A spokesman for the Indiana Republican Party is disputing a claim by the Blue Indiana blog, a liberal Democratic blog, that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) failed to secure enough signatures to make the Indiana May primary ballot. "This is a hatchet job by the Dems and they are the ones that will be embarrassed about this whole thing in the end," Jay Kenworthy writes in an e-mail this afternoon. "They didn’t do their homework plain and simple, and now they are stuck with this story." "I went to the Elections Division this morning at 7:45 (and waited outside until they opened at 8:30) to be sure I was the first to count those sigs." "We have 531 in the 4th Congressional District, according to my count." "That pretty much mirrors the county reports with one exception." "Marion County claims 58 signatures, when in reality, there are 60 (they missed one signature, and their addition was wrong on the final tally)."
It's amazing how someone can manufacture a claim out of whole cloth and get the entire liberal Democratic network of blogs nationwide working over-time to fan the story in an attempt to embarrass Sen. McCain and the GOP. At least this time the Democrats were going after a Republican. This past week, they've been doing everything but snatching Jill Long-Thompson's petitions before they could be filed and burning them to make sure she didn't make the ballot to challenge their anointed one, Diamond Jim Schellinger. That whole Bayh crowd is going to be the one with eggs on their faces when Sen. Barack Obama rolls Hillary in the May Democratic presidential primary.
9 comments:
3rd parties should be complaining about ballot access requirements, as theirs are much stricter. You need bout 33,000 signatures to run for a statewide seat in the general election. 500 per Congressional district would be cake.
Jill did hahve trouble in Marion County. She barely made it.
I was not aware folks were "misplacing" her petitions. But as of late afternoon the day before the deadline, the Marion County Voter Reg people were busily tallying up Jill's totals, and sweating about her totals...they were either neutral or pro-Schellinger, but the Long supporters were heavy on the phones pressuring the locals to certify those petitions. And the 7th CD numbers were tight.
It does show how uninspired the Republicans are (me included) Point is, it looks like he barely got the signatures to get on the ballot no matter how you count it. Does that sound like a "frontrunner?"
What Jay didn't tell you is that the McCain petitions spent four unsupervised hours with Republicans at the Election Division after the complaint was filed.
The tally was at 496 yesterday when a young Democrat counted the signatures -- twice -- in the presence of the Republican IED co-counsel.
Something changed between then and this morning. Weird.
Either way, they were short last week when Carter and Clark filed the petitions with Rokita.
Go Obama!
The arcane system of putting names on the ballot does not well serve any political party or candidate for office, much less the people of Indiana. It is badly in need of overhauling, particularly in view of modern electronic balloting, which does not require machines to be set up with every party and candidate in a finite set of rows and columns.
Nick the Dem
If you think the Election Commission will throw McCain off the ballot, you're dreaming. In fact, I'd be willing to wager a court would be reluctant to do as well.
AR
Thanks, Advance Indiana for calling out Thomas Cook on this bullshit. I'm from Bloomington and know the little backstabbing, two-faced guy very well. He pretends to be some citizen blogger when in reality he is being paid by the Democratic Party to blog. It is impossible for the guy to be objective on anything between a Republican and a Democrat. His credibility is extremely low in my opinion.
It's amazing the change in Thomas' writing after he started getting paid by the Democrats. It's quite unfortunate. I thought he was doing a good job at one point. The recent post with an old photo of Donny Osmond with the title, "Jon Elrod is sooooo diskliked", demonstrates how his site has simply turned from a serious blog into a grade school playground. He was much better when he blogged independently without a political master.
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