Alan Keyes is making his third bid for the White House this year. Back in 2000, Keyes finished third in the Iowa caucuses with a surprising 14% of the vote. But his campaign this time around was practically stillborn… launched late, in debt, and polling at the very bottom of an already crowded field.
Some people have suggested that he’s only running to help pay down past campaign bills, and that he will continue his campaign as a third party or independent candidate in order to continue paying down such debts.
Keyes expected to see a report showing how many votes he won in yesterday’s Iowa caucus. But that report never came… as apparently his name was left out of the system and votes for him were not tallied or reported to the state headquarters.
From a statement released by the campaign…
“We didn’t have the electronic means to record the tallies for Keyes, so we can’t yet report to the public how many votes Keyes got,” said John Lund at the Iowa GOP headquarters in Des Moines. “We can’t report the Keyes votes until we’ve double-checked each individual paper ballot.”
Meanwhile, the Iowa GOP widely reported the vote tallies of all other candidates, including Tom Tancredo, who got 5 votes despite having quit the race.
“I personally traveled with Alan Keyes across Iowa, and we met scores of Keyes voters. It’s totally unfair these citizens’ votes are now being withheld from the public,” said Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt. “This is tantamount to election fraud.”
The Keyes organization claims that they believe their candidate received a significant number of votes yesterday and suggest a conspiracy involving the use of “communist-style” tactics to surpress his support…
“I voted for Alan Keyes,” said Siena Hoefling of Calhoun County. “It’s ridiculous they didn’t report my vote. Each precinct could have easily called or emailed the vote tallies to headquarters, so they should have been counted by now.”
To completely leave off the name of one active candidate while including the name of another candidate who had already dropped out… at the bare minimum this seems like a monumental screw-up on the part of the Iowa Republican Party. At worst, like election fraud.
With voter trust in elections already at an all-time low, this certainly won’t help matters any.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:53 am
What a ridiculous complaint. Alan Keyes is a not a viable candidate, and never will be. He uses every election year as a platform to rake in donation money to live off of, and I’m glad other good conservatives are seeing him for what he is… A Phoney.
January 31st, 2008 at 4:56 am
Alan Keyes is as viable a candidate as we the people make him. The media does not elect our president we do. We each get one vote and owe it to ourselves to do our own homework.
As part of his responsibilities over the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Dr. Keyes also managed U.S. policy relating to issues before the UN Security Council.
Prior to becoming Assistant Secretary, he was appointed by Ronald Reagan as Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council — representing the sovereign interests of the United States in the UN General Assembly.
Before that, Dr. Keyes spent two years as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff — following service as a desk officer in the Department’s Office of South African Affairs and as vice-consul at the United States Consulate General in Bombay, India (where he met his wife Jocelyn).
Previous to joining the U.S. Foreign Service in 1978, he pursued graduate studies in government at Harvard University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1979 after writing his dissertation on constitutional theory.
March 20th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
The only person who believes Alan Keyes is a viable candidate is Tom Hoefling of Iowa/Idaho.Of course Hoefling is campaign staffer for Keyes