In case the papering over multi-million dollar fiascos, facilitating Beauprez's easy primary, enacting GOP lawyer briefs verbatim, and straight-up contempt for compliance with law didn't convince you,

Voting machines "expert" says he's not

Under the gun to meet tight election-day deadlines, the Secretary of State's office certified a kind of voting machine for Jefferson and Mesa Counties that does not meet state requirements.

The information comes from the deposition of John Gardner - the man appointed by Gigi Dennis as an expert and charged with certifying the machines.

But Gardner testified he is not an expert in the areas required by state law. He also admitted that the Secretary of State's office was under pressure to certify the voting machines because counties had already purchased them...

Last thing I needed to convince me an absentee ballot is mandatory this year.

It's a pretty serious thing we're dealing with here -- eye-popping abuse of power, every important function of her office in neglect (or worse), and no check on what she's doing since she's out in a few months and her only oversight is helping her pull it off. Positively Byzantine, friends.

Worst-case scenario is a pardon, right?

The thing about blogging is you can go back at any time and examine a whole body of a person's work with no effort. To some extent this is a function of internet archiving in general and not just blogging, meaning that newspaper columnists and other pundits are also easily held accountable for their prior statements. Of course, many newspapers drop articles behind the archive wall after a couple of weeks, which removes them from casual scrutiny. Those of us with access to Lexis-Nexis and other costly archives are still able to have some fun, it's true.

With that accountability comes a sense of responsibility -- you don't want to be the one who goes off half-cocked two days before you have to take it all back because it was totally wrong. It's important that what you say be defensible over the long term, or eventually you're discredited like any other bum with a sandwich board.

Examples of where I've screwed the pooch in this manner include a vociferous defense of Dan Rather's infamous "fake but accurate" memos in 2004. I stand by the "accurate" part of the statement, but the "fake" was a bit of a black eye. Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who bought the idea of a National Guard office possessing the very slickest typewriter possibly available at the time. It's not just enough to suck it up and drive on in this situation: you have to actually learn the lesson and be more careful next time.

With that in mind, I would like to assert something that I think is gonna hold up to scrutiny.   Read More »