Joe says it ain't so
Late edit: Since there were some comments questioning my use of my editorial license to summarize Dr. Arminio's letter, you can read the letter in full as the first comment and judge for yourself whether I maintained the flavor of his remarks in my post. My only edit of his letter reprinted as the first comment was to space out the paragraphs.
I got an e-mail over the weekend from defeated Congressional candidate Joe Arminio, who seems to have joined the crowd piling on Diebold and electronic voting machines in general. It's a fairly long e-mail, so I'll summarize a few of his points. Here's the opening paragraph:
Were There Inaccurate Primary Votes In Congressional District One?
By Dr. Joe Arminio
March 14, 2008
A heavy fog of doubt envelops the so-called official results, released three days ago, of the 2008 Republican Primary in the First Congressional District. Similar fogs envelop vote counts across the country. A major cause of all this doubt is typically the same: electronic voting machines, not paper ballots, were used to record the votes. The First District, like almost all other places, foolishly and irresponsibly relies upon voting machines and does not rely upon paper ballots that are manually and publicly counted. Very significant inaccuracies may have resulted.
The key points he attributes the "heavy fog of doubt" to are many, but mainly relate to the vast disparity in campaign spending between himself and fellow also-ran Robert Joseph Banks as well as the difference between his vote and Ron Paul's vote in the First District. Arminio also throws into question the results based on the number of straw polls Ron Paul has won vs. the number John McCain won. (For the record, McCain got zero votes in our September Wicomico County Straw Poll while Paul received 4 votes.)
Arminio spent $85,000 on the race, which works out to roughly $66 for each of his 1,277 votes. Most of it went to three editions of his newspaper The American Way and 1,000 small campaign signs, 999 of them I think I saw along Route 50 heading up to Chestertown to cover the Kent/Queen Anne's campaign forum. Banks spent much less and gathered 1,186 votes. Meanwhile, Ron Paul had 4,695 votes in CD-1, and it's this large difference that Arminio questions. It is for these reasons Arminio feels we need to go back to paper ballots. I can just see the ACORN types on that one, complaining how it would disenfranchise the poor and illiterate, along with the illegals they're trying to register.
He also returns to the Ron Paul endorsing Wayne Gilchrest flap:
Someone else shall say that Ron Paul endorsed not me, but Wayne Gilchrest, several days before the primary. True. But news of this endorsement was not surely widely known. What is more, it was evidently greeted in disbelief in many quarters. For the record, Ron Paul sent me a thank you note soon after the primary in which he said he did not know I had been in the race and thanked me for my efforts on behalf of his cause and the Constitution.
Not quite a case of mistaken identity, but a mistake nonetheless by Paul. I chalked the endorsement up as courtesy to a fellow Congressman myself, like Newt Gingrich's endorsement of Wayne Gilchrest. Regardless, Joe comes to his conclusion:
Are we in the throes of a crushing irony? Are we supposedly waging war in Iraq for the purpose of bringing them free elections but cannot ensure free elections in our own country?
In the First District, Andy Harris is the declared Republican Congressional nominee. I trust that he will press for the restoration of the proper, constitutional procedure--the use of paper ballots and the public counting of these ballots--in the interest of preserving the Republic.
I was just reading the copy of the Constitution I keep on my desk and I saw nothing on the type of ballots to be used. In Article I, Section 4 it only states that each state legislature prescribes the electoral laws - however, Congress can "make or alter such Regulations" by law. Joe is correct in thinking that Congress can make such a law dictating paper ballots and certainly is within his right in calling on Andy Harris to do so, but the Constitution is silent on the actual voting method.
So take it for what it's worth, I just found it sort of amusing and decided to share this afternoon.