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Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Olbermann refuses to back down
Posted by Jill | 9:47 AM
Keith Olbermann, clearly (and so far successfully) lobbying for an appearance in my upcoming joint project with Modern Fabulousity, the "Hunks of the Left" 2005 calendar, isn't backing down from doing an exploration of voting irregularities that may have contributed to, or perhaps even generated, George W. Bush's election last Tuesday.

Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written “I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2… My source said they’ve also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time.”

I didn’t get the memo.

We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday’s Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the ‘lockdown’ during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who’ve written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn’t trying to re-cast the election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have advanced to a technological state in which voting - fine, flawed, or felonious - should leave no paper trail.

But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from MSNBC both for the web-work and the television time. We were asked if perhaps we shouldn’t begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.

It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 PM ET start of the program and 10:30 PM ET last night, we received 1570 emails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell). 1508 were positive, 62 negative.


The transcript of last night's show isn't up yet, I'll link it up when it is.

Those of you who are tempted to post that somehow it was John Kerry who rigged the election, or that this is just tinfoil hat stuff, consider this: A voting system that doesn't accurately count the votes, or that eliminates voters from the rolls for no good reason, can just as easily come back and bite YOU and YOUR SIDE somewhere along the line.

If Bush truly and fairly was re-elected, so be it. I don't agree with the people who voted for him, but so be it. People who were illegally prevented from voting can't be counted now, alas, so the kind of systematic disenfranchisement we saw from the Republican party this year, as in 2000, must be stopped. However, those who voted on provisional ballots that pass OBJECTIVE (as opposed to partisan) muster, as well as those who voted on voting machines of any type, have a right to have their votes counted. This is not a partisan issue. Votes should count. Anyone who doesn't want to ensure this obviously has something to hide.

It's one thing to campaign; it's even one thing to campaign negatively. I'll even go so far as to say it's OK, albeit doing the public a disservice, to outright lie about your opponent with ZERO evidence...it's the public's responsibility to use the brains God gave them to separate the wheat from the chaff. However, once people show up at the polls, the count should no longer be a partisan issue. I've had Republicans tell me that rigging the voting machines is perfectly OK as long as their side wins. This should be unacceptable regardless of what side of the fence you're on. Because if the vote can't be trusted, what business do we have touting Democracy all over the world? If the vote can't be trusted, we are no better than any of the tinpot dictatorships to which we feel so superior.
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