Introduction

[If my wordy introduction bores you, skip to the "Analysis" section below. Thanks.]

Last night I decided to tune into Air America's "The Majority Report." Big topic at the moment: "The Conyers Report." As usual, the outstanding feature of Air America is hemetically-sealed environment in which their viewpoint is presented to listeners: no callers allowed, no-one may question the narrative or present contradictory facts or arguments.

Given what I heard, I can understand why so many on the left are so upset: if taken at face value and believed unquestioningly, this narrative presents a picture of a nation where "the current administration was never elected" -- and we're already deep into a "theocracy", controlled by the "Christian right" and "moneyed interests."

To quote.

Certainly, I was aware of massive fraud during the last election. Republicans trying to get out the vote all over the country were actually physically attacked by AFL-CIO thugs. In east St. Louis, Democratic party leaders attempted to kill eyewitnesses to their ballot-box-stuffing operations. In my home state, Wisconsin, friends and relatives of Democratic leaders slashed the tires of a fleet of vehicles Republicans were going to use to help the poor and elderly conservative voters exercise their right to vote. In Madison Wisconsin, anyone who walked into the polls was allowed to vote without even being asked for ID. In Racine, Hispanics who announced that they were illegal immigrants were allowed to vote. After the election, it was found that there were thousands of fraudulent Democratic ballots cast. In many Democrat-leaning areas of Ohio, there were more voters registered to vote than people in the areas (120% registration!). And we all know about the massive fraud in King County, Washington State.

So yes, I was aware of a massive attempt to undermine Democracy, but -- with one exception -- it seemed by far most of this nonesense was coming from Democrats. (The one exception being reports that a Republican-connected organization in Nevada was offering to help people register, and then throwing away the registration forms. I personally found that charge credible. But, again, is seems Democrats also did the same thing, or much worse, apparently, considering massive scale and the final step: "Mac Stuart, a former ACORN field director, told investigators that workers for the organization routinely withheld Republican voter registrations, while 'thousands of invalid voter-registration cards' were submitted in their place. He said he was ordered by ACORN officials to generate 103,000 voter registrations from Dade County.")

But perhaps I hadn't heard the whole story.

So I listened carefully to this discussion about the "Conyers Report", which supposedly detailed massive fraud by Republicans in Ohio -- and thus a stolen presidential election. What I heard concerned me, but, listening critically -- i.e. trying to ignore the name-calling and listening for actual purported evidence -- I didn't hear much which was definitive. So I decided to get online to see what I could see, and how it stood up.

Here is a standard summary, from "truthout", a partisan-left website. I could already see some holes, but some of the allegations -- like discriminatory allocation of voting machines in Ohio -- needed to be supported or undermined by hard data.

In researching this, I can see another reason the left finds this convicing: a search produced page after page of left-leaning websites, repeating the same exact charges, usually verbatim. It wasn't until the 20th page of Google hits that I saw even a single article proposing an alternative narrative. Strangely, it was written by Russ Baker, a Democrat, and posted to a liberal web site named "Progressive News."

Analysis

Now, to address some of the charges in the Conyers Report (as summarized)...

The first thing I discovered was that even if you gave benefit of doubt, the maximum number of people alleged to be disenfranchised weren't enough to change the outcome -- not by far: while thousands of votes allegedly to have been somehow "ruined", Bush's lead was 118,000 votes. Even if all disputed votes were somehow contaminated deliberate malfeasance, and all of went to Bush, but should have gone to Kerry, it still wouldn't have changed the election outcome.

(And that, I believe, was probably Kerry's reasoning for not pursuing them. It's too bad his followers can't figure that out, but I guess the myth must live on to keep the troops angry and fearful.)

Moreover, when you begin to look into the actual allegations, and specific evidence regarding them, an entirely different picture emerges...

The misallocation of voting machines led to unprecedented long lines that disenfranchised scores, if not hundreds of thousands, of predominantly minority and Democratic voters.

Democrats often point to problems in heavily-Democratic precincts to give the impression "something sneaky" is going on there -- as in Florida. But what they typically don't tell their readers or listeners -- and today's Air America show sadly demonstrates -- is that those areas are often controlled partially or completely by their own people.

