Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was very surprised when the Maryland state quarter was released a number of years ago. The obverse of the coin showed George Washington (as ususal), but the reverse showed the cupola of the Maryland state Capitol building and bore the moniker “The Old Line State.” Your Maximum Leader has called Maryland many things over the years (most of them not suitable for a family blog - if only this was a family blog); but “The Old Line State” was never one of them. Indeed, your Maximum Leader had no idea what line Maryland was referring to. Neither did he know if it was old or not. Eventually he decided that the Marylanders were talking about the Mason-Dixon line. This may or may not be the case, but that is his story and he is sticking to it.
Your Maximum Leader brings this up because of an article on the WSJ Op/Ed site last week. The article, by John Fund, was detailing the many voting-law irregularities in Maryland. Your Maximum Leader has excerpted the first few paragraphs of the Fund article below the fold. If you are interested in a taste go and click through. It is hard to beat that great first line, “It should normally be difficult to pick the worst state legislature in America, but Maryland’s is way out in front.” As a proud Virginian that line just makes your Maximum Leader smile, smile, smile.
For as long as your Maximum Leader can remember there have been accusations of vote tampering and vote fraud in Maryland. He supposes the most recent and most eggregious incident was the sudden “win” of Parris Glendenning over Ellen Sauerbrey by 6000 votes in 1994. Those 6000 votes were “discovered” in Baltimore just as it looked like Ms. Sauerbrey was going to win the statehouse.
If the US of A is really just a dressed up Banana Republic when it comes to how we conduct our elections then surely Maryland puts the banana in our republic.
Your Maximum Leader is very concerned with vote fraud and irregularities from all around the country. He proposes a simple solution - really a stop-gap solution until the Mike World Order comes about. Go back to “Taking a Division” as the nation did in the early days of the Republic. A voter would walk into the county courthouse and the circut court judge (aided by a few upstanding citizens) would tell everyone for Candidate X to stand on one side of the courthouse and everyone for Candidate Y to stand on the other. Then everyone would count who stood where and the count would be recorded. Your Maximum Leader says we give that a try. See how it works. If it turns out that we don’t like it. Then we can try some high-fallutin’ electronic system that measures voter biometrics to avoid fraud… Or some such beastie…
Carry on.
From Vote Early and Often by John Fund.
It should normally be difficult to pick the worst state legislature in America, but Maryland’s is way out in front. First it overrode GOP Gov. Bob Ehrlich’s veto of a special health-care tax on Wal-Mart. Democratic legislators then passed three election-related bills and again mustered the necessary three-fifths votes to overturn his vetoes. Together the election laws would so weaken safeguards against voter fraud as to make Maryland the nation’s prime example of Election Day irresponsibility.
The gravity of the changes is causing dismay, and not just for the governor. A bipartisan sate advisory commission headed by the revered George Beall, the former U.S. attorney who convicted Spiro Agnew of tax evasion, had urged legislators to sustain the Ehrlich vetoes.
The most troublesome bill undermines the concept of local polling places by allowing all voters to vote anywhere in Maryland using a provisional ballot. Gilles Burger, chairman of the state’s Board of Elections, flatly says the bill invites fraud. His testimony prompted the Beall commission to warn that it would mean “a provisional ballot could be cast successfully in multiple counties and not be detected until after the votes were certified.”
