Oh boy, oh boy, a delicious little tidbit comes to us from Terri Hallenbeck of the Freeploid’s vtBuzz politics blog.
As you may recall, the VTGOP did a lot of last-minute scrambling to put together a statewide ticket — pulling Jack McMullen out of mothballs to run for AG, settling for no-name no-hopers to run for Congress, and really, settling for party lifer Randy Brock to be, apparently, its sacrificial lamb in the governor’s race.
And failing to identify a candidate for Secretary of State.
Well, in all the fuss over the Progressive Party recount, nobody thought to check on the Secretary of State’s race until Hallenbeck looked into it. And found the answer.
Jim Condos is your Republican nominee. Yep, more Republican voters wrote in Jim’s name than any other.
As Hallenbeck points out, this is the same Jim Condos who was basically accused of corruption and/or mismanagement yesterday by VTGOP chair Jack Lindley.
Hey, Jack: meet your newest candidate! Hope you put up a good fight on his behalf.
(Condos is also the candidate of the Progressive and Working Families parties. I’d say he’s the heavy favorite to win a second term.)
He can only act in accordance with what’s already in the statutes, and people are always finding novel ways to get around the rules.
For instance rules governing conflicts of interest are woefully inadequate and mostly left to the discretion and whims of individual town governing bodies.
They fail to codify the complexity of modern relationships, where people who are unrelated by law may co-habit and therefore have shared interest in business or property matters that may be under review in a particular process.
People who feel they have been wronged due to a conflict of interest at the local level find that there is little recourse for them at the state level. The failure is in the rules, not with the Secretary of State’s office.