I hope everyone had a chance to watch Rep. Conyers on COUNTDOWN last night!
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• December 15, 2004 | 11:07 p.m. ET
Conyers "prepared" to contest Ohio Electoral Vote (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee told us tonight on Countdown that he and others in Congress are considering formally challenging the slate of electors who cast Ohio’s votes, when those votes are opened and counted before a joint session of Congress on January 6th.
“We’re prepared to do that,” Conyers said. “And we understand the law as well as you.” After the on-air interview ended, the Michigan representative added that he and his colleagues had not yet decided whether or not to take the extraordinary constitutional step, and he had not sought the support of a Senator who would have to co-sign the challenge.
The constitution provides the challenge process for the eventuality that a given state’s popular vote is determined to have been compromised after that state has certified the vote, and its members of the Electoral College have cast their ballots for a presidential candidate. Such a challenge needs to be in written form, signed by one member of the Senate, and one member of the House. Upon its presentation, the joint vote-counting session would be adjourned, and the Senate and House separately vote, by simple majority, whether to accept the challenge, or let that state’s electoral votes stand as cast.
Conyers also rebuffed criticism that his “voting forums” in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, had included formal participation only by Democratic congressmen and politicians. “The fact that Republicans didn’t join us isn’t our problem, it’s their fault.” Republican Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio last week announced plans to conduct an investigation into the 2004 vote under his auspices as Chairman of the House Administration Committee.
Conyers said he had not yet received a reply to his request to the Cincinnati field office of the FBI and the office of the Hocking County, Ohio, Prosecutor, to begin an investigation into the allegations that a vote-tabulating machine there was manipulated there last Friday, contrary to the statewide instructions of Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell that no ballots or vote-counting equipment be inspected except in the presence of bi-partisan observers of that state’s recount.
He said he “didn’t know” if the explanation offered by the president of Triad, the manufacturer of the tabulator, that his employee merely conducted maintenance on the machine, was valid. But he did note that the source of the allegations, Hocking County Deputy Director of Elections Sherole Eaton, has “given a sworn affidavit. The president of the company hasn’t.”
E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
• December 15, 2004 | 4:06 p.m. ET
Conyers: "Maintenance" violates state and federal laws (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS— Congressman John Conyers' request that the FBI investigates the actions of a voting equipment manufacturer in Hocking County, Ohio last week, includes the assertion that those actions may have violated two federal laws, and as many as four state statutes.
Conyers, who will appear live on tonight's edition of "Countdown," notes in his letter to the FBI (and the Hocking County Prosecutor), that "for a period of 22 months from the date of a federal election... it (is) a felony for any person to 'willfully steal, destroy, conceal, mutilate, or alter' any such record."
The Michigan representative also wrote that under Ohio law, "during a period of official canvassing, all interaction with ballots must be 'in the presence of all of the members of the board and any other persons who are entitled to witness the official canvass'." Conyers notes that just last week, Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell had declared that the so-called "canvassing period," which usually expires ten days after an election, had been extended to cover the period of the Ohio recount.
Conyers' office indicated there had not yet been a response from the FBI field office in Cincinnati, nor from the Hocking County Prosecutor's Office.
• December 15, 2004 | 10:29 a.m. ET
Conyers and cautions (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK— At least this should put a spike through the still-rampant rumor that the mainstream media is “locked down” and not reporting anything of the investigation into the apparent Ohio voting irregularities.
It is not a banner headline; in fact, it is but nine paragraphs. But those nine paragraphs are in this morning’s editions of The New York Times.
Congressman John Conyers of Michigan, the newspaper reports, will today ask the FBI and a county prosecutor in Ohio to investigate what he has termed “inappropriate and likely illegal election tampering” in one or more counties in that state.
And beginning on the front page of this morning’s Washington Post, there cascades down upon the reader no less than 41 paragraphs, told soberly and without much evident partisanship, reciting the litany of Ohio screw-ups that led that newspaper to invoke the headline “Several Factors Contributed to ‘Lost’ Voters in Ohio.”
Conyers’ invoking of the FBI doesn’t even make it into The Post’s pages, probably because The Times makes it clear that Conyers shared his letter of request to the Bureau and Ohio prosecutors with them. Ironically, that letter apparently focuses on a reported irregularity not in the November 2 vote per se, but in the days preceding the recount. As The Times notes, Conyers’ inquiry rests primarily on a sworn affidavit by the deputy director of elections of Hocking County, Ohio, the Democrat Sherole Eaton.
