Huckabee demands justice from the Washington State GOP, which apparently thinks calling the state for John McCain with only 87 percent of votes counted is a good idea.
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Count Every Vote
10 Feb 2008 11:11 pm
Comments (28)
LOL. It doesn't matter if it's McCain or Huck or both because Obama's gonna kick their butt. Go Obama!
This would probably be a good time to stock up on popcorn.
A Republican discovers disenfranchisement! Well, better late than never.
Huckabee is awesome. I love the guy. I don't agree with a single thing that he says, but he's single handedly destroying the Republican Party. Give 'em Hell, Huck!
I'm not a Huckabot (assuming there is such a thing), but this is insane. He should send Chuck Norris over to kick some ass. He was robbed, plain and simple, of his (ultimately pointless) momentum if nothing else.
The funny thing is there are actually people in the liberal blogosphere who think that voter disenfranchisement is a fine thing as long as it benefits their favored candidate.
It's like not playing the last 6 minutes of the 4th quarter in the NBA game. Teams never come back from a few points down in the last 6 minutes, right? Riii-iight.
This is a pretty incredible story.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/177863.php
It seems that Washington State GOP chair Luke Esser spent most of the day avoiding calls from the Huckabee campaign. And when he finally got back to them he told a lawyer for Huckabee's campaign that they'd probably count the rest of the votes some time next week. When the lawyer, Lauren Huckabee, the candidate's daughter-in-law, requested that a Huckabee lawyer be present when the remaining votes were counted, Esser hung up on her.
Now that is an undemocratic caucus.
I think this is a huge mistake on part of the McCain campaign. Imagine if Hillary had done that to Obama... I think this could really play beautifully for Huckabee. Now, not only is McCain not a true conservative, but he's cheating conservatives out of their votes... Someone like Rush Limbaugh could get a lot of the base pretty worked up about this, I'd imagine... It pisses me off, and I would vote for McCain over Huckabee any day...
You can't expect them to get it right in November without a little practice in February.
Farce:
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/02/10/politics/fromtheroad/entry3813882.shtml
“You don’t get to announce the votes until they are all counted. And obviously, by his attempts to project without any statistical data or even if he had statistical data, it’s irrelevant: we’re entitled to a fair, full count," Rollins said."Our lawyers attempted to contact [Esser] today, finally did so about ten minutes ago. He said, ‘Well I don’t know where the precincts, are, I just sort of did it. How dare Mike Huckabee challenge – he has to trust us. We’re going to count the rest of the votes today in the office.’"
"We asked to have someone go in to the office with them and count the votes and he refused us. He said he would have to notify the other campaigns."
“I’m not accusing the McCain campaign of anything. I’m accusing the state party chairman of using very, very bad judgement. We are going to fully pursue this legally."
"When our lawyer asked them, again, 'will you say statistically, will you project, what were the precincts?', he said, 'well I don’t know, I can’t count that.' So, basically, he’s making a guess [about the results].”
"I think it literally took away from our momentum…Going to the primaries here, everything is about momentum, so we are very disturbed by it.”
What, honestly, was this doofus thinking?
"Now, not only is McCain not a true conservative"
But this proves he's a true Republican.
It's one thing to disenfranchise the opposing party, but it takes a real maverick to disenfranchise one of your own.
This is like if a Patriots fan closed his eyes and ran out of the room at the two-minute part of the last Superbowl. "We won! Quick, turn the TV off!"
How did this guy put reality on pause and expect to get away with it?
this is insane.
as an Obama supporter, i don't care which of the two remaining Republican knuckleheads he gets to paste into the electoral ground come November, but holy jeebus, NOT TO COUNT ALL THE VOTES?
why the hell do Republicans want to fight so hard for Democracy in Iraq(i know, i know, that's not the real reason we're still there, but humor me) since some of them seem to not give damn about it HERE?
Huckabee should fight this with everything he's got, this is shameful.
This is great. Christine Gregoire won the governorship over Dino Rossi in 2006 with a very tight election (~200 votes) after a recount. It looked like they wanted to run Rossi again and push the vote recount angle, but that may be tougher now.
Esser said this afternoon that the Republican Party was going to try to get as "close as we can to 100 percent" in the vote count
From the Seattle PI via TPM
Oops. Seattle Times.
The funny thing is there are actually people in the liberal blogosphere who think that voter disenfranchisement is a fine thing as long as it benefits their favored candidate.
Oh, don't play that kind of fruit salad logic with the term 'disenfranchisement'. Unless you want Missouri holding its 2012 primary on Jan 21 next year.
What, honestly, was this doofus thinking?
He was thinking that he was master of his own little domain, and that national presidential campaigns didn't mean shit. Marshall's Boss Hog comparison is spot on. I'll say this about caucuses: by being party-run rather than state-run, they're usually the hands of people who, frankly, you wouldn't trust to run a lemonade stall.
I don't get this at all. Why wouldn't they count all the votes? And why should it take so long if they do? Are there caucus locations that are only accessible by Sherpa or something?
Awesome. To think I was worried the Republicans would get their house in order while Hillary* and Obama duked it out.
* If both Clintons are running, I need to differentiate them don't I?
I thought it was an enshrined principle of the modern Bush Jr. Republican Party to make sure that only the votes you desire to be counted are counted?
If so, doesn't that make John McCain even more the standard bearer?
"I don't get this at all. Why wouldn't they count all the votes? "
Because they don't need to count the votes they wrote out themselves?
The fix is so obviously in in the corrupt Republican party it isn't even funny. This is a bumbling local party boss trying to pull a Katherine Harris.
And the stupider part of it all is that it isn't even helping McCain. Huckabee is going to be much less likely to withdraw now.
Hilary and Obama should call the GOP on this.
Royko:
You don't get why the clown in Washington state would do this? It's easy. Esser is a McCain guy. McCain was about to get completely embarassed Saturday(losing all four races) so the guy put a stop to it. It's not right but when did that ever stop the Rethuglicans. It just goes to show that there isn't a lot of love out there for McCain. Has McCain won a primary/caucus with over 45% of the vote yet?
"Rethuglicans"? Clever, Joe Klein's conscience. Did you think that up in homeroom?
I have no idea what the real story in WA is, but if you are concerned about voter disenfranchisement, what about the Dems disenfranchising the voters of whole states like MI and FL?
It was pretty stupid to call the race for McCain prior to all the votes being counted, being that it is so close. That said, Esser's press release did say that it was only with 87% counted, and that the "final report" wouldn't be expected until Monday. (Maybe they don't work on Sundays in Washington state?) Moreover, Washington apparently has BOTH caucuses AND a primary, on the Republican side, and so this caucus doesn't even select half the Washington delegates. There would be maybe a one or two delegate swing if Huckabee were to pull it out. So it's more a molehill than a mountain, I'd think.
Also, by the end of the night on Saturday, they were up to 93.3% of the vote counted, and it was still McCain leading by 1.6%.
what about the Dems disenfranchising the voters of whole states like MI and FL?
the voters of those states did it to themselves.
Read the quotes from this guy Esser over at TPM.
He's ALL ABOUT "voter disenfranchisement."
It's truly embarrassing - or would be if Republican thugs could be embarrassed.
Comments closed February 24, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Watching this last night, it was pretty ridiculous. Huckleberry had been in the lead through most of the precinct reporting... then St. John took a slight lead. All of a sudden the votes just stopped coming in. It was frozen in place. And it never budged upward after that, and then the party called it for McCain.
Posted by jbryan | February 10, 2008 11:16 PM