Another New Mexico Election Disgrace

Rank Incompetence, Stupidity And Sleaze

Democratic Party Blows The Presidential Caucus

NM is the "Idiot State That Couldn't"

New Mexico's Democratic presidential caucus was another in a long line of election night disasters on Tuesday; a disgrace and humiliation regarding electoral competency and honesty.

The entire process was steeped in incompetency and chaos. The state Democratic Party, which ran the caucus, didn't have enough polling places. The party set up only one for the entire city of Rio Rancho, which has a population of 71,000! Read that again: one polling place for a city of 71,000! When the polls closed at 7 p.m.at Rio Rancho High School in Sandoval County, there were close to 1,800 people still in line to vote. At 8:25 p.m., there were still 400 people in line. The final vote wasn't cast until after 9 p.m.

Rio Rancho voters waited more than three hours in line to vote. How can that be when they only had to choose between two candidates? Marking a ballot took all of three seconds. The limited number of polling places were so "swamped" that voters couldn't find parking spaces. The limited voting hours, noon-7 p.m., concentrated too many people at too few locations.

In Albuquerque and elsewhere throughout the state it was the same: waits of over an hour to mark one spot on a ballot. Voters were pissed. In some Albuquerque polling places people started shouting and screaming at party officials for bungling the vote and making them wait. Polling places ran out of ballots because party officials greatly underestimated turnout. Many voters left rather than spend hours in the midst of incompetency and stupidity.

The long lines in Rio Rancho caused other problems. Party officials said they couldn't release any vote totals until the last person had voted. That meant no vote counts until more than 90 minutes after the polls had closed! When the counts did come in, they were embarrassingly slow. The party stopped updating its vote total Web site at 11:56 p.m. Tuesday, presumably to go home. By 1 a.m. Wednesday there were still two or three counties out. That's unacceptable, and it's a disgrace.

Democratic Party officials said the polling places were swamped by mobs of voters.

Really?

So how many millions voted in New Mexico?

Well, it wasn't millions.

Then, 500,000, maybe 600,000 voters?

Naah.

A hefty 350,000?

Nope.

Only 150,000 people cast ballots--150,000 measly votes!

How come New York state can count 1.7 million votes by midnight, and we can't count 150,000? How come Illinois can count 1.9 million votes and we can't count 150,000? How come Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and New Jersey--states with far greater numbers of voters than New Mexico--could count votes and New Mexico couldn't? How could Alaska, whose polls closed long after New Mexico's, have its vote totals in before New Mexico?

The answer is simple: Those states have marginally competent people running their elections; New Mexico has idiots--pure, stinking, disgraceful idiots.

State Democratic Party Chairman Brian Colon, the goof who set this mess up, should resign immediately and go live in a cave or throw himself down an old mine shaft. Other party officials should consider blowing their brains out so as to spare the world any more of their stupidity and incompetence. If they have children, they should toss them off cliffs so as to prevent the New Mexico Stupidity/Incompetence gene from replicating.

Everyone involved in this fiasco should go to Los Alamos National Laboratory and ingest massive amounts of plutonium.

But most of all, members of the Democratic Party, and really, all New Mexicans, should do the world a favor and dive head first into the muck of Elephant Butte Reservoir or the Rio Grande. Because it's you--we, us--who put these jerks in power. And we keep returning them to power even though they don't deserve it. They're fools and idiots, but we're bigger fools and idiots.

New Mexico is so screwed up, so incompetent, so vile, that it should just cave into the center of the earth and spare the rest of humanity the embarrassment of knowing it exists.