The Plot Thickens

A second post for today.  Jim's crew has had a productive day: at 3:00 this afternoon they had completed the lakeside wall and were hard at work on the side walls.

Working on the walls under the first floor bedroom...

...and under the service porch door.

Meanwhile, this week's Presque Isle Advance, the local weekly, carried no news of the theft of Jim's tools.  All I found were the usual notices that so-and-so was arrested on a DUI.  However, on page 1 just below the fold was an article announcing that Pat, the PI Township Supervisor, "will find out in November if he can keep his job."  According to this story, Pat was sent a letter "on September 1st" telling him that the county clerk found a sufficient number of valid signatures on the recall petitions to qualify this effort for the ballot.  The margin was narrow — just 4 more signatures than required.

Pat tells Sharon he received his registered letter today, Sept. 9.  It was postmarked Sept. 2 (not Sept. 1) in Gaylord, which seems very slow delivery.  In any case, Pat now has 72 hours to compose a 200-word rebuttal of the charges against him, the text of which will appear on the ballot.

A challenge to the validity of the recall petitions is going forward as I write, with a hearing scheduled for a few days hence.  In addition, Pat's group has identified four people feel they were misled into signing the petition and want their names removed.  Under the circumstances the clerk's public announcement seems a bit premature.  Pat's group is trying to get hold of the list of names which the clerk disqualified.  Initially, she said she had reviewed all the names on the petitions and found them valid.  However, after Pat's group compared the petition signatures with the voter registration records, she seems to have amended her original blanket approval.   Pat's group wants to know what's going on.

During the cross-checking of names, some people were found to have two addresses listed on the voter registration records — for example, Presque Isle and Flint.  These folks appear to have two homes, with Presque Isle probably being their summer home.  That raises interesting questions: first, where are these people voting?  and second, are these people voting in more than one jurisdiction?  Remember the "voter fraud" flap involving the now-defunct ACORN urban action group?  Consider, if you will, the potential impact, both locally and nationally, of people voting by absentee ballot in one jurisdiction, and then voting again "back home."  Who would know, because who would check?  With the electorate narrowly divided, and some elections decided by wafer-thin majorities, the possibilities here are disturbing. •••