@MSCatLady: I found this at the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124078946691457509.html

It has a lot of what you were saying earlier about how Tedisco shot himself in the foot by not figuring out what kind of candidate he was until the very last moment.

It sort of reminds me of McCain who tried about three various campaign strategies and always backed off the effective stuff when Dems complained about negative attacks.

But apparently no one minds if Dems are using negative campaign tactics or if they disenfranchise military voters.

There are just too many Republican candidates so afraid to do the wrong thing that they do nothing at all.

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The “elephant in the room” in coverage of this particular from all regular media quarters seems to have been the military ballot issue. Nobody wants to cover it. I didn’t know too much about it myself until this election, and it seems the issue might be picking up steam from sources like NRO and the Heritage Foundation, but you really have to search to find it. This is from a Newsmax article at http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover/tedisco_absentee_ballots/2009/04/14/202691.html

“Liberals scream about disenfranchised voters,” Fund tells Newsmax, “but they largely fall silent when it comes to the shameful fact that many of our military servicemen and women and their families can’t vote if they are overseas because of bureaucratic barriers.

There’s another positive lesson to come out of this and that is what happens when citizens shirk their duties. I tend to rant about this and will try not to here. Anyway, voters in earlier state constitutional conventions wrote in a requirement to the state constitution that the legislature must ask the voters every 20 years if they want to convene one. They did in the 70s, and the legislators took it over and made it a zoo, and the people could not or did not (I don’t know, I was too new to things at that time). The question again came up in 1997. The unions all came out against it, and there was a big push to say no because the legislators would just take it over again…as if a “no” vote wouldn’t just allow them to continue to run things and take over even more for another 20 years! But the citizenry voted “no.” I left as soon as I could, which turned out to be 2 years later. It’s not fun to live among Americans who seem to be broken and without a taste for liberty.

Not long after that vote, the First Lady of those days, a Chicago lady, with apparently the only exposure to NY being on Wall Street, just waltzed right into a US Senate seat here. She was first carpetbagger. Murphy from Missouri is only the latest. Had the citizens of New York State shown some backbone in 1997, I suspect neither coup by an out-of-stater would ever have happened. An in-depth analysis by experts would be very interesting, but it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Anyway, it all boils down to the voters. “We” didn’t lose; the voters of New York State did, again. Of course, besides such heavy-handed stuff as legislative control and so forth being wrong, it is also bad economically. The state’s about broke to the point where it can’t tax its way back into the good old days. That needn’t have happened either, and again, the voters have only themselves to blame.

There is much other Americans can learn from the greatly underpublicized lessons coming from the Empire (state) these days.

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@MSCatLady: I’m disgusted with this result. It should have been a clear win for us. We made remarkable strides and yet once again we see how a Dem just games the system with absentee ballots and wins.

Did we ever determine how many military ballots failed to be return by the unreasonable deadline Dems insisted on?

I’m wondering if we suffered this narrow loss because we were so afraid of offending people with a stronger campaign that we simply stood by and watched as the Dems threw everything including the kitchen sink into the race?

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Tedisco has abandoned the race: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5j3-h_lUUzLANYAPtVzQjjD462HhQ

Well, it is kind of consistent with the race run anyway; he should have won it by a landslide.

Obama chortled and Steele talked meaningless generalities, per the article.

Sigh.

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@MSCatLady: The Politico link had some new information:

Keep in mind that the deadline for receiving overseas and military ballots is Monday and that they won’t be counted until Tuesday. As of 1:00 pm Friday, only 403 out of the 1918 that had been requested had been received.

I thought the the number of military ballots was 1,005. If there is a much higher number of military ballots that were not able to be returned by today then that could certainly throw the election to the Democrat.

I’ll keep that letter from veterans and POW’s handy until we know more.

Believe it or not we had one dim wit liberal on another thread claim that the military supported Obama by 6 to 1. No doubt he and others like him will claim that if we don’t count all the military votes in this race it only disadvantaged them. But that raises the question as to why Dems fought so hard to force an unreasonable deadline on the return of military absentee ballots.

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That Corner Review article, “The Shameful Disenfranchise” is excellent; thanks for sharing it. I hadn’t heard all the details about this aspect of the election.

“The only thing DOJ leaders essentially asked for (and got in a consent decree) was an extension of time for the receipt of overseas ballots, from April 7 to April 13. In other words, despite the fact that almost every expert in this area now recommends at least a 45-day transit time for absentee ballots for military voters, Justice asked only for 30.” WTF????

I did a Google News search and learned a bit more it from a Politico post at http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0409/MiniMinnesota.html (note that it quotes the “Albany Times-Union” as a source, which tells me all I need to know about their own credibility; again, there is a mention of legal battles in terms of the hearing tomorrow in Poughkeepsie…more battlespace preparing?) They mention an open letter from US veterans about this disenfranchisement issued on Thursday, but the link doesn’t work. I found it at a Gathering of Eagles: http://gatheringofeagles.org/view701247r6071524660.html

I don’t know which is more stirring, the text of the letter or the names of those who signed it. I wonder if Curt might be interested in posting that in full? This really needs all the publicity it can get, as the media sure aren’t covering it, and it is an outrage.

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@MSCatLady:
That was an interesting article about the possibility of a tie. Statistically it is tied. This is why states with runoff provisions have a much better system. A runoff would also have avoided the mess in Minnesota were Coleman would be the clear winner in a two man race with Franken.

I know it’s difficult to get hard facts in an election like this where we depend on multiple boards of elections for information but I would be very interested to learn just how many military ballots were mailed out and then received AFTER the Monday, April 13th cutoff.

Dems forced that early cutoff date knowing that it ran against all recommendations from postal officials:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NjUwYWJmMTRjNDNlOWYyMTVhNTFiOGFjMWJhYTJkZWQ=

1,005 absentee ballots sent to military personnel serving overseas. I’d like to know just how many arrived back in time to be counted and how long it took all of them to be returned?

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Yep, currently Murphy’s a wee bit ahead but two counties have yet to be heard from and some other counties have only posted partial returns, plus they haven’t counted the military ballots yet; I have yet to find a simple, straightforward explanation in the news about the status of those ballots but by reading between the lines from a couple sources, and using a tea leaves, psychic researchers, and a water dowser (BG), at least 60 of those are already in and Monday is the deadline for the rest to be mailed, which means it will still be a few days. I could be wrong – correct me, please, if I’ve misunderstood about those.

The “Albany Times-Union” is not too obviously but clearly boosting Dems in an article at http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=789212&category=SARATOGA and reporting on how mean those Republicans are for challenging ballots; and apparently the TU is also helping to prepare the battlefield for space an upcoming legal battle (as in “Ken Dow, a former elections commissioner and Democratic committee chairman, said the Republicans are ‘acting in bad faith’ because state law is clear on the matter. In 1983 the Court of Appeals ruled in Ferguson v. McNab….”).

Meanwhile, “The Saratogian” today has an interesting article up on what would happen if there is an actual tie: What we have here is a “failure to elect”…. http://www.saratogian.com/articles/2009/04/11/news/doc49e00a129f744192217984.txt I think an actual tie is pretty unlikely, but it’s interesting. I’ll bet Paterson is wishing he’d gone with Princess Caroline after all.

Happy Easter, all!

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UGH! Looks like the vote counters wrapped up the day with a lead of 8 to Murphy (D).

http://www.elections.state.ny.us/

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Just noticed a change:
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/

Tedisco now up by 24 votes. This is painful to watch!

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