I thought that, once his monkey-mischief surrounding the presidential election had failed so utterly to elect Willard Romney, we might have heard the last for a while of Jon Husted, the secretary of state in Ohio. However, he's still hard at work at the job of screwing up elections so as to advantage the Republican party. The latest fiasco is the discovery that Husted's office may be tossing thousands of provisional ballots cast in the late election and, by doing so, affect the balance of power in the state legislature.

According to a document created by Phillips and Clyde, the two say that Ohio is breaking federal election laws by not allowing certain ballots cast in a voter's former precinct to be counted. The representatives also claim that the state is withholding public records so that provisional ballot disputes cannot be discussed and resolved in a timely manner; that the state is requiring more information that is legally necessary on provisional ballot envelopes; and rejecting ballots of those whose registrations might have been lost or improperly purged.

There is simply no other reason that a secretary of state would preside over this mess of a process other than the fact that making a mess of the process serves his political goals. Human error is understandable. Arranging the system so that human error becomes inevitable, and so that its ramifications are more serious than they have to be, is another thing entirely. And we have to keep an eye on this finagling at the local level because that's where the national finagling ultimately is born. And it is also important to remember the guiding principles of modern conservative power politics — nothing is ever settled, nothing is ever over.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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