Wednesday, December 15, 2004

MSM Bias Out in Full Force

LGF points to an MSNBC article but that's just a tip of the iceberg. Here's a sampling...

From the AP...

In a scene reminiscent of Florida circa 2000, two teams of Republican and Democratic election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light Wednesday and whispered back and forth as they tried to divine the voters' intent from a few hanging chads.

Wrong. Ohio law does not allow election workers to divine the voter's intent. Ohio law specifically states that if two or more corners of a punch card are punched, the vote counts. Otherwise it doesn't.

From the New York Times...

The ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, plans to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a county prosecutor in Ohio today to explore "inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering" in at least one and perhaps several Ohio counties.

The request for an investigation, made in a letter that was also provided to The New York Times, includes accounts from at least two county employees, but is based largely on a sworn affidavit provided by the Hocking County deputy director of elections, Sherole Eaton.

Among other things, Ms. Eaton says in her affidavit that a representative of Triad Governmental Systems, the Ohio firm that created and maintains the vote-counting software in dozens of Ohio counties, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator last Friday, in advance of the state's recount, which is taking place this week.

Misleading. They fail to report - as this Columbus Dispatch article does in it's last sentence - that Eaton, a Democrat, said she doesn't suspect fraud:

Cobb has called the incident "a shocking event," but Eaton said yesterday that she doesn’t suspect fraud.

And then of course, the MSNBC article, which has so much misleading information that I'd be up all night if I wanted to respond to all of them. Among the more blatent:

Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door.

She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?

Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.

Very misleading. Calling Harrisburg a "suburb" of Columbus and comparing it to a city precinct is ridiculous. Harrisburg is a 10 mile drive through farmland once you get past Columbus's outerbelt. When you get to Harrisburg, a township with 0.1 square miles of land mass and a total population of 332, you better not blink or you will miss it.

And it goes on...

Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly interpret a state law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must cast provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct where they reside.

A ruling upheld in the US District court, as it was in several other states.

And finally...

Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines.

Their choices were to buy touch-screen machines that didn't have a paper trail, optical scan machines which Jesse Jackson has called "high-tech fraud", or punch card machines. Do you really think any of these options would have quieted these people?

Actually, there are plenty of other examples as well, but you get the idea.