The current limbo in which Beth Clarkson's court case now finds itself.

I received the following email recently, indicating the strange judgment rendered in court here in Wichita on Thursday. For those who have forgotten or lost interest in the case, Beth Clarkson is the statistician at Wichita State who is trying to look at and verify the votes in Sedgwick County in the last state elections in order to determine if the statistical anomalies she has found are actually there on the paper and not just mistakes somehow reported by the machines or the computers used to count the votes. Here is her report:

"Hearing on the 18th.

"It was amazing and disappointing. It was amazing to see how many people came. The room was packed, standing room only and I heard there were additional people outside the room looking in. This is clearly a problem that has attracted people's attention.

"The judge even denied the plaintiffs motion and we can proceed to trial next month. But he gutted it of all meaning by instructing us that while I could sue for a recount, I could not use the R.T.A.L. records to conduct that recount.

"R.T.A.L. records are the Real Time Audit Logs I have been seeking. . . . To conduct an audit and verify the machine produced counts, these rolls of paper must be unfurled and manually inspected to determine the votes. It's a lot of work, but without using these records, a recount or audit is just theater. It will produce no assurances that our votes are counted as they were cast.

"I am deeply disappointed. My lawyer, Randy Rathbun, has promised to file an appeal immediately. He deserves recognition for all the hard work he's done - pro bono!"

This is probably somewhat confusing to those unfamiliar with the hallowed halls of justice here in the state of Kansas so I may be able to throw some light on the subject. Beth Clarkson has sued Kris Kobach the renowned Secy of State here in KS, who spends perhaps not as much time here in the state where he has various responsibilities as he does in other states where he has no official responsibilities but where he is coordinating efforts among Republican legislators to limit the number of voters on the rolls throughout the country in order presumably to reduce the number of votes needing to be tallied and thus limit capital depreciation of the voting equipment being used to count votes and thus save the states considerable do-re-me. Kobach has refused to allow Ms. Clarkson to examine the voting scrolls inside the touch screen voting machines in Sedgwick County and this is the reason for Ms. Clarkson's law suit. Kobach had entered a counter suit, charging that for various reasons her law suit should not be permitted to proceed. This was the case decided on the 18th. Otherwise, her case to be allowed to examine the paper would have been decided in March. The judgment rendered by the illustrious judge sitting on the bench here in the aforesaid county of Sedgwick explained that Clarkson's case could legally proceed, that Kobach's objections could not prevent this from happening. However, and this is the qualifier that stretches the imagination and taxes the brain cells of the average yokel even in Kansas, a state not renowned for the niceties of its jurisprudence, she (the aforementioned Clarkson) cannot use or unroll the tapes that contain the paper records of the vote she wants to count in order to determine whether or not the voting results can be verified on paper or whether they are merely something generated in the bowels of the computer in some unknown and inexplicable fashion. Of course the counting of the paper records (such as they are in touch screen computers counting the vote) is after all the purpose of the whole judicial charade taking place in the hallowed halls of justice here in the state. I can imagine the judge was almost certainly quite proud of the judgment he rendered, perhaps leaning back in his shimmering robes, a grave and magisterial look on his face, as the result of his deliberations was revealed. The fact that his judgment made no sense whatever somehow escaped his notice. If Clarkson cannot unroll or look at the tapes that constitute the paper records she proposes to examine, then there is no reason to continue her suit, permission for which the judge pointedly granted in the same ruling. To resort to a somewhat less exalted form of comparison, it would be like a referee allowing a basketball player to proceed to the free throw line at the end of the game to shoot a 2-shot foul in a game where the opposing team has only a one-point lead, except that in this case, for reasons the referee never is quite clear about, the shooter may not use a basketball to carry out the action that the referee has clearly and purposefully given permission for the shooter to avail himself of. As nearly as I can understand it, this is the place where Ms Clarkson now finds herself. It will be interesting to see if Rathbun's "appeal" to a higher court raises any eyebrows in the higher reaches of the KS judicial system, such as it is. The courts in KS have not in the past distinguished themselves by the intellectual rigor of their jurisprudence so hoping for the ruling to be overturned seems to be something of a pipe dream. Nevertheless, those sitting on the bench do seem to possess functioning brains and nervous systems capable of the rudimentary logic and a reasonable response is quite possible.