Ms. Eaton’s story has been circulating around the Internet for days, and was presented to Conyers at the first stop of his “Voting Forum” road tour in Columbus on Monday, to his apparent shock and awe. Her affidavit contends that last Friday, in advance of the recount, a representative of the manufacturer of the vote-counting software used in her county’s vote November 2, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator.
The employee of Triad Governmental Systems then asked, according to Ms. Eaton’s statement, which of Hocking’s voting precincts would be selected as the “sample” for the small hand-count required in each of Ohio’s 88 counties. She claims that when informed, the Triad man, as the Times’ Tom Zeller put it, “made further adjustments to the machine.”
The Times quotes Conyers as saying “This is pretty outrageous. We want to pursue it as vigorously as we can.” But the reporter also reached the president of the Triad company, Brett Rapp, who calmly welcomed any investigation, and added that, in correspondent Zeller’s words, “preparing the machines for a recount was standard procedure and was done in all 41 counties where Triad handles votes,” insomuch as the company not only supplies the tabulating software, but is also contractually obligated to maintain it. Mr. Rapp did acknowledge to the newspaper that it would be atypical for an employee to have asked about a specific voting precinct.
As it proved, Hocking County election officials chose a precinct different than the one purportedly mentioned to the Triad representative, from which to gather the three percent of a county’s ballots that must be counted by hand under Ohio’s recount laws. They also found nothing amiss that would trigger a full hand recount for the entire county.
John Conyers is clearly not a tin-foil-hatter. His description of the response to the request he and a small number of other Democratic congressmen made of the Government Accountability Office for an Ohio investigation was, however, a little fulsome. At the time of the GAO’s answer, Conyers presented it as a full-blown victory for transparent government. The actual letter from the GAO read much more like tepid boilerplate language.
There is also the matter of the inviolability of the affidavit as a truth-telling mechanism. Without characterizing that to which Hocking County’s Ms. Eaton swore, while all states equate filing a false affidavit with perjury, prosecutions are spotty, and thus the risk of straying from the truth probably carries less weight than it would at first blush appear to the layman. One need only remember the flurry of paperwork that accompanied last summer’s Swift Boat advertisements and book— and in particular the one Vietnam vet who changed his story faster than a sportswriter providing a running round-by-round description of a championship boxing match— to recall that today’s absolute truth can be followed by a statement like “I probably shouldn’t have signed that.”
Nevertheless, if the FBI, or Ohio prosecutors, actually do accede to Conyers’ request, the Eaton affidavit will loom very large, and she will presumably be asked to repeat her statements to the Bureau, or to the local investigators, with the threat of stronger penalties attached.
It is the appropriate place here to clarify something about the Conyers forums, both in Washington last week, and in Columbus two days ago. They have been characterized by many on the web as “Congress Investigates Ohio,” but this exaggerates both the scope and the formality. One reader even asserted to me that a “majority of the House Judiciary Committee” was “conducting hearings.” In fact, Conyers and several of his House colleagues, some on Judiciary, some not, are meeting ad hoc without nearly all of the powers a true congressional or senatorial committee could muster. There are no subpoenas to be issued, very little budget, and not even the hint of the statutory bipartisanship that a bona fide committee or subcommittee would bring with it. In short, Congress isn’t investigating the Ohio vote or even these latest allegations about the recount— Congressman Conyers and several of his Democratic cohorts are taking testimony in informal hearings.
Nonetheless, Mr. Conyers has succeeded in dragging parts of the voting story into the mainstream: the GAO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and possibly the FBI. This underscores a point I made here some time ago: that what was understandably misinterpreted as a "media lockdown" is much more likely to have been media passivity. Senator Kerry conceded, therefore Ohio couldn’t change the election, therefore reporters go elsewhere. Many political reporters respond to accusations by one party against the other— the ‘Theysaidthat’ factor— and tend not to awaken unless they see both dogs growling.
Throw the Senior Democrat on Judiciary, and Jesse Jackson, and the letters “FBI” into the mix— and presto, you get mainstream media attention.