In Ohio, there does seem to have problems with some Democratic districts having too few voting machines, particularly in Franklin County. But here's what they're not telling their readers (emphasis added):

William Anthony is the chairman of the Franklin County board of elections. As an African-American and a Democrat himself (in fact, he is the county chairman and works as a union representative) Anthony resents the suggestion that Franklin County authorities somehow worked to help Bush. "I worked my ass off in those precincts," he says of African-American areas of the county....

Significantly, the people making these decisions aren't necessarily Bush partisans. Every county in Ohio, by law, divides its elections personnel evenly between the Democrats and Republicans. This means that where the chief administrator of elections is, say, a Republican, the chairperson of the elections board is a Democrat. In the case of Franklin County, two individuals shared the task of allocating machines — and one was a Democrat.

The tacit impression that you get from the Air America show -- of an election machine controlled by Republicans -- is simply false. State laws ensure a bipartisan participation in all decisions -- even in Democrat-controlled areas like Franklin County. If there was a conspiracy to commit fraud, it was a massive one involving 176 complicit Democrats.

This leads to a more mundane explanation: big cities, the main centers of Democratic control and support, are often strapped for cash, and tend to do things badly, and cut corners where possible. Baker came to the exact same conclusion, noting problem areas had experienced a recent growth spurt, and that the powers-that-be had felt it wasn't worth the investment to buy new machines which would soon be obsolete.

Which brings me to another point: On Air America, they alleged that the Republican leadership of Ohio were against any kind of reform. To the contrary, the very reason the machines would have become obsolete is because the state leadership -- Republicans -- had passed a law mandating a paper trail for all votes by the next election.

Mr. Blackwell's decision to restrict provisional ballots resulted in the disenfranchisement of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of voters, again predominantly minority and Democratic voters.

Not according to this Democrat (and sometime Nation magazine author):

There's no doubt that Blackwell consistently ruled in a manner that seemed to favor Bush. But the impact of these rulings on the election was probably minimal. For example, Blackwell ruled that Ohio voters could not cast provisional ballots outside their designated precinct. Local officials had hoped to alleviate confusion over polling places by letting people come to "zones" — regional locations where they could cast a ballot when their assigned precinct was in doubt. When Blackwell blocked this option, a number counties, including Franklin, went ahead and accepted provisional ballots at polling places from people who signed a statement explaining why they were in the wrong place, why they didn't have time to go to their designated precinct, etc.

In other words, contrary to what the Conyers Report asserts, this ruling didn't usually result in a misdirected person not being able to cast a vote.

Mr. Blackwell's widely reviled decision to reject voter registration applications based on paper weight may have resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time for the 2004 election.

Since Blackwell's attempt to disqualify these registrations failed (yet another important fact being withheld from the reader!), it's impossible to reasonably claim it "resulted in thousands of new voters not being registered in time." (And even if it had, they still could have cast a provisional ballot!)

Perhaps this was a bad call on his part -- I haven't had the time to look into the reasoning behind it, given the number of allegations to cover here -- but the obvious fact is that this denied request had zero effect. This has been obviously added simply to make people angry at Blackwell's alleged attitude, not because any votes could have been lost because of it.

The Ohio Republican Party's decision to engage in preelection "caging" tactics, selectively targeting 35,000 predominantly minority voters for intimidation had a negative impact on voter turnout.

What this charge refers to is the fact that Republicans sent registered mail to a number of newly-registered voters in order to see if they really existed. The Republicans were simply following the law for how to challenge voters. Read this Columbus Dispatch article about it (emph added):

In yet another sign of how fiercely Ohio will be contested in the Nov. 2 presidential election, Republicans challenged 35,427 newly registered voters yesterday. And both parties named thousands of people to be challengers at the polls.

The Ohio GOP said it is questioning new voters in 65 counties where mail sent to them was returned as undeliverable. [...] Those who have been challenged must receive a letter by first-class mail no later than three days before a hearing to answer the challenge — with a lawyer and witnesses, if they choose. [...]

