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Issue 10.15: Cunning Lingle
What Governor Linda Lingle said at a Sept. 26, 2006 press conference on the slow release of final vote tallies during the 2006 Primary Election, according to the Sept. 27, 2006 Honolulu Star-Bulletin:
by Anthony Pignataro
October 05, 2006
“I have observed several statewide elections now fairly close up and I think they have gotten worse with each succeeding election… This is a very bad sign—it makes people lose confidence in the integrity of the voting system.”
What she didn’t say:
While Lingle is correct that it’s a travesty for the state Office of Elections to take all night to count less than 300,000 votes while California can get 15 million tabulated by 11 p.m., other actions like her brazen call for people to vote for Republican Jerry Coffee in the U.S. Senate race—even though he dropped out of the race months ago for health reasons—so Lingle and the rest of the party leadership could pick a replacement smacked of the old smoke-filled room machine politics of more than a century ago. I’d say acts like that do more to sap voter confidence than a mere slow counting of votes.
-Anthony Pignataro