Incidentally, Conyers has also again exchanged letters with Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and would appear to have once more gotten the public relations edge on him. After Conyers’ “36 Questions” letter of December 2, he said yesterday that he had received a reply from Blackwell in which the Secretary refused to answer any of the questions, and (according to Conyers), made the rather baroque claim that he couldn’t be cooperative with the GAO and members of Congress at the same time.
As Newsweek’s Howard Fineman noted on Countdown Monday night, Secretary Blackwell sure isn’t doing a good job of convincing people that the puffs of smoke rising from the election he supervised came only from overheating voting machines.
Thoughts? E-mail KOlbermann@MSNBC.com
• December 13, 2004 | 7:37 p.m. ET
Xenia-phobia (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS - If the subject weren’t so serious, the clunky maneuverings of John Kerry and Kenneth Blackwell would make for a nice modernized version of the Keystone Kops, or maybe Gilbert & Sullivan.
It’s hard to tell which of them is doing the worse job convincing anybody that there’s nothing to see here — keep moving — pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Here is Kerry, insisting he is not invested in the outcome of an Ohio recount, asking through his lawyers to inspect the 92,000 ballots that contain no vote for president. And, through his interactions with Jesse Jackson and John Conyers, connecting into the Alliance for Democracy lawsuit to overturn or freeze the Ohio Electoral count, and into the assessment that Blackwell’s behavior “appears to violate Ohio law.”
And here is Blackwell, having insisted on 'Countdown' that there would be a re-count and his office would take no steps to prevent it, stepping on his own feet in Xenia, Ohio. Last Friday, Greene County election officials there tossed out two Green Party observers who had been given access to the examine the voting records there, attributing their actions to Blackwell’s directives that the so-called ‘canvassing period’ which follows every election be extended from ten days to more than a month because of the fact of the recount. Those county records, Blackwell’s people reasoned, needed to be sealed and handled with the “utmost care” until the recount was completed.
Just to round out the absurdity, those same two Greens returned to the Election Board building in Greene County (and what script editor would’ve permitted that coincidence?) on Saturday morning to find, they say, the facility unlocked, and all those ‘sealed’ voting machines and records out in the open where any passing vandal or political memorabilia junkie could’ve walked off with them (heck, I own two Broward County 2000 Voting Machines, if anybody would like to do a private recount). Greene County responded by insisting that while it was true that someone appears to have left the building unlocked, overnight, on Friday, and that nobody locked it up until Saturday afternoon, the other stuff — about the machines and records being unprotected — wasn’t true; they were inside locked rooms.
Well, that’s all right, then.
My MSNBC colleague and Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman shares my amazement at the Inspector Clouseaus of the Ohio Secretary of State’s office. If there’s nothing wrong in Ohio, it sure won’t be because Secretary Blackwell didn’t try to make it look like there was.
“I think that Ken Blackwell and his people have behaved in a duck-and-cover mode a la Florida, even before Election Day,” Howard said in a conversation before his appearance on tonight’s edition of 'Countdown'. “By extending the ‘canvassing period’ until now, they make it look as though they have something to hide. They’re supposedly doing it in the name of security, but you can’t do that if you’re leaving the doors unlocked.”
Fineman suggests Blackwell’s personal pique at having had his reputation sullied in the last month — and the month before it — is also a factor. “The Secretary of State’s office hasn’t been doing such a great job because he’s been testy and impatient about the whole affair.”
It took us several phone calls today to get any explanation out of Secretary Blackwell’s office as to the events in Xenia. Carlo LoParo, the Secretary’s Press Secretary, finally came through just before dinner time. “When a county board of elections receives a formal request for a recount,” he said on Blackwell’s behalf, “all ballots, poll books and lists must be sealed to protect the record. Those documents can only be accessed in the presence of all parties involved in the recount through bi-partisan election officials — at least one Democrat and one Republican.”
In other words, the Greens’ observers were kicked out because they were neither Democrat nor Republican, even though the recount is being sponsored by, and funded by, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans.
The answer was a far cry from the seemingly genial exchange I had with Secretary Blackwell on November 29th’s Countdown:
KO: “As it plays into the recount, though, sir, are you saying that your office does not anticipate taking any steps to try to prevent a recount in Ohio?”