The challenges arose from a letter Bennett sent to all voters who registered between Jan. 1 and Aug. 31. The letter, Bennett said, welcomed the new voters "to the process" and invited them to vote Republican.

Of the 232,000 letters mailed, about 30,000 were returned as undeliverable either because the registrants didn’t exist, had moved or died, or because the letters went to vacant houses or bogus addresses, Bennett said.

"It was an astounding number," he said. "The potential for these fraudulent registrations to produce fraudulent votes at the ballot box is very real."

But Democrats said returned mail is not proof of fraud.

The challenges are "an unprecedented effort to throw tens of thousands of voters off of Ohio’s voting rolls," said David Sullivan, Ohio coordinator for the Democrats’ voter-protection project.

Bennett said there was no attempt to target Democratic strongholds. Most of the returns came from Ohio’s large urban counties — which tend to be Democratic — so that’s where the majority of challenges were filed, he said.

About 1 out of 8 new voters who recently registered come back with notices saying the "voters" are currently living somewhere else, are dead, or don't even exist. By some strange co-incidence, this tends to happen in Democratic areas! And Democrats allege the Republicans are "intimidating" voters and engaging in fraud -- even though they followed the correct legal processes? If this is evidence of vote fraud, this would seem to point to Democrats, not Republicans.

The Ohio Republican Party's decision to utilize thousands of partisan challengers concentrated in minority and Democratic areas likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal voters, who were not only intimidated, but became discouraged by the long lines.

Sounds evil doesn't it?

Again, that changes when you hear the facts they yet again withhold from their readers. The process of challenging voters is not unusual, is completely legal, and, as noted in the previous article, both Democrats and Republicans appointed "thousands of challengers" to the polls.

The court ruled [pdf], simply (emph. added):

At any primary, special, or general election, any political party supporting candidates to be voted upon at such election and any group of five or more candidates may appoint to any of the polling places in the county or city one person, a qualified elector, who shall serve as challenger for such party or such candidates during the casting of the ballots...

Whether or not we like the idea (another interesting tidbit: Ken Blackwell opposed such challenges), these Republican (and Democratic) challengers did absolutely nothing illegal, nor have I seen any evidence that lines were attributed to vote challenges.

Finally, remember: a person voting twice or more -- which this is meant to discourage -- takes away (cancels out) many other people's votes. Both the Federal Appellate Court and the Supreme Court held that challenges can be employed as a way of discouraging fraudlent overvoting.

Mr. Blackwell's decision to prevent voters who requested absentee ballots but did not receive them on a timely basis from being able to receive provisional ballots likely disenfranchised thousands, if not tens of thousands, of voters, particularly seniors.

Again, probing more deeply into this story, one discovers another apparent attempt to commit massive vote fraud, sadly, again, by Democrats!

Lake County Elections Board trustees today will discuss the possibility of criminal charges being brought against at least two issue advocacy groups and potentially a political candidate regarding suspected illegal absentee ballot applications.

Janet F. Clair, elections board director, said she is investigating numerous applications and is likely to ask trustees to refer the matter to Lake County Prosecutor Charles E. Coulson. Her investigation had not concluded Tuesday, she said. Trustees will meet at 8:15 a.m. today in Painesville.

Clair said questionable applications have come in from large neighborhood blocks in which the entire area is requesting absentee ballots.

No wonder they had trouble researching and approving all the requests in time. Whole neighborhoods apparently all decided -- on the same day, apparently -- to vote absentee. How odd.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported:

More than 1,000 voter registration forms and absentee ballot requests may be fraudulent in Lake and Summit counties, where investigations of irregularities are broadening.

Lake County Sheriff Daniel Dunlap said Thursday that he will investigate an attempt to register a dead person and other possibly fraudulent documents that were submitted to the Lake County Board of Elections. Dunlap also said he has notified the FBI and the Ohio secretary of state...

Elections officials have said hundreds of absentee ballot applications and dozens of voter registration cards are in question. Lake County Prosecutor Charles Coulson, also involved in the probe, said the problems are more significant than originally thought.

