Continuing the saga of Republican norm-breaking, a decent lady from a nearby county is learning the lesson “lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas.”
Indiana State senator Spencer Deery was one of the most eloquent opponents of Indiana redistricting mid-decade, thereby painting a target on his back. So MAGA endorsed and supported, to the tune of millions of dollars, a lady named Paula Copenhaver, who had run and lost against Deery previously.
Copenhaver seems like a decent lady, albeit with some caution flags like her current employment by Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, an unqualified rightwing pastor and shit-stirrer foisted on governor Mike Braun as his running-mate by a rightwing-packed GOP State Convention.
Despite the millions of dollars of MAGA support, part of Trump’s nationwide revenge program on Republicans who don’t knee-walk to tongue-shine his shoes, Copenhaver lost to Deery by three votes out of a total count in the 12,000 range. She predictably asked for a recount, which is fine and good. What isn’t fine or good are the methods she/they (for here, I suspect, is where MAGA enters the recount room) are trying to insinuate into the recount process.
Indiana does not register voters by political party, but it has some arcane rules intended to avoid mischievous crossover voting: basically, you are not entitled to vote in a party’s primary unless you voted for a majority of its candidates in the last election or intend to vote for a majority of its candidates in the upcoming election.
Now I have some principled problems with the state carrying water for the partisan duopoly by running partisan primaries. Those problems are heightened when the state by its election laws tries to enforce party discipline by preventing crossover voting. In short, I think that if the Republicans want to limit primary voting to Republicans, they should run their own primary elections, or select their candidates by party convention. Ditto with the Democrats.
Instead, we have a bastardized system, whereby the state not only conducts parties‘ primaries at state expense but tries to enforce the purity of those primaries by excluding crossover voting. I suggest that even if the state facilitates this corrupt duopoly, enforcing who can pull a particular partisan ballot should be beyond its ken.
But let’s take the obnoxious system for what it is. Mischievous crossover voting is supposed to be eliminable by the arcane rules alluded to. But the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers to challenge voters they think are not qualified to vote in the parties’ primaries.
Copenhaver and her supporters did not recruit such poll-watchers, but waited confidently for the election results and, shocked by the results, went combing desperately through social media for people who boasted (truthfully or falsely — you know how social media roll) that they took crossover ballots to vote for Spencer Deery but intend to vote for the Democrat in the General Election.
Now they have filed, under seal, a list of 14 such people whose depositions they apparently intend to take in order to reduce Deery’s vote count, after the fact, instead of the normal course of challenging those voters upfront. So much for ballot secrecy and norms.
I like to think that Copenhaver is mortified by this process, but I venture a guess, having some experience in the ways of the world, that having accepted millions of dollars of support from MAGA normbreakers, she is powerless now to object. It’s out of her control, thought it’s being done in her name
Like I said: lie down with dogs, rise up with fleas.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 