KB: “No, we haven‘t. We‘ve told the two officials candidates that have-the candidates that have asked for a recount that, once we certify on December 6, they have five days to certify, I mean, to ask for a recount. Once they ask for a recount, we will provide them with a recount. And that‘s what I‘ve said from the very first indication that they were interested in a recount. Once it was established that they were statewide candidates withstanding, our law says that they can ask for a recount. We will regard this as yet another audit of the voting process.”
Smoke — plenty of it. And little obvious means of telling whether it’s the smoke of a flawed election, or the stuff set ablaze by Ohio officials falling into the fireplace during their desperate, petulant, failing struggle to make themselves look good.
The problem, of course, is that those positing an Electoral College freeze, or a formal Congressional Challenge to Ohio’s Electors on January 6, are generating nearly as much smoke. Kerry’s attorney’s letter to the 88 County boards not only asks to see the 92,000 “undervotes,” but also, to permit independent examination of “the programming and calibration of the tabulating system, scanners, and electronic voting machines verified by independent experts.”
The problem — as Howard Fineman puts it — is that even acknowledging the delicate position Kerry finds himself in, and the easy target he would make himself by openly investing in an Ohio recount/investigation/protest, this all still smacks of “I didn’t care about the recount before I started caring about it.” Howard continues: “If Kerry and his lawyer really thought there was real mischief going on, they should have had all their guns out there investigating what happened in Ohio and they should have been strong and vocal.”
Fineman also reminds us that it is noteworthy that, with the voting machine disparities and the potential disenfranchisement in urban communities so superbly documented over the weekend by The Columbus Dispatch, this is a minority voting rights issue, and Kerry needs to play it perfectly. “It’s not insignificant,” Howard said, “that the Ohio Secretary of State, Representative Conyers, and Jesse Jackson are all black politicians who are caught in this power struggle.”
The irony of all this smoke is that the day’s only practical election news came not from Columbus, but from St. Paul. There, one of Minnesota’s ten electors presumably messed up big time and voted not for John Kerry, but for John Edwards. So — the Electoral College vote will change — now it’ll be Bush 286, Kerry 251, Edwards 1.
E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
• December 9, 2004 | 12:54 p.m. ET
Reporter behind Rumsfeld grilling (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - An embedded reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press is claiming credit for the blunt questioning yesterday of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by American soldiers in Kuwait.
In an e-mail to an unidentified colleague at the newspaper, Edward Lee Pitts — traveling with a Tennessee National Guard Unit — said that when a scheduling delay permitted him to attend Rumsfeld’s visit with 2,300 troops, he learned that only soldiers could quiz the Secretary. “So,” Pitts writes, “I brought two of them along with me as my escorts. Before hand we worked on questions to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have.”
A copy of Pitts’ e-mail to his Chattanooga colleague is posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog at the Poynter Institute website. Pitts has a copyrighted piece on the Rumsfeld grilling, headlined “Dispatch Kuwait: ‘Hillbilly armor’ for 278th,” in today’s edition of the Times Free Press.
His e-mail goes on to claim that he even helped ensure that two of the members of the 278th Regimental Combat team got to ask what can only be described as their and his questions. “While waiting for the VIP (Rumsfeld),” Pitts writes, “I went and found the Sgt. In charge of the microphone for the question and answer session and made sure he knew to get my guys out of the crowd.
“One of my guys,” Pitts writes, “was the second person called on.” That would’ve been Army Specialist Thomas Wilson, whose question provoked first several seconds of silence, and then thunderous applause and cheering from the troops. Wilson asked: “We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on for three years and we've all been staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local land fills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"
Wilson appeared to be reading his question from a small piece of paper in his hand.
Pitts did not identify the second questioner he claims to have prompted, although additional pointed queries of Rumsfeld focused on the military’s controversial “Stop-Loss” policy, and the purported disparity between the quality of equipment assigned to active-duty units, and guard and reserve units. It is noteworthy that Pitts claimed only two of the three most searing questions were, in essence, his plants — the third presumably arose organically.
In the e-mail Pitts insisted this wasn’t merely a clever journalistic strategy. “I have been trying to get this story out for weeks — as soon as I found out I would be on an unarmored truck — and my paper published two stories on it. But it felt good to hand it off to the national press. I believe lives are at stake with so many soldiers going across the border (to Iraq) riding with scrap metal as protection. It may be to (sic) late for the unit I am with, but hopefully not for those who come after.”
