” For Florida Republican leaders, that wish couldn’t have come truer or sweeter than the confusion which befell their political enemies this past week. Governor Bush called it “ shameful” and other GOP officials clucked their disgust and shook their heads. But the truth is we Republicans can hardly keep the grins off our faces as Democrats are turning red, then purple, then ghastly white. It seems...

"Frenchie Kerry" (Based on "Spanish Eddie" sung by Laura Branigan) There were chads in the air And ballots everywhere you looked So there wasn't a lot And the votes got you know you took And I remember wonderin' Where you'd been The night Frenchie Kerry cashed it in The night Frenchie Kerry cashed it in They were playin' "Desolation Row" On the radio The night Frenchie Kerry fell from grace There was sadness on Daschle's face On the night that Kerry failed Sanity prevailed It was June or July When the heat from the press beat down It was famine...

Please NO, not the chad!

New York - Boston's ALCS victory celebration proved short-lived last night, as a hastily-assembled New York State Supreme Court ruled 9-0 to overturn the Red Sox historic come-from-behind win over the Yankees. The dramatic ruling, issued at 4:52 AM, noted that while losing the series 4 games to 3 the Yankees had actually outscored Boston 45 - 41, and that a Red Sox berth in the World Series would constitute "widespread disenfranchisement of the higher scoring, and clearly more popular, team." The ruling also overturned a game six interference call against Yankee Alex Rodriguez, which it termed "an arbitrary and...

IT WAS an affair with technology that began in the early part of the last century and lasted several blissful decades before ending in an ugly divorce.Now Americans have simply fallen out of love with their not-so-trusty old mechanical voting machines, which were widely blamed for the 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida. But as voters in the United States rush to embrace the wonders of touch-screen voting and other electronic improvements on the notorious butterfly ballots and hanging chads of four years ago, many believe the old system was not so bad. "If this is how it is starting,...

Friends - one thing bothers me a lot these days. In the 2000 elections we got TV and paper info about the vote counting, the 'hanging chad' issue, the 'post voting' issue, the 'Fla. vote issue' and so on and so forth. Now I hear that in many U.S. places electronic voting machines are in use just like in many Euro cities. And what do we hear now? That electronic voting might be rigged, because no receipt is issued. This paranoid idea is no doubt thought up by Democrats, who will stop complaining as soon as said shortcoming works in...

Attorneys for voting watchdog groups said they will drop election lawsuits if Florida officials offer voters in Broward, Miami-Dade and other counties the option of voting on a paper ballot. TALLAHASSEE - U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler and a coalition of unions and civil rights groups offered Tuesday to drop their ongoing lawsuits against the state if Florida would give all voters the choice of using a paper ballot on Nov. 2. Attorneys representing the Palm Beach County Democrat and the groups made the offer to top state election officials during an hour-and-a-half meeting, where they presented a lengthy proposal that...