Right Wing Nut House proprietor Rick Moran writes at American Thinker:
No one is saying that the Democrats are trying to steal the Minnesota senate race between GOP incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic clown Al Franken – yet
And after citing an article comparing the Minnesota Senatorial election to the Florida 2000 debacle, Moran goes on to suggest that the election is being stolen, but in a slightly different way:
This is shaping up more and more like the transparent way the Washington state governor’s race was stolen by Democrats in 2006 when hundreds of ballots were suddenly “found” in Democratic King County – many of them coming from people (it was later determined) with unverifiable addresses.
Here we see the seeds of the type of propaganda effort, based on twisting of the truth and downright factually incorrect information (what is called, in less polite company, fucking lies), that occurred during the previous Washington state gubernatorial contest.
Interestingly, the the previous bullshit propaganda is cited as “evidence” to bolster the new propaganda efforts. I guess this is what Bush meant by “catapult the propaganda.”
Let’s ignore the first error—the race in question was 2004, not 2006. That’s an honest mistake that any out-of-state Wingnut could make.
The propaganda begins by the suggestion that ballots were “suddenly ‘found,'” in King County, as if nobody had any idea where the ballots came from. The implication, of course, is that they were manufactured after the election and thrown into the mix to change the outcome
There were several batches of “found” ballots in King County. The first batch resulted when elections workers put aside ballots from people whose signatures had not been previously scanned into the computer system. The workers were supposed to check the signatures against the paper records, but they didn’t. This was only discovered because King County Councilman Larry Phillips was one of the victims. A total of 561 absentee ballots were “found” this way.
The other source of found ballots came from the insides of secured voting machines and trays stored in a secure warehouse. There were 723 ~160 of these ballots literally found. But they were valid ballots cast during the election, and the voters who cast them were entitled to have them counted. The Republicans sued to prevent these ballots from being canvassed. The state Supreme Court rejected that idea.
The other implication in Moran’s statement is that, somehow, King County stood out as the source of “found” ballots. There were other counties that also “found” ballots. In fact, King County did not have the highest “error rate” in the state—there were four counties with higher rates. King County did have errors, but only at a rate slightly higher than the background rate for the whole state. King County also had a substantially higher voter load, with the same amount of processing time as other counties, so this is hardly surprising. The Republicans lost the election contest lawsuit in every way—except for the propaganda wars.
The final bit of propaganda in Moran’s statement is an irresponsible falsehood. He states that the “found” ballots in King County had “unverifiable addresses.” Um…no.
I don’t know where this notion came from. Perhaps Moran is confusing the 2004 election contest with a 2005 Republican scandal in which the senior vice president of the King County Republican Party, Lori Sotelo, challenged 1,944 voters days before the election, based on some sloppy attempts to find voter addresses that were not real residences (mailbox outlets or storage facilities). The challenges were potentially perjurious, fradulent, and hugely error prone (only 58 ballots of 1,944 challenges were disqualified). The episode had nothing to do with the contested 2004 election.
In sum…Moran doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about.
He probably doen’t care…truth and accuracy are not what it is all about. It’s the early stages of a shameless propaganda effort.
Let’s hope the politicians, the political parties, the media, and the bloggers do a better job with fighting Republican bullshit about election-fraud in Minnesota in 2008–2009 than they did with Washington state in 2004–2005.