If Pitts’ account is correct, he certainly got the attention for the story that he sought. Yesterday, the Pentagon had to applaud the soldiers who questioned Rumsfeld. This morning, the President echoed that endorsement. And the Defense Department had scheduled an early afternoon briefing on the subject of armoring U.S. troop vehicles in Iraq.
Pitts had opened his e-mail to his colleague with a cogent observation: “I just had one of my best days as a journalist today.”
E-mail: KOlbermann@msnbc.com
• December 8, 2004 | 11:05 p.m. ET
Town halls in Washington and Kuwait (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - For all the testimony, for all the verification provided that the names on the internet(s) belong to real people with real hairstyles, the key moment in Wednesday’s voting irregularities forum on Capitol Hill probably came during a colloquy between two of the Congressmen.
Jesse Jackson, Jr., of Illinois, turned to the chair of the ad hoc committee, John Conyers, of Michigan, and said “if the votes are not tallied in the state of Ohio by the appropriate time, is there any thought being given that the committee might consider an objection to the proceeding of the Ohio Electors until such time (as they are tallied)?”
Conyers replied, extending each word to about eleven syllables: “We are now.”
These were deep waters, and in an interview with Countdown’s Monica Novotny right after the forum closed, Conyers backed quite a bit away from the river’s edge. He said “We will wait for someone else,” in preference to drawing congress into a legal battle.
And a battle it would be, because the congressionalese Jackson and Conyers were using, translates roughly as this:
Jackson (translated): The Constitution says the states have to tally the votes of their citizens before they can send their electors to the Electoral College. If Ohio doesn’t finish its recount before the College votes, or before the vote is unsealed before Congress on January 6th, shouldn’t one of us raise a formal objection to those Ohio electors’ votes?
Conyers (translated): After what I heard today, we ought to talk about it.
You may recall that on the November 9th Countdown, law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, a constitutional expert, told us that though the Electoral College votes next Monday, there is a subsequent window, and a process, for challenging whether voters from a state, pledged to one candidate and not the other, should be allowed to vote.
“If there are controversies,” Professor Turley reminded me, “such as some disclosure that a state actually went for Kerry (instead of Bush), there is the ability of members of Congress to challenge. It requires a written objection from one House member and one senator.”
Once that objection is raised, the joint meeting of the two houses, convened to formally count the Electoral College votes and certify the winner of the presidential election, would be immediately discontinued. “Then both Houses separate again and they vote by majority vote as to whether to accept the slate of electoral votes from that state.”
What Jackson was asking Conyers was whether or not the Congressmen who were at the voting forum should consider invoking that challenge. The threat was raised in 2000, but Al Gore insisted no Democratic representative or senator should wield the cudgel. It last came up in the 1876 mess and it is not a pleasant thing - the wackier of the politically active of the day started to wonder aloud about rebellion.
But despite Conyers’ back-pedaling in the subsequent interview, Congressman Jackson’s question raises an essential point. If the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who convened the forum seriously believe something went astray in Ohio - even something entirely attributable to static cling in the computers - they should put some of their political capital where their mouths are.
These minority members, who now say they are headed to Ohio to conduct field hearings to listen directly to the grievances of voters there, have provided an invaluable service in forcing at least part of the mainstream to provide a platform for the 20% or more of the citizenry who suspect error or subterfuge.
But to stop there is to subject themselves to accusations of political cowardice and grandstanding. If, in Ohio, or in the calculations of the academics, or in subsequent developments, they conclude there is reasonable evidence that the vote there was rotten - merely accidentally so - one of them in the House and one of them in the Senate should stand up and produce that written challenge to the Ohio electors’ credibility.
As Jonathan Turley suggested - and logic confirms - for the formal challenge to get anything but token support in the Senate and the House, there would have to be overpowering, dramatic, conclusive, evidence to suggest not merely a sour vote but one so screwed up that it could produce a different outcome. And the likelihood of such evidence turning up in the next month is infinitesimally small.
