Times are hard for the Texas GOP, particularly in CD22 — Tom Delay’s district.
Bad enough that CD22 has to contend with the embarrassing legacy of Tom himself; they’re apparently the front line on the Dem – Rep battle for the “balance of power” in the House:
DeLay’s voluntary withdrawal from the ballot last week, the product of an attempt to have the party handpick his successor, has left Republicans with no choice but to try a long-shot write-in campaign. Yet they’re in such disarray that the hope of backing a single write-in candidate became possible only Monday, when Sugar Land’s popular mayor bowed out of the race. One top state Republican, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, had urged Republicans to consider voting for the Libertarian candidate, who has a spot on the ballot.
Looks like chaos, doesn’t it? Hardly the consensus Texas’ GOP was looking for:
“Tonight was an opportunity for the Republican Party in Congressional District 22 to come to some healing,” Sekula-Gibbs said after the group’s decision. “We have come together and there is now a consensus, a majority, and we are going to go forward and win against the Democrats in November.”
It really isn’t shaping up into a “go forward and win”, and Charles Kuffner gives a couple of reasons why:
That brings us to Sekula-Gibbs. As I see it, she has two big problems, beyond Lampson and his $3 million campaign fund. One is Smither, who just by being on the ballot will siphon off votes that she otherwise might have gotten. And two is straight-ticket voting – since she isn’t on the ballot, she won’t receive any straight-party votes, no matter how many Republicans endorse her.
Polimom will defer to Kuff on the details (he’s unbelievably good with local-level politics), but I’m far more entertained by the trouble coming from that hitherto unidentified political sand-trap, the hyphen:
In short, the Republican strategy is now this: tens of thousands of GOP voters will go to the polls on November 7, ignore the names printed on the ballot, and write in a hyphenated name of 20 characters (counting spaces).
Worse than the 20 characters, though… the eSlate voting machine doesn’t have a hypen!
Ms. Mitchell didn’t know that the eSlate machine lacked a hyphen, but did say that “If you had most of the name without the hyphen, I don’t think the counting judge would discount the vote just because you didn’t have a hyphen that wasn’t on the program.”
Does she sound confident to you?
As has been happening a lot lately, Polimom’s mind couldn’t help zinging off in strange directions….again….
For instance: given how few hypenated husbands I’ve encountered over the years, I wonder whether the developers of the voting apparatus were men? I bet they’d have put a hyphen on that machine if our societal norm dictated that men took the wife’s surname.
I wonder how the conservative base will react to this clear violation of tradition, now that the dangers of the hyphen have been identified.
(I sure hope you guys have a sense of humor today. My current irreverent frame of mind seems to be continuing unabated…)
There is a way around this (in Ft Bend county, at least) – vote absentee. They use paper ballots for absentee voting, and last I saw they support names with hyphens.
~EdT.
Polimom says – Worse than the 20 characters, though… the eSlate voting machine doesn’t have a hypen!
GREAT! Sounds like grounds to appeal and WIN (the appeal) of the district’s entire electorial processs. Maybe we can get a fair vote out of CD22 after all.
Funny though, had this been a predominately Democratic district every left-wing pimp and pundent would be on a stump screaming discrimination at the top of their lungs.