Bookkeeping

On December 1, I published an excerpt from an email from a GOP recount observer.

Quoting myself:

This email, from a GOP election recount-watcher, has been making the rounds of local conservative activists.  I’m keeping the writer’s name off the record for now.

Emphasis is added by me:

Well, it’s been a good (better) day today here at Hennepin County for the recount. Lots of notable errors in judgment…

For instance, we found one precinct with ALL Dayton ballots challenged (103 total) that appeared to be a “mass” group of blank ballots run thru without a judge’s signature – all in a row. Shows how easily certain folks of a party’s persuasion can cheat so easily – and have it counted?

Let’s repeat that for those of you who glaze over:  103 votes, run through in a group, without a judge’s signature, apparently consecutively.

I asked the source of this email earlier this week what the resolution of this issue was.  The source wasn’t entirely clear on how things turned out: she or he sent me this message:

I think it was 102-103 ballots in Hennepin County (some precinct) that looked suspicious, and were run through the machine and counted in the total. What was believed was it happened after the polls (and machines) were closed and counted w/ a tape already generated…. Hence, the difference in the counts from registered voters vs. the machine counts…I was told the sequence and appearance of these ballots looked suspicious and forged, and now that I think about it, I remember one of the primary reasons they weren’t allowed was they were not properly signed off by the appropriate parties – yet, counted. If my memory serves me right, they were taken out of the totals once discovered.

Now, I’ve been getting regular, frequent emails for the past six weeks from a regular reader who is also a supporter of our current election system and, I’d suspect, of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.   According to this person, it would be impossible for this scenario to have happened; that that’s just not how canvassing and recounts work.

That, of course, is one of the problems of blogging; when one is an actual, full-time, employed journalist, one has time to learn enough about the subject about which one is writing to comment on it with more literacy than when one has other things going on in life.

So OK, fair enough.  I’m way too buried with personal and day-job business to really dig into it all that much at the moment.  I guess, at least as regards this particular episode, the iron-clad integrity of the Henco elections staff, of Mark Ritchie, and of everyone involved is unimpeachable.  Until a better explanation drops into my lap. at any rate.

Which it’ll have to do, because – and this is an admission against interest – I have a hard time concentrating on that sort of anal-retentive, pointillistic, nit-picky, left-brain sort of thing.  God bless those who can – but I can’t.  Call it a learning disability, and a politically-imprudent one at that, but my brain just tunes out the finer points of the mechanics of recounts.  There’s a reason I’m not an actuary, an accountant, or a wedding planner.

And that’s that, I guess.

Well, no.  It’s not.  The person who’s written, and left any number of comments in the blog on the subject, said it was a matter of my “integrity” to “fact-check” this story – and that if it didn’t check out, somehow my premise that the Minnesota electoral system is flawed is, itself, flawed.

As re the electoral system?  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  Much better minds than I – or at least much more methodical ones – are digging into that even as we speak.

As to exercising integrity by scrupulous fact-checking?  Well, the critic who wants to to make sure I vet every nuance of my December 1 post – which was basically a throwaway, for better or worse – was the same person who left a comment at 1:15 last Saturday in the blog post I wrote while on the air, linking to the ongoing coverage of the Tucson massacre:

Shie is one of the members of congress who received threats, and who had her office vandalized, over her support for health care reform last spring.

You know, Mitch – one of those ‘avalanche of violence’ incidents you like to deny.

Oh, I don’t “like to deny” anything; there were plenty of nasty words thrown about during the Obamacare debate – going both ways.  Congresspeople – on both sides – got threats.  It’s just that virtually every single example of the “avalanche of violence” – a term that I’ve taken to using with irony – was either debunked, shown not to be affiliated with the Tea Party, and/or  shown to be complete fiction.

But that’s not the real issue, at the moment.  The real one, for purposes of this post, is ethics.

So let me get this straight; criticizing the electoral system, and the government employees and the elected official who run the system – my employees, really – must be rigorously gone over.  But participating in a venal slander of half of the electorate, on the other hand, can and should be done with impunity and casual disregard for fact?  Especially when being done to exploit a horrific tragedy to purely political ends?

No, I’m really asking.  I’m just trying to figure out how our leftyblogger friends see this whole “ethics” thing.

11 thoughts on “Bookkeeping

  1. Mitch,

    on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 in a post titled Happy Holidays – fact checking Christmas the blogger so concerned about your integrity made the following comment referring to herself “What do I do that is uniquely ‘me’, what is my ‘bete noir’? Fact checking!” . I won’t provide a link because thats just feeding the troll – but its there for all to see at least until she discovers the secret and tries to send it down the memory hole along with her noxious bit of anti-catholic bigotry and intolerance from a few weeks earlier.

  2. Face it, Dayton stole an election. So did Franken. Happily, Dayton is going to have to choke on it.

  3. Mitch is being a gentleman (I’m assuming) by not identifying this person who is unhappy with his 103 Dinktyown ballots lies as me.

    The real issue is that the original story was a fraud, a lie, a hoax; patently untrue. There WERE 103 FRIVOLOUS ballot challenges that were withdrawn by the Emmer campaign – part of the thousands of unmerited, unjustified bad challenges they were making for strategic reasons, which ended up counting for Dayton. Dayton withdrew the very few frivolous ballot challenges (less than 2 dozen or so) against Emmer.

    Mitch’s source did not see what he claimed to have seen- those ballots he described never existed. Not before, not now.