But the challenge itself, even if it garnered exactly one vote each from the Senate and House, would be a powerful protest, and an earnest signal that a full investigation of what happened in Ohio should take place, even after the inauguration. It could even be relevant, legally, in terms of the impounding of voting machines and records, to serve as the basis for some later examination to determine what, if anything, failed - and how it could be prevented from failing again.
There is no question it would be a short-term political liability - even a fatality - to the Representative and Senator who signed it. But, especially with that realization, it would not be an act of partisanship, but of patriotism.
You know - like those soldiers in Kuwait Wednesday morning who gave Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld the shock of his life by asking him searing questions about how the troops in, and on their way to, Iraq, are supplied - or not supplied.
Whether you support the war in Iraq or have protested against it, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, whether you are a Veteran, or a Conscientious Objector, it was an appalling image presented by Army Specialist Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team: “We've had troops in Iraq coming up on three years and we've all been staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local land fills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"
For the record, the media got a hold of Specialist Wilson's former wife. She says that she and her ex-husband both voted for President Bush and that they support him "100 percent." She also said Wilson would’ve asked the same question if the president had been standing there instead of Mr. Rumsfeld.
And she didn't like the reply he got. Quoting her: "Rumsfeld's answer seemed like he was sidestepping around the question. If there is something lacking, perhaps that is why our death toll is climbing."
U.S. service men and women are constantly in harm’s way - 1,000 of them now dead in action in Iraq, and another 10,000 injured as of Tuesday night - and they have to scrounge through the garbage to find materials with which to try to keep themselves in one piece. I don’t know whether to weep, or punch somebody.
The same story about insufficient armor, has previously been a campaign issue, a subject that brought up charges of inadequate patriotism in both political directions, and an urban legend. But to hear the men and women at the front hit the Secretary of Defense over the head with it, was an extraordinary moment.
Too extraordinary for one viewer, a veteran, who suggested that the “Town Hall” format in which superior officers or non-military figures open the floor to questions from the grunts, invariably comes with exhaustive preparation, even rehearsal. The viewer wondered if it was possible that the commanders on the ground at that camp in Kuwait could not have known those were the types of questions that were coming - and might’ve thought that was a particularly useful thing for the Secretary, the media, and the public, to hear.
A little too neatly planned of a theory for my tastes. But regardless, retired General Barry McCaffrey was on the show tonight and he agreed with me: The soldiers who broached those questions weren’t complainers or politically motivated. They were Patriots.
It was an eloquent and conclusive argument that dissent is not dangerous to democracy - it is its lifeblood.
What do you think? Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
• December 6, 2004 | 7:25 p.m. ET
Certified and/or certifiable (Keith Olbermann)
SECAUCUS - Exactly one month to the day before Congress will open the votes of the Electoral College, the Secretary of State of Ohio certified the state’s vote this afternoon, that moment in time which separates the Re-Count Exhibition Season from the Re-Count Regular Season.
Exactly per his legally-supported schedule, Kenneth Blackwell this afternoon made the November 2 vote official. With provisionals, absentees, and corrections, it turned out to be not a 136,000 vote margin for President Bush, but rather one of 119,000. The certification was almost immediately greeted by two protests, the prospect of a third, and the details of a fourth.
Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb today scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon in Columbus at which the re-count request from he and Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik will be formalized.
Still delayed, a long, long, long-shot bid - spearheaded by attorney Cliff Arnebeck - to have an Ohio Supreme Court Justice contest the actual election — holding off making the first count official until voting irregularities are reviewed. Mr. Arnebeck told us this afternoon that it now may be Wednesday before his suit is filed.
But the protests are not just from the fringes any more. Citing the long lines, shortages of ballots, voting machine meltdowns, and spoiled ballots, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe announced his party would spend "whatever it takes" to conduct what it calls "a comprehensive investigative study" of the vote in Ohio, one to be completed some time next year.
But just as McAuliffe insisted that the study was not intended "to contest the results of the 2004 election,” a slightly different message was coming from what remains of the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Ohio. Kerry's lead electoral attorney there, Daniel Hoffheimer, echoed the McAuliffe tone, noting "neither the pending Ohio recount nor this investigation is designed to challenge the popular vote in Ohio.”
But in another moment of perplexing tantalization from the Kerry camp, Hoffheimer also said, “while the election of the Bush-Cheney ticket by the Electoral College is all but certain..."
