Miller Going Over the Edge? - You Betcha!

I. Joe Miller and his supporters are starting to go nuts. Echoing Josef Stalin's quote (which may or may not be an urban myth), Josef Stalin-Miller seems to be saying, "It's not who votes who counts, it's who counts the votes!"

I agree. But his supporters are all but accusing the Murkowski camp of using telepathic messages and astral projection to change the outcome of Alaska's closely contested GOP primary race for the 2010 U.S. Senate seat slot in the final. Their nuttiness is showing even more than their magic underwear.

Frankly, should Miller win in November, we'll be closer to a Stalinist reality than the purported quote above might indicate:

In the late 1930s, during the height of the Stalinist purges of theCommunist Party and Red Army, Stalin gave a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. It was a long, incredibly polemical speech, as was and is the habit of Communist leaders. After Stalin completed the speech, the hall, with about 1,400 members present, erupted in enormous applause. It kept growing louder for minutes. It went on for at least a half an hour before members started looking around and craning their necks to see if anyone had already stopped. None had. All kept clapping for a while longer. Finally one member stopped. Soon everyone began putting their tired, reddened hands down.

The next day, nobody could find the first member who had stopped applauding. They never did.

That is closer to what a Joe Miller kind of government would be than what we now have.

I have an image that Joe is waiting for the call from Sarah Palin in which she asks, "Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?"

II. Of course these machines - the Diebold Accuvote system - can be manipulated. It's quite funny that it is finally wingnut Teabaggers who are bringing the long-known flaws in the machines, how they are used and how the votes are collated and tabulated at higher levels to the fore in the Alaska press:

The Division of Elections investigated and found the most alarming allegation in the Van Flein complaint was unfounded. Van Flein alleged Roman used the state computer at the Division of Elections office in Wasilla and that for 20 minutes "this Murkowski observer was in the state's voter records viewing private information and, we are told, accessed the state's election management system."

Van Flein wrote in the complaint that the state's Diebold voting software "contains vulnerabilities that may allow someone to install malicious software to discount votes." Van Flein suggested that there may need to be a hand count of ballots or an IT computer audit in order to verify that Roman didn't do anything like that.

Elections officials said Roman did request access to the computer with the state's voter registration system but was not allowed. Alaska Division of Elections Director Gail Fenumiai said he would have not been able to compromise the system anyway. "There is no GEMS server in the Wasilla office, so there's no way the state ballot tabulation system was compromised," Fenumiai said.

Van Flein said Monday night that the complaint was verified by Miller election observers on the scene. "We have a statement from an eye witness establishing that the Murkowski observer in fact was using the Division of Elections desk top computer for up to 10 minutes," he said.

Alaska Division of Elections Director Fenumiai disputed that, saying the observer did not use any state computer.

Elections officials said Roman did break the rules by texting from inside the ballot room. He also tried to bring a large bag into the room, against instructions, which Miller campaign lawyer Van Flein described as a potential way to make ballots "disappear."

It's obvious to me that all the GOP ballot votes need to be seized. They need to be gone over by a panel of experts, inch by inch. Micron by micron, under a spectrograph (there may be fake ballots in there, you know). Bev Harris should be called up here to head a commission appointed by Gov. Sean Parnell to investigate it.

Thomas van Flein, on instructions from Sarah Palin and Glen Beck can talk about it hourly on FOX. They should investigate, deliberate, lie, threaten and sue at least through the third week of October.

All Miller's supporters in this should be allowed to carry semi-automatic weapons with two extra clips into all the deliberations.

III. Meanwhile, rational people can do this.