Barack Obama was told on Monday that he will be kept off the ballot in Connecticut. Despite turning in the required number of signatures before the deadline, the ticket will not be listed. The secretary of state admitted that they made a mistake in counting the signatures and also incorrectly struck legitimate signatures from the ballot, but explained in a court hearing on the issue that they couldn’t possibly remedy the situation by printing new ballots in the allotted time. A judge agreed with them, and in essence said that despite admitting the mistake, the electronic voting machines and paper ballots could not be corrected in time for the election next Tuesday. “There’s nothing we can do, and we’re sorry,” were the only words that the judge could offer to a devastated Obama campaign.

Sounds horrible, doesn’t it? The Obama campaign did everything right and couldn’t make the ballot because of screw-ups, laziness, and a judge too stupid to realize that a candidate should be on the ballot if the state screws up and the candidate plays by the rules. The outrage would be palpable if this story was true for Barack Obama or John McCain, but it’s non existent right now because this actual situation, word for word, happened to Bob Barr, the Libertarian Party candidate in the 2008 election and my choice for President of the United States.

What’s completely enraging about this case is that the Barr campaign did everything right. In fact, Judge Janet Hall, the presiding judge in the case, didn’t dispute the argument that everything was done by the books by the Barr campaign.

“We are outraged by the decision of Judge Hall. To allow a candidate for the highest national office to be unlawfully excluded from an election because it would inconvenience state workers or interfere with bureaucratic procedures goes beyond the pale,” stated Russ Verney, campaign manager for Bob Barr.

Verney continued, “It takes a few days to print good, old paper ballots which served us well for over 100 years. Throw the machines in the river and allow democracy and justice to take precedent over technology. If the state of Connecticut maintains a level of incompetence so great that they cannot print ballots before the election, I encourage them to look to private industry and call Kinkos.”

You can’t even imagine this happening to McCain / Obama, can you? In fact, in Texas, despite a state law that clearly stated deadlines for candidates to submit their ballots, and despite the fact that Obama hadn’t been nominated yet, and McCain wasn’t nominated and hadn’t picked his VP candidate, they were still allowed on the ballot even though they had to certify the choice was already made. I spoke about this on an episode of IT.tv last month:

Hell, in that video, I even mention Bob Torricelli and his replacement on the New Jersey ballot, despite it being inside the deadline, because the New Jersey State Supreme Court ruled that no matter how many candidates were on the ballot, the ballot wasn’t fair if there wasn’t a Democrat up against the Republican, in effect taking all of Doug Forrester’s campaign ads, materials, and in fact his strategy, and tossing it down the toilet inside a deadline within which change was actually against the law.

That’s what happens when Democrats break the law. That’s what happens when Republicans break the law. That’s not what happens when a Libertarian doesn’t break the law. Whether or not you’re a libertarian is not at issue here. Either way, you should be outraged that the two major parties are allowed to ignore the law without consequence while those same laws are enforced to the letter against independents and third party candidates.

The system is designed to protect the Democrats and Republicans. It’s run by Democrat and Republican judges who have party allegiances and who let those allegiances cloud their decisions. In case after case, election law isn’t equally enforced even when the violation is flagrant and obvious. If that isn’t political croneyism, nothing is.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Obvious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.