No UFOs or Election-Snatchers in Lorain

The Lorain Morning Journal made it clear how they felt in a lively editorial from yesterday's edition:

Step back, Bigfoot. Fly away, UFOs. Let Elvis and JFK rest in peace. There's a whole new ''lunatic fringe'' lurching to life in America, and their feverish mission is to battle a fictional ''Invasion of the Election-Snatchers.''

They have met the enemy, but don't recognize that he is their imagination.

And then they really get in the groove:

No more flooding newsrooms with frantic, misinformed e-mails.
No more Jesse Jackson apparitions.
No more calls for FBI investigations; they've got real bad guys to chase.
And above all, no more recounts or re-recounts.
It's done. Stick a punchcard stylus in it.

Those, like Jesse Jackson and Rep. John ''call in the FBI'' Conyers (D-Michigan), who encourage unfounded conspiracy-itis for their own self-aggrandizement are contemptible. And those Democrats and demagogues who refuse to recognize reality, no matter how you count it, do America a disservice by wasting our tax money cutting away at the fabric of an election system that works fine.

Of course someone forgot to tell the NY Times, who had their own editorial today:

In Ohio, where a recount of the presidential election is under way, it is becoming clear that as important as recounts are, they are not enough to ensure the integrity of our elections. Representative John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan, has charged that an employee of a company that makes vote-counting software used across the state may have tampered with one county's vote tabulator after the election to make the recount come out right.

Less than 8 hours later, the Akron Beacon Journal reported Conyers had once again jumped the gun:

Prosecutors and local police found no evidence of election tampering when they watched Monday as a technician repeated a repair to a tallying computer that led a congressman to request an FBI investigation.

Observers including Green Party representatives who requested a presidential recount agreed the procedure did not alter the hard drive where data are stored, Hocking County Prosecutor Larry Beal said.

"Everybody felt better," he said.

And even if it did...

"The actual votes are stored on the punch-card ballots," [Brett] Rapp [president of Triad Governmental Systems] said. "The machine simply counts the votes. During this whole process, the ballots were locked up."

Michigan is considered a four letter word this close to the OSU campus, I'm guessing that Conyers is wearing out his welcome in other parts of the state too.