Washington state and Luke "SupprEsser"

Washington: A friend's illness has resulted in my light posting of late. Thus, I have been remiss in my election-coverage duties.

Fortunately, we have had Brad Friedman asking the right questions about the strange affair of the Republican primary election in Washington state, where GOP party chair Luke Esser stopped the vote at the 87% mark, at the very moment when McCain (who had been trailing to Huckabee all day) took a slim lead. In his latest, Brad quotes a local news station:

KING 5 News has determined that there are inconsistencies in the "votes" being counted and reported by the Washington State Republican party.

Throughout the vote reporting process, State Party Chairman Luke Esser has said the party is reporting the presidential preferences of the delegates who were elected at the caucuses. But today we learned that Snohomish County, the third-largest county in the state, reported the preferences of all caucus attendees instead of the elected delegates.

One Snohomish County caucus chairman told KING 5 that the delegate preferences are "dramatically different" than the attendee counts.

The Snohomish County Republican Party does not have the delegate preferences from many of its caucuses and is working to obtain them.

The euphoniously-named Horseass blog found an astonishing Esser quote from 1986. Granted, these words are meant to be taken as facetious -- Esser was promoting a "rain dance" to dampen the Democratic vote. Still, perhaps he was -- as they used to say -- kidding on the sly:

Like any sport worth its salt, in politics you have adversaries, opponents, enemies. Our enemies are loudmouth leftists and shiftless deadbeats. To win the election, we have to keep as many of these people away from the polls as possible.

Now your average leftist loudmouth is a committed individual and can almost never be persuaded to ignore his constitutional rights. The deadbeats, however, are a different matter entirely. Years of interminable welfare checks and free government services have made these modern-day sloths even more lazy. They will vote on election day, if it isn’t much of a bother. But even the slightest inconvenience can keep them from the polling place.

Many of the most successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings, etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by busybody judges.

As some of you will recall, Snohomish has an interesting recent electoral history. From earlier blog posts on this humble site:

Former King County Elections Superintendent Julie Anne Kempf was booked into jail Tuesday, July 19, on investigation of forgery, theft, criminal impersonation, and assault on a police officer, Seattle Weekly has learned.

The probe that led to her arrest is related to events that occurred after she left her county job in December 2002, but it involves recent incidents connected to the elections office.

Snohomish was the subject of the damning Lehto/Hoffman study of the 2004 vote. To quote my earlier summary of that study:

1. Machines which recently had their CPUs "repaired" (how the devil do you repair a CPU?) developed a mysterious tendency to spew out Republican votes. (Note: The authors may have confused the terms "CPU" and "motherboard" in a section of their paper.)

2. Touch screen voting was supposed to help eradicate undervoting, yet undervoting remained four times the national average in minority districts of New Mexico using the technology.

3. The low rate of undervoting in Snohomish County may be connected to the numerous reports of "pre-selections" for Bush. (And that, in turn, may be connected to point 1, above.)

4. Sequoia requires -- for no reason I can discern -- that its machines have their power cords daisy chained. Is it possible to transmit data through the power line? In a word: Yes. Sequoia's enigmatic insistence on plugging the machines into the juice in a certain way may indicate the presence of a hidden network.

Why do I bring up this "ancient history"? To ask a simple question: If fraud occurred in 2004, do you think it could have taken place without the knowledge of Luke SupprEsser?