Election foul ups

I didn’t know you had to mark all the boxes when you were picking ONE candidate? Apparently a badly trained Kentucky election worker didn’t either because he physically tossed a voter out of a polling station in Louisville on Election Day because he hadn’t marked all the offices on his ballot.

Then there’s the case of a voter in Allentown, Pa., was arrested after he suddenly erupted in the voting booth and began pounding the machine with a paperweight. He must have thought it was a vending machine that didn’t give him his goods?

Wow how could this happen? In elections for sheriff, Chris Abril was elected in Polk County, N.C., despite his arrest in August on years-old charges of statutory rape, which Abril said he would straighten out as one of his first orders of business. Yeah, probably to have the charges dismissed.

Then there’s, Rick Magnuson who was soundly defeated for sheriff of Aspen, Colo., after “all of my skeletons (were) exposed,” he said, in the course of the campaign. Among the skeletons was a stint in alcohol rehab; his unauthorized use of a criminal database; his onetime letters to Osama bin Laden as part of an “art project.”

Dutch Labour party leader Wouter Bos was turned away from a polling station in Amsterdam on Wednesday because he showed up to vote without all the right papers. That’s not the way to start off an election day now is it?

The Labour leader, Bos, who is usually calm and relaxed, cameras Bos, at first looked stunned In front of dozens of television and then sheepish before hurrying home to fetch the correct documentation.

Bos has seen a commanding opinion poll lead vanish over recent months as his rival, Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, took the credit for an economic recovery in the run-up to Wednesday’s parliamentary election.

There’s no word yet on how he did in the election but that couldn’t have been a good Omen.