Well, if you don’t know who Ted Stevens is, I’m a little surprised. He’s the guy who wears his “Incredible Hulk” tie to the Senate floor when he is expecting to have to put up a fight to get a bill passed. Stevens is the brilliant mind who described the Internet as a series of tubes.

OH yeah, THAT Ted Stevens–ANYway, so he was recently convicted of corruption–a conviction he is appealing. In the meantime, there’s an election going on for his seat. Turns out, initially, he won. The catch? Ted Stevens, is now trailing his opponent, Anchorage Mayor, and Democrat, Mark Begich, by 814 points, according to an article at Reuters.com. But how did we go from disgraced-but-somehow-re-elected to losing by 800+ Alaskans?

Back on November 7, 2008, I linked to a post over at BradBlog.com called “SOMETHING SMELLS VERY FISHY IN ALASKA.” Here’s the excerpt from that article that I used in my post a week ago:

In Alaska, more people voted for George W. Bush in 2004 than for Sarah Palin on Tuesday despite an identical 61-36 margin of victory. Yes. Only four years ago 54,304 Alaskans got off their sofas and voted for Bush, but decided to sit home and not vote for Palin in 2008.

In turn, I have to ignore the 30,520 Alaskans who felt progressive enough in 2004 to vote for John Kerry, but weren’t inspired enough to get out and vote for Barack Obama.

Then, on October 10, BradBlog.com reported this:

Alaska Update: Thousands of Ballots ‘Found’, One-Third Remain Uncounted in the State’s Still-Fishy ‘08 Election
This just in from Alaska, where thousands of new ballots continue to be found each day, since it was first reported that turnout in 2008 was 11% lower than in 2004. Thousands of ballots, nearly a third of them, remain uncounted nearly a week after the election. Their numbers could explain the strange results so far in races — such as those of the felonious Sen. Ted Stevens (R) and the under-investigation Rep. Don Young (R) — for which pollsters had predicted decisive losses for the Republicans.
www.bradblog.com/?p=6654

Yeah, pretty neat, huh? Thousands of ballot turn up and they begin counting them. By last night, Keith Olbermann reported that Begich had inched ahead of Stevens by just three votes.

Yep:

It turns out, according to another post at BradBlog.com, 90,000 ballots were in the process of being counted after they were found days after the election.

And by today, Reuters reported Begich’s lead over Stevens had reached 814 votes.

Perhaps the people of Alaska aren’t as dumb as we were led to believe? Sure, they elected Palin governor, but they seem to have been smart enough to vote out a very recently convicted Stevens. Now, if we could only find out why 90,000 ballots were left uncounted as Stevens was being reported as the winner of that race.

Well, maybe YOU shouldn’t be, but that guy next to you? Or that woman over there by the door? Yeah, they maybe should be concerned. What if *you* are that woman by the door? What if you are the guy sitting next to the person reading this post? Well, you might want to be concerned about your vote counting. Or, I should say "you should be concerned about your vote being counted".

See, not everyone will be immediately impacted by this. Plenty of folks will actually have their vote counted. However, many won’t.

It turns out that a few different states are going through voter purges. This is basically when the state’s election officials decide that they should "reduce voter fraud" by trimming down the voter rolls (the list of voters in that state). The thing is, there isn’t a federally standardized way of doing this. As a result, some state officials seem to be using questionable tactics to remove people.

Now, I’m not advocating that there should be a federally sanctioned way to do this, but maybe a federal oversight committee might be a good idea, to make sure this process isn’t being abused.

Back in 2004, according to journalist Greg Palast (his site: http://gregpalast.com/ ), Republicans would send registered mail letters to low-income areas in certain states asking for registered voters to confirm their addresses. If they never heard back from these people, their names were challenged and many were removed.

This means that anyone who doesn’t take the time to sign for registered mail, or sees the Republican party return address and blows it off, or is serving overseas, or is on vacation, or whatever, could have had their vote challenged.

Now, it’s happening again–right now, in fact. CBSNews.com is reporting (here: http://www.cbsnews.com/…0682.shtml ) on a new study from the non-partisan public policy and law institute, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law:

calls the nationwide process "chaotic," "shrouded in secrecy", "riddled with inaccuracies", "prone to error" and "vulnerable to manipulation."

"What’s wrong with the process is it’s happening in secret. It’s happening with no accountability," Michael Waldman, the center’s executive director, told CBS News.

Nice, huh?

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