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May
8
Doesn’t everyone living in Lake County feel proud that the whole country witnessed a Lake County, Indiana style election night on CNN and other national media outlets? After all, we voted year after year to keep the folks in place who are running our county government and they displayed their mad political and media skills not just for us, but for everyone watching and waiting for the vote results in Indiana.
Lake County, Indiana even gets mentioned on The Daily Show for its election silliness.
Annie Wu writes on TV Squad that the lack of voting results and Lake County’s past flings with voter fraud were just the thing needed to fill up hours and hours of television time on a relatively uneventful election night. It’s great the Lake County’s officials could help out by providing some drama.
The Indiana primary saw a bit of controversy and the news networks, desperate for any bit of drama to spice up those seven hours of news time, jumped all over it. Indiana’s Lake County didn’t turn in its results within the same time as the other voters. Naturally, “hanky panky” was suspected and the news anchors were pissed. CNN’s John King turned to the touchy screen for distraction. The choice of music under the footage made me laugh uncontrollably. Fact: On two hours of sleep, The Daily Show is even funnier, but not necessarily on the best parts. The mayor fight sent me into a fit of giggles, if that’s any indication of my fatigue.
It all came down to absentee ballots and decisions to not release preliminary totals to the media.
Absentee ballot counts in Lake County always raise suspicions given past election problems.
The Northwest Indiana Times writes about the delays in releasing Lake County, Indiana’s vote totals:
The nation watched Tuesday night as Lake County election officials held the fate of the Democratic presidential primary in their hands — and held it, and held it and held it.
The delay provoked a broadside of allegations from national, state and local pundits of election trickery in a county infamous for vote fraud and political corruption. The firestorm continued into Wednesday — long after election tallies were finalized — with national news crews storming the Lake County Government Complex in Crown Point, demanding answers to the county’s delayed results.
The Post-Tribune’s John Byrne reports that the delayed vote tabulation made people wonder if dirty tricks were once again at play in the Lake County election. Such a thought wouldn’t be far fetched in a county where the Indiana Supreme Court once threw out an East Chicago election because of vote fraud. See the Indiana Supreme Court’s decision in Pabey v. Pastrick.
The state’s 91 other counties had reported their results hours earlier, leading national election analysts to wonder whether a plan was afoot in Lake County to manipulate the vote totals.
The Associated Press gives us a concise history of vote fraud in Lake County that caused the whole nation to wonder what was up with the slow vote count.
Lake County’s history of corruption raised concerns that something more suspicious had gone wrong.
In 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy called Lake County one of the most corrupt counties in the nation. In 2004, the state Supreme Court tossed out a mayoral election in East Chicago because of campaign misconduct that resulted in dozens of voter-fraud convictions.
In 2005, former congresswoman Katie Hall resigned as the Gary city clerk after pleading guilty to federal mail-fraud charges. That case resulted from accusations that she made office workers raise money for her re-election campaigns in order to keep their jobs.
Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter, whose office helped investigate the East Chicago voter-fraud cases, said he believed the county’s political process had improved in recent years.
“It took years for the reputation to become as poor as it is, and it is going take years to correct it, rehabilitate it,” said Carter, a Republican who is the state chairman for John McCain’s campaign.
All I can say is that we as voters deserve some blame since we keep electing the same people to county offices year after year. We complain about the goofy things our “leaders” do, but then never take any action to make sure to put new people into power.
In a year where “Change” is a key election buzzword, I predict locally that people in Lake County won’t even think of making any changes to the status quo. Despite being one of the most liberal places in the nation, Lake County, Indiana remains staunchly conservative when it comes to re electing the same people to political office year after year and decade after decade.
Video: Why Did Lake County Vote Take So Long?
Video: Frustration With Slow Lake County Vote Tabulation
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4 Responses to “Nation Witnesses Lake Co. Style Election”
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Yeah really. This is nuts. Even McCain poked a little fun at Lake County on the Daily Show last night. According to a blogpost from Jerry Davich at http://blogs.post-trib.com/davich/2008/05/mccain-did-we-solve-the-myster.html
“Anyway, McCain asked Comedy Central host John Stewart, “Did we solve the mystery of Lake County?” garnering an applause from the crowd.
And Stewart quickly replied, “It turns out nothing was going on.”
I don’t know about that, but still….”
Well said, Jerry.
Chris,
Lake County is a public embarassment to all of Indiana. I for one hope that the one percent property tax cap will bancrupt most of the major cities and towns in Northern Lake County and cause the state to come in and set up Marshall plan style reorganization.
If Hillary got 60,000 extra votes in Indiana from Republicans, I’d bet that Mayor Clay was able to make up for more than half by cheating the system.
Hi Dan,
Lake County deserves to have some of the spotlight on it — but not for our silly pols and their inability to match Marion County or anywhere else in the nation where electronic voting machine totals are available within a short period of time.
Unfortunately, I’m betting that nothing much will change because the same types of people (if not the same people) will be in charge for the next 40 years to come.
People love talking about change, but when they don’t often go through with it when they get a chance to vote for change on the local level.
Hi Steve,
Well said. I am not surprised that Barack Obama won Lake County. I am surprised that the Lake County officials wouldn’t release the voting machine totals earlier in the evening out of fear that it would show earlier in the evening that Hillary was going to win in Indiana.
In the grand scheme of things, Hillary winning Indiana doesn’t mean much because the Democratic primary system assigns the delegates on a proportional basis and Barack Obama will always be ahead of Hillary — even if she wins big in the upcoming primaries in West Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere.
I just hope that we aren’t looking at a preview for what might happen in the Fall election. The local officials need to develop a plan to get partial vote tallies out to the media since everyone assumes waiting for the absentee ballots means that extra votes are needed to put someone over the top.