WOULD YOU HIRE THESE GUYS? It's now fairly evident that the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections screwed up its responsibilities in the November election to the extent that hundreds, if not thousands, of legitimate votes were not included in the total certified yesterday to the Secretary of State.

At the two-hour hearing yesterday prior to certification, the Voter Registration Coalition documented nearly 500 voters who were properly registered, showed up at the polls, but were then forced to use provisional ballots and subsequently excluded from the final count.

Nonetheless, the Board certified the results unanimously. According to the PD story, they characterized the problems with the count as "minimal".

Minimal? If you ran a company where the people in charge took orders and money from five hundred customers that you knew about (and probably lots more you didn't), failed to ship their orders, and then failed to make good on them when challenged, would you consider that a "minimal" problem? If you were one of those customers -- one who had stood in line in the rain for an hour or two to place that order -- would you consider the company's failure to deliver or rectify your order a "minimal" problem?

Board of Elections Director Michael Vu got lots of media after Election Day bragging about how well his operation performed. The reporters who carried this BS now have an obligation to go out and find some of the 500 documented disenfranchised voters, and ask them for an assessment of Vu's performance.

My assessment? Either Vu and his Board members -- Republican county chairman Robert Bennett and three others, all appointed by Bush campaign honcho Ken Blackwell -- have deliberately conspired to sideline thousands of voters in Cuyahoga County, or (more likely) they're just incompetent and irresponsible. In either case, they're unfit for their jobs and should be fired before they do any more damage.