"We've seen voter fraud before, but never on this level," Coulson said Thursday. "I grew up in Chicago and this looks like the politics of Mayor Daley in the '50s and '60s."

Lake election and law enforcement officials said their investigation is centered on absentee registration attempts by the nonpartisan NAACP's National Voter Fund and an anti-Bush, nonprofit group called Americans Coming Together, or ACT Ohio.

The National Voter Fund could not be reached Wednesday or Thursday at its Washington, D.C., offices. A spokesman for ACT Ohio, however, said the group believed the allegations would prove groundless.

Several registration applications submitted by campaign volunteers for a candidate are also being scrutinized, Lake elections board Director Jan Clair said. None of the officials would identify the candidate, however.

Dunlap said the probe will include visits from detectives to addresses of the voters in question.

In one other instance, an elderly nursing home resident who usually signs with an "X" appeared to have a firm, cursive signature when she registered...

Blackwell's directive seems to have been an overreaction to this kind of fraud. But yet again the point is moot because Blackwell's directive was never even implemented, meaning that all people who had failed to receive an absentee ballot in fact were allowed to vote!

(How dishonest can this Conyers guy be???)

There were widespread instances of intimidation and misinformation in violation of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, Equal Protection, Due Process and the Ohio right to vote.

No, there were allegations of intimidation, and they were not, apparently, widespread. Writes Democrat Russ Baker:

Certainly, there were many instances of small-scale cheating and intimidation — as there probably always are. Limited numbers of voters received phone calls and letters on bogus official letterheads, telling them they could not vote; in one egregious instance, elderly Democrats were "informed" that it might be more comfortable for them to vote on Wednesday, when lines were shorter. But there's no evidence or even likelihood that this was authorized from on high; it's far more like that such amateurish interventions were locally conceived.

Sadly, unspecified Democratic claims of intimidation have been hurt by a line in the Kerry/Edwards mobilization plan which advised Democratic leaders to cry wolf: "If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a 'pre-emptive strike" and "Prime minority leadership" with stories of intimidation to tell.

As far as the charge that Blackwell isn't investigating these charges, it seems even Ohio newspapers are having trouble tracking down even one credible charge:

While most of the top dailies there say they are following, if not probing, each accusation, many coming from liberal blogs, none of the editors who spoke to E&P this week find the allegations highly convincing or plan to devote major resources to them.

"We have been chasing them down as they come up, and a lot of them are so groundless," said Doug Clifton, editor of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland....

"We have written a lot about it, but we have found very little evidence that anything has happened in the election that didn't happen in every other [Ohio] election," said Ben Marrison, editor of The Columbus Dispatch. "Every rock we have turned over, we've found nothing." ...

At The Cincinnati Post, Editor Mike Philips is still keeping an eye on the allegations, but admits nothing has prompted him to run any alarming stories. "It looks like there is an awful lot of smoke, but not much fire," he told E&P, adding that he has no staffers assigned fulltime to such stories. "What you see on the Internet gets the true believers all stirred up, but when you actually start looking at it, there seems to be less than meets the eye."

Yup, that about sums it up, I'd say. Same goes for Air America.

We learned of improper purging and other registration errors by election officials that likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide. The Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition projects that in Cuyahoga County alone over 10,000 Ohio citizens lost their right to vote as a result of official registration errors.

This is absurd on the face of it: The charge itself admits these problems were due to "official registration errors" -- in a Democrat-controlled county -- not due to some evil Republican plot. It's self-refuting.

I'd personally be embarassed even to make such a lame charge.

There were 93,000 spoiled ballots where no vote was cast for president, the vast majority of which have yet to be inspected.

Since about 5.6 million votes were cast, this represents a spoilage rate of about 1.6%, which is about typical in many types of voting system -- sometimes people punch the wrong hole, or abstain from that category. 1 or 2 out 100 isn't a sign of dirty tricks of some sort. Further, there is no Ohio law demanding such ballots be manually "inspected" -- perhaps in order to manufacture a presidential vote where none was recorded.

The problem was particularly acute in two precincts in Montgomery County which had an undervote rate of over 25% each - accounting for nearly 6,000 voters who stood in line to vote, but purportedly declined to vote for president.

