Voter Suppression in Virginia's 5th Congressional District

I keed! I keed! The Virginia 5th Congressional District race between Republican Virgil Goode and Democrat Tom Perriello is one of the tightest in the country.

Bleeding heart Perriello is now leading nativist crank Goode by around 600 votes. What's interesting is that some votes were temporarily "lost." As one of the local TV stations reports:

The numbers are changing in the Fifth District congressional race thanks in part to new results from Charlottesville.

The city's voter registrar says two precincts did not report complete results on election night. The oversight at both Carver Recreation and Jefferson Park Avenue skipped almost 600 votes in the tight race between Tom Perriello and Virgil Goode.

"The chief election officer did not generate a tally tape on the e-scan machine. So when they reported the numbers back to the registrar's office, they only read the numbers from the e-slate machine," explained Charlottesville Electoral Board's Rick Sincere. 

The additional votes have been reported to the state board of elections. We're told a majority of them were for Perriello.

I am particularly interested in this story because I happen to vote in the Carver precinct in Charlottesville, so one of the votes that may have gone astray was mine. Finding these misplaced votes in the People's Republic of Charlottesville has to be bad news for Goode.

Disclosure: Consistent with my stand that the Republicans have been very bad dogs and need to be rapped over their noses with a rolled up newspaper, I voted for Perriello. Besides I generally prefer bleeding hearts to nativist cranks.