Tea Republican challenges the disabled vote

Experts in Alaska election law:

One of the new allegations raised by Joe Miller campaign spin doctor Floyd Brown was from a Miller write-in observer in Cordova who claimed to have seen several ballots for Lisa Murkowski written in the same handwriting. . . .

"Somebody with Parkinson's disease, you know, their hand shakes but they're fully capable of voting and they go out to the poll to vote, they may very well ask for somebody who could write legibly, would you please write the name in for me," said Alaska lieutenant governor Craig Campbell.

Classy.

Tea Party strict constructionism in Alaska

Miller's campaign disputed the charge, saying observers are simply challenging votes that don't meet the strict letter of the law — including those with minor misspellings of Murkowski's name or those with legibility or penmanship issues.

Alaska law says nothing about either legibility or penmanship.

To be sure, deficiencies in either legibility or penmanship would serve to obscure accurate determinations of voter intent, which is exactly the standard of evaluating ballots that Tea Republican Miller at the same time argues is a subjective and therefore lawless one.

In other words, there's legal strategy, and there's abject hypocrisy.

eta: And it's nice to see an election law specialist agrees with me:

In this case, throwing out minor misspellings would disenfranchise voters for a technicality. I've traced use of the voter intent standard in State courts back to 1885, and Alaska has a particularly strong version of it.

Rick Hasen at Slate.

Box Lid #4

4. Place ballots [in this box lid] where the oval is marked for Write-In category (colored in, X, Star, Check) and THE NAME WRITTEN APPEARS TO BE A VARIATION OR MISSPELLING OF MURKOWSKI OR LISA MURKOWSKI. Also place in this lid any ballot that an observer challenges so that the director can make a determination.

There probably won't be enough ballots in Box Lid #4 to make a difference, but Tea Party Republican Joe Miller — he's the guy who handcuffs and "detains" reporters — insists that counting any ballot with even the slightest misspelling of Murkowski's name is unlawful.

And he's probably wrong about that, because Alaska's apparent statutory demand for electors to be perfect spellers is likely a too onerous and narrow requirement for a showing of "voter intent."

That a voter wrote Murkowsky or Merkowski instead of Murkowski shouldn't deny them a constitutional right and that right is certainly more compelling than a State requirement that all voters be spelling bee champions or else their otherwise lawful ballot is discarded.

Miller's claim — and what he claims the Alaska rule of law is — smacks of the voter literacy tests that plagued the pre-Civil Rights era.

But if there does happen to be a significant number of ballots in that category, we might count on Box Lid #4 to be 2010's hanging chad.

Joe Miller's Tijuana border patrol

"If East Germany could, we could." — Joe Miller (Update 7)*


Source.

* Except the wall was to keep the Germans in, not the Mexicans out.

GOPer goon squad's business license was expired

Quite the operation this character is running.

"Polls suggest that voters have grown less fond of Mr. Miller."

So the country hasn't completely lost its mind ... yet.

New campaign slogan:
M-U-R-K-O: Close enough to discern voter intent

Goon Squad

False imprisonment or shopkeeper's privilege?

Reporter handcuffed pilfering answers from AK GOP candidate

Related: The Library of Congress, recent acquisitions

Strict constructionists in the news

Risibly shameless hypocrite watch:

Tea Party-backed Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller (R) thinks federal unemployment insurance is constitutionally questionable. But it turns out that his wife benefited from it in the early part of the decade — after she left a job working for him.

Yes, but in this case the Republican's "principles" apply better to you. Are there seriously still people left who haven't figured that out yet?

O'Donnell, Angle, Miller, Johnson ... quite the impressive field.

'I'm going to Washington DC to make sure all these government perqs I've enjoyed ... to make sure they're not available to anybody else.'

Public Service Alert — Have you seen this missing fellow?

Illustration: Thomas Fuchs.