And you thought the mid-terms were over. MUA HA HA!

Ever since the ‘explodah in Minnesota’ where Al Franken ascended gloriously to the Senate, jokes about extra bags of votes being found in car trunks have become fairly ubiquitous among more jaded election watchers. But now, thanks to the eagle eye of William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection, we know of a city in Upstate New York who may be trying a little oneupmanship on them.

In the race for a seat in the closely contested state senate, GOP challenger Mark Grisanti is leading Democratic Sen. Antoine Thompson by 821 votes. While it’s too soon to declare victory, things are certainly looking up for the Republican, right?

Not so fast there, slick.

Two new voting machines were located last night in Buffalo, according to Sen.-elect Mike Gianaris, a Democratic attorney helping his party’s efforts in ballot counting…

“It puts a cloud over the whole process,” Gianaris said of the machine irregularities. “And how we handle this is going to set the tone for around the state.”

See, you people in Minnesota are never going to get anywhere if you keep focusing on small potatoes like individual bags of votes. Out here in the Empire States, we do things in a big way. We find entire voting machines weeks after the polls have closed.

I’m going to take a moment of my time in this borrowed bully pulpit to pontificate on this. My first exposure to the new optical scan voting machines being used in New York came this fall and I didn’t care for them a bit. Unlike similar machines in use around the country, these machines have no “confirmation stop” after you feed the paper ballot into the reader. Other models display your selections and give you a chance to bail out of the process and start over if any of them are wrong. Not these. The machine swallows up the ballot and, if it is “satisfied” that is has read all of the filled in circles correctly, gives off a short “thunk” sound and the ballot is gone.

This story is hardly the only report of problems. Ed Morrissey previously reported on broad problems with the Tim Bishop race in Long Island where a hand recount produced a startlingly different total than the optical scan machines recorded. In other precincts we saw reports of delays in getting counts out and candidates suddenly doing surprisingly well in areas where they had been consistently polling weakly.

The Help America Vote act was supposed to instill greater confidence in the voters, not decrease it. This system has some serious bugs left to be worked out in my opinion.

Now you can scream at Jazz for being a stupid, wrong-headed RINO even faster than just leaving comments by following him on Twitter! @JazzShaw