…well, that is the message that Hartford residents might be hearing lately. To the list of dirty politics–well-timed look at how Perez keeps his kitchen, Gonzalez going to court over an old signature law, and the requisite mob mentality of a certain incumbent’s supporters–add forged signatures. It could get worse, I suppose, if one of the candidates gets accused of hosting cock fights.

Also add to this the new voting method. Now people wanting to exercise their right to vote will have to cope with terrifying flashbacks of taking those awful bubblesheet standardized tests from high school. Maybe all you want is to write-in the name of your next door neighbor, and to do that, you wind up sweating profusely, having sound hallucinations of your homeroom teacher scolding students for not filling the bubbles in completely or putting stray pencil marks all over the page. The new voting technique requires voters to use a black felt marker. They did not say what happens if you accidentally mark more than one candidate in a column (the old machines were designed so you just could not do that), if the scan machine misreads your form, and how you would know your choices were counted. The sandwich shop will give me a receipt for a meal under $6.00, and that’s far less consequential than knowing where my votes went.