Every vote counts, unless of course, your intent was to vote for someone other than Joe Miller

Why are we surprised?  Has not the bar been set, nay, buried beneath a two-foot berm by our own two  million dollar hockey mom?  This is Alaska politics now, like our sad, dysfunctional national scene.

And, clearly, this is all the federal government's fault.

If they'd just eradicated any vestigial foreign-ness stemming from the Murkowski family's origins at Ellis Island, back when Lisa's great-grandfather emigrated to this country to something very patriotic and American-sounding like, say, Smith, we wouldn't be in this mess.  I'll bet the Democrats were in charge back then, too, allowing Poles to come over with their difficultly spelled names all willy-nilly taking away those low-paying jobs that our great-grandfathers wouldn't deign to do. 

Try it.

S-m-i-t-h.

Easy!  Got it on the first go!

As opposed to Murkowsky  Murcowsky  Mirkowski  Murkowski.


Came the news that Miller and that bunch of Outside wackos, aka the Tea Party, are suing to make make any misspelling of 'Murkowski' not count.  From the ADN:

"Miller is asking a judge to stop the state from making a judgment on a voter's intentions if the voter wrote in something other than "Murkowski" or "Lisa Murkowski." State law allows no leeway for other spellings, his lawsuit says."

What if a voter wrote in 'Lisa Ann Murkowski'? Or 'Lisa A. Murkowski'? And how shocking that Joe Miller, lawyer and ex-magistrate -- who made such an enduringly positive impression on his peers that word is that the magistrate's association spurned his campaign's request for an endorsement prior to the election -- has pursued this further.  I'm seriously suprised surprised.

Better yet is Miller's argument that minor misspellings, may, in fact, be 'protest' votes.  Frankly, I think one could make the case that a huge number of voters, hundreds even, intended to vote a protest vote and accidentally spelled the name correctly.

So there I was in the ballot box, so I misspelled it just to make some weird point that I don't understand but sounded really good when I heard it on talk radio... and I -- dang it -- what was that again ? Murkowsky  Murcowsky  Mirkowski  Murkowski. Oh, shit!  I think I voted for Lisa Murkowski!

Really, I am shocked that he hasn't started challenging correctly-spelled versions of the name on the grounds that they were cast, actually, by voters whose intent was to misspell it.   It is entirely possible that 98% of those write in votes were cast by people in protest and they spelled the damned name right!  My god!  How will we ever know? 

S-m-i-t-h.