Sorry for the delay getting this 4th update out but I actually have a life so that's the way it is.
Last night my computer wouldn't receive the Maine House live video feed so I was in the dark when I went to bed as to the outcome of the Constitutional Officers vote in the Joint
Session of the ME legislature that directly followed the underhanded seating of a GOP Senator, Cathy Manchester, from the disputed District 25 recount. I documented yesterday's Senate session where that happened in the previous Ballotgate II entry. If you want to catch up on the story from the beginning, here's my Diary page where all the Ballotgate II stories appear at the top of the page.
My dreaded expectation. expressed in those diaries, was that the CO vote in the Joint Session would be tipped toward the GOP by virtue of the 2 vote swing that the seating of Manchester represented. I was wrong. Partially wrong, actually, would be closer to the truth. How wrong? Here's yet another wrinkle in this sad tale: we'll never know how wrong I was because we'll never know what the tallies of the votes were. Follow me over the fold for more disturbing stuff.
Before I go into the CO vote results, first a rant:
As I mentioned yesterday, I was surprised and quite dismayed to learn that this vote (which is a poll of all the members of the Maine Legislature for each of the three Department head positions) is done by secret ballot. This is absolutely wrong: as a voter, I need to know how my representatives vote on every single issue that's put before them and this one (or these three, actually) must rank among the most important issues these Senators and Representatives will vote on for their entire two year session. To not be able to see their votes is yet another gross deficiency that this sordid episode has exposed to view, and as if that's not bad enough, here's the cherry on top of the dog doo: my Senator informs me that the only information we are allowed to know about these three votes is who won. Not what the winner's or loser's total vote count was,let alone how each Legislator voted, just who won. Is there any reason for that other than opacity? I can't think of one.
In this case, it prevents us from knowing how close to, or far from, success the GOP Senate leaders came to flipping the AG and Sos positions to their preferred candidates. As I posted previously, Janet Mills was the Dem running for re-election to the AG position and she was a very troublesome thorn in the side of Gov LePage. He made no bones about the fact that he wanted to get her out. And who was the candidate the GOP put up to oppose her? A guy named Logan who, just by wild coincidence, was the attorney for the Republican Party in the District 25 recount scandal.
So here's the thing: the GOP was clearly shooting for the moon in the AG race because if they had been successful, the Senate Committee that is charged with investigating the disturbing facts surrounding the District 25 recount could do what they've said they'll do and whitewash the whole thing, allowing Manchester to be seated, and there would be no AG followup to the GOP Senate coverup. Janet Mills, on the other hand, has said, in a private email that was shared with me, that her office "would undertake an inquiry" if the Senate Committee "does not do it's job." Give the comment that GOP chair Katz made the other day that,
“We want to be thorough and fair, but we’re hoping we can complete that in a day,”
it seems like Mills' might have to back her statement up with action in very short order, because one day to thoroughly investigate a matter of this gravity and magnitude is a bad political joke. Add that to Katz' previous statement (reported in my last diary) that his best guess is that the 21 phantomd ballots will be explained by "clerical error," and you have Janet Mills' marching orders.
But we'll never know how close the GOP came to thwarting her in the CO vote. Nor will we know how far they missed their target: what if, for instance, there was a 15 vote margin in favor of Mills? That would indicate that a goodly number of Republicans, dismayed at the sordid sequence of events that led to yesterday's historic (in a bad way) seating of Manchester, had jumped ship and sent a message to Senate Pres Thibodeau and Gov LePage that the rule of law is actually something to take seriously? But we'll never know how close to or far from removing Mills they came. And we'll never know what the message of the vote was.
So of the three offices, the Dem choices for AG and SoS were re-elected, but the Dem Treasurer was ousted and the GOP candidate, who was a very strong Eliot Cutler supporter, won. It was a cagey move on the Republicans' part to put her up for the post; she had worked to help several Dems get elected this cycle and she's pretty liberal in some respects, but she's a fiscal hawk and anti union to a degree. But again, we'll never know whether she won by two votes or twenty.
But in that instance, I may have been right about the 2 vote flip that seating Manchester represented; it might have been the margin of victory in that race, but we'll never know. This is a system that is screaming to be fixed on a dozen different levels.
Now before I finish this installment, Spud1 was kind enough to upload to scribd a pdf I sent him of the letter Cathy Breen wrote to the Maine Senate and which was included in the official Maine Senate Advance Journal and Calendar that my Senator gave me yesterday morning. Thank you Spud. It's well worth the read for its own sake, and for more reasons than just the circumstances surrounding the 21 phantom ballots (the bombshell in that letter that I mentioned yesterday: those ballots were all marked for Manchester, and only for her, no other races marked at all!). Please y'all, read the whole letter and feel free to comment about it. It's pretty well written and thorough.
Finally, let me say how chagrined I am at the state of my State's electoral and policital processes. It's one thing for people I disagree with so vehemently getting elected, like LePage and Thibodeau, but that's what happens sometimes, and you roll with those punches and keep your eyes open looking for the counter punches. But when something like those 21 votes appear in the Long Island ballot box, so obviously a case of tampering, and they aren't cause for an immediate cessation of the recount and an immediate, aggressive, forensic investigation, well despair is pretty easy to hear as he's driving into your dooryard.
And then you add the transparent, Machiavellian motives of the GOP as they engineer the seating of the lady who, without those 21 fraudulent ballots, lost the race - and then you also add the opacity of the way the State selects three of its most powerful positions of public trust - and you can hear despair wiping his feet on your welcome mat.
Let's hope things improve in the days and weeks to come.