Oh dear. The chair of the Vermont GOP, Jack Lindley, has a serious case of Bunched Knicker Syndrome. He’s upset that his man, Thurston Howell the Thir — er, Mitt Romney — failed to win 50% of the vote in Tuesday’s primary. That means Mitt will have to share Vermont’s 17 delegates with Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

(Probably also means a couple of Lindley’s golfing buddies will miss out on a trip to the convention, replaced by scruffy goldbugs from the Paul camp. But perhaps I’m being overly churlish, due to the ridiculosity of what follows.) Vermont Digger:

Lindley… says he wants the Vermont Secretary of State to examine alleged poll reporting irregularities. Lindley says a new state reporting system for municipal officials led to anomalous results that were posted on the Secretary of State’s website Tuesday night. He stopped short, however, of calling for a formal probe.

“I’m not asking for an investigation,” Lindley said. “I’m asking for an examination by the Secretary of State whose principal responsibility is to validate the integrity of the ballot in Vermont.”

After the jump: political hypertension and Much Ado About Nothing.  

That would be the, as Lindley would say, DEMOCRAT Secretary of State Jim Condos. Lindley’s griping about a new secure online reporting system that had its first run on Tuesday. Before the vote, some test results had been posted on the site, and some were still visible on Tuesday.

“The mistake the GOP made yesterday was they were thinking these were official results – they weren’t,” Condos said. “It’s hard not to think it’s sour grapes. They thought Romney would take 50 percent, and they’re looking to blame somebody and they’re blaming our office.”

It’s standard practice for an election reporting system to post test results before a vote count begins. Sometimes it’s a string of zeroes, sometimes it’s really outlandish totals. Because if the test results are implausible, nobody will mistake them for the real results. Well, not unless they had a big political ax to grind. Cue the Fox News-style harrumphing:

“Obviously the Secretary of State’s site was not accurate,” Lindley said. “Their response was this was an unofficial tally. I’m not sure what kind of system we’re running here, either we have it right or we don’t.”

Problem is, all the officially-reported results were accurate. The test results were never counted. The new system worked! That’s plainly obvious to anyone who isn’t ignoring the facts to try to score a cheap political point.

Lindley then turned to Burlington, the ACORN-riddled Rotten Borough of his fevered imagination.

About 800 provisional Burlington ballots, including about 200 that weren’t matched with Social Security cards or drivers’ licenses, Lindley says, should have been challenged by Republican candidate for mayor, Kurt Wright.

…”Any party would have an opportunity to challenge provisional ballots and they’ve walked away with that, which I think is regrettable,” Lindley said. “So what have we got? We don’t even know if they’re Americans.”

AHA! The smoking gun! Kurt Wright’s landslide defeat can be explained by trumped-up uncertainties over a couple hundred provisional ballots. Never mind that he lost by more than two thousand votes. The anti-immigrant bit is an especially nice, completely irrelevant and baseless touch.

I guess this is what we can expect from Jack Lindley’s Vermont Republican Party: a dogged search for any little thing he can turn into a talking point, no matter how outlandish. A blizzard of hysterical press releases and dudgeony news conferences. Trumped-up allegations of Democrat/liberal perfidy, with constant Bernie “Socialist” Sanders name-dropping.

Ignoring the fact that Bernie is the most popular political figure in the state. But Lindley isn’t using the Jim Douglas happy-face playbook; he’s using the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News/Karl Rove playbook. Small problem: that stuff doesn’t resonate in Vermont. He keeps this up, his party’s going to get its ass kicked in November.

Question: Jack Lindley was chair of the VTGOP once before, in the late 70s and early 80s. Back when the party’s officeholders were Dick Snelling, Bob Stafford, and Jim Jeffords. Not exactly doctrinaire conservatives, and men who were certainly willing to work across party lines. So what happened to the VTGOP, and to Jack Lindley, between then and now?  

I think they’ve caught a bad case of Fox poisoning.