Once again, here's the crucial withheld fact: these precincts were traditional bastions of Republican support, which suggests it would have been Bush voters, not Kerry supporters, who lost their votes.

In two precincts [in Montgomery County] where majorities voted for Bush, 27 percent of ballots cast did not register a vote for president, although undercounts tended to hit Democratic voting areas to a greater extent than Republican strongholds overall. Comparisons between counties in Ohio suggest the inferior technology of punch-card voting machines disenfranchises voters without regard to race.

There were numerous, significant unexplained irregularities in other counties throughout the state: (i) in Mahoning county at least 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of Kerry votes to the Bush column.

This is sad to hear, but the Conyers Report again withholds relevant data to create suspicion: The director of the Mahoning county electoral board, Michael Sciortino, was -- you guessed it -- a Democrat. The mistake resulted from the decision of the board to try to make some wrongly-sized ballots work with the optical scanners they had:

[While] conducting a test of the optical scanning device that reads the paper ballots[, officials] found that the absentee ballots were one-sixteenth of an inch too wide, which resulted in the scanner rejecting every third one.

Elections officials tried trimming the test ballots, but the scanner still kept rejecting some.

It was then decided to reprogram the optical scanner so it would accept the wider ballots. This solution worked well with ballots in the test pack, but the officials weren't sure how well it would work with actual absentee ballots that had been folded when they were returned to the elections board in envelopes.

As usual, three Democrats and three Republicans were the ones doing the work, and were present at all times, and part of the decision-making team. Such a technical problem is regrettable, but not part of some vast sweeping effort to purge democracy from the U-S-of-A. Read more about their technical problems here, if you're interested in facts, rather than half-witted conspiracy theories.

(On The Majority Report, after they'd read these kinds of charges, they'd cry: "And nobody is looking into this!" implying it was some kind of mysterious cover-up by big media and the government, and that nobody really knew for sure how these mistakes occured. My reaction, after doing this research and finding these answers: That's bogus! There are all kinds of newspaper articles out there explaining exactly what happened in these cases. The problem seems to be simply that the explanations are mundane, or impliclate Democrats is incompetance or bad behavior.)

(ii) Warren County locked out public observers from vote counting citing an FBI warning about a potential terrorist threat, yet the FBI states that it issued no such warning;

This charge is deceptive: Read the closing of this interview by Amy Sullivan at "Democracy Now" -- a liberal source: "The FBI agent apparently spoke with some county officials who then relayed the information to the commissioners. He actually spoke directly to Frank Young, who is quoted in the article as well." The FBI did relay such a threat to Warren County, though not directly to election board officials. The language in this charge appears carefully chosen to mislead the reader without lying outright.

Regardless, the threat didn't seem to have affected the election outcome: In 2000, 28% of Warren County went for Gore. In 2004, 28% again went for Kerry. Maybe I'm just strange but I would look for a signficant difference as evidence of fraud, not having the same kind of demographics as four years ago.

(iii) the voting records of Perry County show significantly more votes than voters in some precincts, significantly less ballots than voters in other precincts, and voters casting more than one ballot;

For example:

In one Perry County district cited by Conyers, for example, 393 voters cast 489 votes. Similarly, in another Perry County precinct, 266 voters cast just shy of 400 votes. Turnout was also high. In another Perry County precinct, 125 percent of the registered voters cast votes for president.

Perry County also has a remarkably high voter registration rate of 91 percent. Many voters, however, never voted and have no signature cards on file. Furthermore, thousands of these ghost voters all coincidentally registered in 1977, with 3,100 registering on one day alone. Certainly this can all be explained. Conyers’ point, however, is that it must all be explained now, and to the satisfaction of the American people.

Guess who these overages apparently supported? That's right: Perry County went strongly for John Kerry. Conyers carefully keeps his readers from learning that. Wouldn't want to make it look like the books were cooked in -- uh -- Democratic areas.

As far as Conyer's demand to "explain" it, it's quite easy: with inadequate validation at the polls it's easy for people to vote fraudulently. