Could we please have a different director of the Board of Elections in St. Louis County? One who might, you know, find out before 4 p.m. that people were suffering six hour waits in line at one of his polling places. One that didn’t have to get that news from a  Post-Dispatch reporter.

Appoint me. Hey, I may not know the logistical niceties of planning an election, but I’d know how to put out a memo to all polling place supervisors mentioning that if the line got more than, say, five hours long–especially if the cause of the problem was obvious–that they should, like, call me.

And I wouldn’t pinch pennies during the most important election in seventy years. I”d print up enough paper ballots. Joe Goeke is sandwiched in between two election authorities who had the good sense to do that. Not him, though. He knew better than his colleagues and better than election protection activists who warned that ballots sufficient for 80 percent of the registered voters might not be enough.

But nothing is his fault, he says. Running out of ballots was the fault of those henny-penny, sky-is-falling voters who don’t trust touchscreen machines and wanted paper ballots. Hell, yes, they’re paranoid, and that’s one of the bright spots in this scenario, that the word about DREs is getting out.

Goeke is annoyed about it, though:

“There are small groups, whatever their agenda is, encouraging people to not use touch-screen equipment,” Goeke said.

Our agenda, Mr. Republican Elections Director, is to have honest and transparent elections. Forgive us.

And forgive us for threatening lawsuits over problems at 14 polling places in order to get more paper ballots delivered there.

I don’t know if it’s fair to blame Goeke because a few of his election judges went off the reservation. One of them at Lee Hamilton Elementary School in North St. Louis County was slowing the line down by insisting on seeing photo IDs. It took the mayor of Ferguson quite a while to get that problem sorted out. At another location, a judge believed he had the right to require two forms of ID and dismissed voters’ claims that the card sent to them by the County Board of Elections was sufficient.

Maybe Goeke had no control over that sort of incompetence or obstructionism–whichever it was. But on the issues he definitely could have controlled, he gets a D-.