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Joe Miller looks destined to lose the Alaska Senate election if all the votes are counted. Naturally, he subsequently wants to make sure all the votes aren’t counted. Miller wants to force a change to the stated intention of the Alaska Elections Board on how they will count write-in ballots.
Votes that misspell Lisa Murkowski’s name shouldn’t count as the state today tallies write-in ballots in the U.S. Senate race, Senate candidate Joe Miller said in a federal lawsuit Tuesday.
Miller is asking a judge to stop the state from making a judgment on a voter’s intentions if the voter wrote in something other than “Murkowski” or “Lisa Murkowski.” State law allows no leeway for other spellings, his lawsuit says [...]
The campaign seeks to block the state from “counting or otherwise accepting as valid any write-in ballots in which the name of the candidate is spelt incorrectly, or on which the name of the candidate is not written as it appears on a write-in declaration of candidacy,” according to the complaint.
While Miller’s lawsuit claims that the state waited until after the election to announce that they would use voter intent to determine ballots, it was clear for months that this was the case. As far back as September, the Board of Elections said that the last name need not be spelled correctly, only as correct as needed to determine voter intent. And the state pointed to substantial case law in making that determination. So Miller only pushed for statutory relief now that his campaign sees the possibility of losing.
Adam Bonin adds that Miller makes a number of other arguments in the lawsuit, including the claim that voters who misspelled Murkowski’s name perhaps wanted to register a protest vote, which seems to take voter intent to ridiculous levels.
Good to know that at least some Republicans still support frivolous lawsuits.
20 Comments
miller sure is a sore loser
Miller is so dumb it’s scary. Can’t imagine how he got through college – in fact, I can’t imagine how he got through the sixth grade.
I thought the Tea Party was all about “the will of the people”. Apparently that only applies when they benefit. Otherwise, the will of the people ain’t so important.
Republicans: hypocrites to the core. No surprise there.
Curious: the Anchorage Daily News employs the older version “spelt” instead of “spelled”. Toss it out.
One of the more remarkable things about the lawsuit, given that once the primary was over he recanted on his “the government shouldn’t do that” and reworked it to “the federal government shouldn’t do that,” is that he went to the federal court rather than the state.
Actually, Anchorage Daily News quoted the actual complaint using “spelt”
I posted about the “spelting” problem this morning on Roundup. I find it curious that a campaign worried about spelling has trouble with “spelting” itself.
Imagine being Lisa Murkowski right now. She’s completely dependent on her tea bagger voters…
…SPELLING!
BWA-HA-HA-HA!
ROFLMAO!
Isn’t “spelt” the standard English spelling? As in, England, British. Maybe Alaskans are influenced by the nearness of Canada, which usually uses the British variant of such words? Hmmmmmmmmmm….Joe Miller isn’t . gasp…a “real Amurikan?”
Way to stay classy, Mr. Miller.
Miller is from Kansas. I got my graduate education in Kansas. Believe me, Kansas did well to export Miller to Alaska. I suspect it raised the IQ in both states.
Ouch!
I’m no fan of Miller, in fact it’s obvious that he’s extremely dangerous.
However, his decision to pursue his cause in court is not at all surprising and has precedent with other GOPers (serial legal frivolator Norm Coleman) including Ms Murkowski. In fact, it was her pursuit of legal “remedies” to being beaten fairly & squarely that led to Alaska’s election commission to change its own rules in this very election.
In fact, I’d suggest that Scott McAdams (with the aid of the DSCC, wishful thinking I know) should beat a path to the courthouse too!
The reason being that the state election commission’s decision to abruptly change election rules and allow a list of names of write-in candidates to be added to the ballot is patently partisan and illegal. Isn’t the ballot the list of names? If you fail to win your primary, you are, by virtue of losing, eliminated from consideration as a listed candidate.
Without the “list” with Murkowski’s name on it, it’s conceivable that McAdams would have garnered a much larger share of the vote. Furthermore, seeing that the state provided voters with an extra-ballot ballot and still manage to misspell Mukowski’s name, Miller’s legal steps are perfectly rational.
That saids, I wish Kaine and the DSCC would pull their heads out of their asses and send lawyers, guns and money to aid McAdams. Short of that, someone should “break a foot off” in the DNC and DSCC leadership’s collective ass for quitting on McAdams months ago and choosing to stay “quit” when they had the chance to steal victory from the jaws of defeat.
Same old, same old. Republicans will do anything to win an election, except count the votes.
So what if the law says voter intent is to be considered? How long has that law been around? Probably not as long as the laws against torture, and it didn’t take much to twist them completely ass backwards.
Miller’s an ass for taking this route, but it’s not like he has no possibility of ever getting a court ruling that what was legal yesterday doesn’t apply today, or vice versa.
Enjoy.
So you don’t want Alaska election law followed because you don’t want laws against torture followed?
I hope he learns hunger.
Perhaps on my optically scanned ballot, my filling in an oval only 95%, or going a hair outside the oval (pretty poor sight), should be considered a possible protest vote and not counted.
Or maybe lowered the ethical standards in both states?
What amazes me most about this is that Miller is trying to have it both ways. His suppporters got a ridiculous number of write-in names registered, to make it difficult for people to find the proper name on the list. If I’d been doing it, I would have searched out people with names similar to Murkowski. The big prize would have been a Lee Morkowski or a Leeza Murkowski, of course.
Get them to register as write-ins and you’d have a knot no court could untangle. Is the “official” write-in list published anywhere, ET?
It’s not surprising that Joe “It’s unconstitutional because I say it is” Miller doesn’t really care what the law says.