Okay, so now Judge Dennis Pearson has TWICE told Jacob Perkinson, atttorney and chairman of the Burlington Democratic Committee, to drop his effort to impugn the integrity of City Hall's handling of the Ward 7 city councilor election on March 4 in Burlington.

Do you really think Perkinson is going to follow Pearson's advice? It would seem not, because looks more and more like this squabble is about the control of City Hall after the next mayoral election, not how city elections officials handled or mishandled the ballots in the close Ward 7 contest on March 4.

To recap: Perkinson, representing former Councilor Jean O'Sullivan, D-Ward 7, is alleging city workers under the control of Jonathan Leopold, Burlington's chief administrative officer, cracked the seal on a Ward 7 ballot box three times between the election and a March 10 recount to tally up the votes on their own. That happens to be against the law.

No argument there from Leopold or his assistant, Ben Pacy, who actually did the seal breaking. Their explanation is that it was all harmlessly done to resolve confusion on the vote count, and no vote tampering took place.

This week, Perkinson came up with a new allegation: Leopold falsely testified before Pearson last week that he'd been told by an assistant city attorney that the Secretary of State's office had no problem with the ballot box seal breaking. Au contraire. It did have a big problem, and the city and Leopold were forced this week to concede making another goof in this weird case.

So maybe, as Pearson has said, the whole thing about Leopold is a red herring. Or maybe we're going back to the future, to a time when Democrats and Progressives were more enemies of eachother than either party was with city Republicans.

Whadaya think?

-- Sam Hemingway