Well that’s enough to drive the remaining Kerry faithful right out of their capsules. File it next to “regardless of the outcome of this election,” and the debate over whether the campaign in Ohio should “join” or “participate in” the Glibs’ recount.
Meantime, what happens when the losing party in the election wants to investigate the election, but has no standing nor political capital to conduct actual hearings in, say, the House of Representatives? It hosts a "forum" — a friendly little informal gathering of members of the House Judiciary Committee in the Rayburn Office Building, Wednesday morning.
John Conyers and as many as dozen of the other 15 Democrats on Judiciary, who say they want to "discuss any issues and concerns regarding the numerous voting irregularities that have been reported in Ohio during the 2004 election."
Conyers has invited a special guest — none other than Warren Mitofsky, the head of Mitofsky International, one of the two companies that conducted exit polling for the television networks. Conyers has written to Mitofsky, asking him to release any of the so-called "raw data" from November 2, the materials constituting the exit polls that fired such controversy, particularly on the internet, and show up to Wednesday's little gathering.
Conyers' office told us Mr. Mitofsky has yet to R.S.V.P.
Interestingly, in the letter to Mitofsky, Conyers is not at all informal. He says Mitofsky can best serve truth right now “by testifying at a hearing we will be holding…”
If you’d like somebody to testify on behalf of the proposition that you’re not nuts for reading about, nor asking, questions, try the Public Editor’s column in Sunday’s edition of the Portland paper, The Oregonian. There, Mike Arrietta-Walden says the foremost complaint received from readers, is about his newspaper’s spotty coverage of voting irregularities. It’s very possible that a lot of the reader feedback was encouraged by websites, but that’s par for the course, as Mediaweek’s piece on the number of Brent Bozell-generated form letters received by the Federal Communications Commission.
What matters most, perhaps, is that while Arrietta-Walden notes the geographical distance between Portland and most of the election hot spots dictated the paper would have to rely on wire services, he still sees his newspaper (and others) as asleep at the switch: “That coverage, especially from national newspapers, has not been extensive and deep, but The Oregonian hasn't taken full advantage of what coverage there was. The lukewarm interest shown by many newspapers partly stems from the fact that leaders of the Kerry campaign and experts with several nonpartisan election watchdogs have repeatedly said that the errors detected would not amount to a reversal of the election. Journalists have moved on to other, pressing stories of the day.”
Arrietta-Walden is also cautionary about the wisdom of letting the blogs drive the net. He didn’t mention Wayne Madsen by name, but he might well have.
When Mr. Madsen’s internet piece positing a $29,000,000 payoff to “fix” the election made the rounds, I wrote here that the journalism didn’t live up to many minimum standards, and the logic, even fewer (somebody promised to pay off people to rig the election computers, gave at least some of them the full history of how the money was to be laundered — and then didn’t ante up?).
Mr. Madsen followed up with another piece in which he claimed to have an actual copy of the check. A single election-fixing check for $29.6 million. One-stop shopping for the political scandal of the millennium.
Now, he is back with an even longer, more intricate story that drags in NASA, Lockheed Martin, Brazilian computer maintenance technicians, Nigerian scammers, and a reputed affidavit that fingers a Florida congressman.
The problem is that the amazing check for $29.6 million, whose authenticity was the cornerstone of Madsen’s first two stories, not only turns out to be a fraud, but now, its fraudulence becomes one of the cornerstone’s of Madsen’s newest story. As he told the Pacifica radio station (KPFT) in Houston Sunday, “Yeah, it turns out that the $29 million check, although a valuable clue, was a fake. But it looks like the people who released the check did so as a way to say ‘hey, look here, don’t look at the check, look who’s behind it, look around it, follow the money that these people have been involved with…’”
Once again, if any part of Mr. Madsen’s writing on the election is proved and valid, I’ll not only repeat my offer to pay his way for him to pick up his Pulitzer Prize — I’ll physically carry him there myself. There could very well be facts — even important facts — hiding in there somewhere.
But to turn on a dime and write that a document is real, and hard evidence of a crime, and then come back and admit that it’s fake, but still hard evidence of a crime, is an intellectual leap of faith worthy of Evel Knievel. It violates every precept of good journalism, to say nothing of good investigation. I won’t even ask about logic.
Shoot e-mail to KOlbermann@msnbc.com