| I bet you dollars to pesos that you'd be reading a lot more about this if this woman were Hispanic and a Democrat. From the San Angelo Standard-Times, "2010 ELECTION: 1,545 local ballots found": A voting problem left more than 1,500 local ballots off the Nov. 2 election canvass, a problem the Tom Green County Elections Office said would not have changed the outcomes but which it has reported to the Texas Secretary of State’s Office and local political leaders. The problem resulted partly from a mobile ballot box getting left behind at one of the precincts during early voting, said Vona McKerley, the elections administrator. “Once we realized it was something to do with early voting, we realized one of the mobile ballot boxes was missing,” McKerley said. “We found a shelf that had our training equipment, and somehow that piece of equipment had gotten set on those shelves.” [...] “I take full responsibility that this has happened,” McKerley said. “We were under no obligation to let anybody know, but because our office aims for integrity, we let people know that this happened and that we will try to find ways that this never happens again.”
Personally -- I don't really care. Mistakes happen. No election outcomes were changed by the discovery of the missing ballots, and this woman appears to have done everything she can to take full responsibility and announce a problem she probably could have just tried to cover up. I applaud her honor and integrity on the matter. But in the upcoming legislative session, Republicans are going to push -- and most likely pass -- voter ID legislation. They will dehumanize Democrats and Hispanics for cheating the system. For Republicans, a granddaughter helping her grandmother vote can constitute voter fraud in the right circumstances. They will choose cases involving a single misplaced ballot and pontificate for hours about how that single ballot could have led to the end of democracy as we know it. So when they do, kindly remind Republicans that a Republican elections administrator lost over 1,500 ballots for an entire month, and nobody is persecuting her or claiming she was trying to steal an election or demanding drastic new laws to increase government control in order to over-correct a simple human error. Reason and sensibility is one of our only advantages we'll have in the next seven months. Keep this story in your back pocket, Democrats. |