    So, when Mitch’s source goes on to provide him with a second whopper pants on fire lie, I called him on it:

    “Hence, the difference in the counts from registered voters vs. the machine counts…I was told the sequence and appearance of these ballots looked suspicious and forged, and now that I think about it, I remember one of the primary reasons they weren’t allowed was they were not properly signed off by the appropriate parties – yet, counted. If my memory serves me right, they were taken out of the totals once discovered.”

    Um….NO, on all counts. I couldn’t find this supposed “difference in the machine counts”. The 103 ballots WERE allowed. There are perfectly legal and legitimate reasons for proper ballots not being signed, but still counted without being challenged. If this person had actually been at the recount (or received any training) he or she would know that.

    This simply displays more GOP disinformation, which is even more deplorable, coming from a GOP candidate.

    In fact NO ballots were determined to be forgeries. This story of Mitch’s – as always coming from an anonymous source who is protected by having no identity or contact available – is not supported by either the Emmer campaign or the Dayton campaign, or the Henco auditor, or the Sec. State, or any of the recount observers who were in fact there with whom I was in contact.

    NO recount observer, no representative from either campaign can take ballots out of the count. All that is accomplished at a recount is that EVERY SINGLE BALLOT is sorted. Recount observers or the attorneys representing the campaign can insist a ballot go into a pile which is sent to the canvassing board for a decision. Those ballots go in separate envelopes, as either legitimate challenges, or frivolous challenges. Period. That’s it. ONLY the canvassing board can take ballots out of the count for either candidate – and this didn’t happen. I checked.

    Those supposed forged ballots remain a matter of public record – you or I, Mitch or Kermit, could go look at them if they were real. They aren’t real.

    And the notion that the Dayton campaign agreed to this is stupid. The notion that the media would fail to follow up on such a story or would miss this is even more ridiculous.

    I took Mitch to task for not fact checking — getting a second bullshit story from the same source – a single source – is emphatically not fact checking.

    Kermit, while you can believe the earth is flat if you like, that is the validity of your notion that anyone has stolen an election in 2008 or in 2010. Voter fraud is less common than being struck by lightning twice. Even when Republicans were sure it was out there and used every power they had to find it (see Ashcroft’s record for example) they couldn’t. Not DIDN’T – they COULDN’T find any.

    This is one more bogus claim of voter fraud that doesn’t hold up to investigation. Like the ice cream voter fraud in Cincinnati, like the Crow Wing County disabled voter lie, like the Union care givers voting in the Alzaheimer’s patient’s name, are all fakes, ad nauseum.

    That goes for the claims of Minnesota Majority et al – and their claims and investigations have cost the state, and the individual counties a lot of money. Some counties had to hire extra employees to do those investigations. Yet the county attorney’s association presented a report just this past fall – no problem with voter fraud! And that wasn’t JUST Democratic County Attorneys, it was ALL of them.

    When you have some proof of voter fraud, then fine, post it. But in the mean time, you should at least fact check what you post here as first hand fake stories.

  4. “…is not supported by either the Emmer campaign or the Dayton campaign, or the Henco auditor, or the Sec. State, or any of the recount observers who were in fact there with whom I was in contact.”

    Yes, Dog, and the Burdenko Commission found no evidence of Russian involvement at Katyn woods. Sorry, but where ther’s smoke, there’s fire.

  5. Dog just loves defending stolen elections.
    Voter fraud is less common than being struck by lightning twice.
    I’d say prove it, but first you would have to want to. Neither Lori Swanson, nor Mark Ritchie are so inclined.

    It’s like I’ve said before, even the hint, taint or suggestion of fraud calls the entire system into question. We have all three.

  6. But let’s review. In an election where the Republicans won a historic victory, taking both houses of the Minnesota legislature, Mark Dayton miraculously wins by a razor-thin margin.
    Two years previously, Republican Norm Coleman sees his 300+ lead turn into a 200+ victory for Carpetbagger Al Franken.

    Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. George Soros got his money’s worth in Minnesota.

  7. DG shrilled:
    But in the mean time, you should at least fact check what you post here as first hand fake stories.

    This from a commenter who on her own blog in an 11/28/2010 post of an absolutely bigoted, intolerant, and scurrilous attack on the Catholic Church asserted the following:
    The church for example, at the Council of Trent in 1642, while establishing the foundation for that horror, the Spanish Inquisition, decreed that…. Would that DG could focus on the beam in her own eye and bend her murky intellect to fact check her own libels – too much to hope for DG? or perhaps beyond your intellectual reach?

    I agree DG, fact checking is your “Bete Noir”

    And yet you presume to scold others for their transient inability to please you. I seldom use the word hypocrite but in your case I believe it is amply appropriate.

  8. Dog Gone paraphrased:

    “These questions about the election are all a web of lies! Lies, I tell you! Mwahahahahahahaaa!”

  9. Dog Gone, what is wrong with you?
    People who want to be taken seriously do not make absolute statements like “Voter fraud is less common than being struck by lightning twice. Even when Republicans were sure it was out there and used every power they had to find it (see Ashcroft’s record for example) they couldn’t. Not DIDN’T – they COULDN’T find any.”

    The judge who decided the Gregoire-Rossi gubernatorial election dispute in Washington State’s 2004 election determined that over 1600 votes had been illegally cast. They were counted. Gregoire wan the election by 300 votes.

  10. dog is fully aware of those facts, Terry. That’s why she’s screeching her denial at the top of her lungs. She’s not trying to convince us, she’s trying to convince herself.

    It’s a manifestation of the same mental dysfunction that allows her to celebrate infanticide.

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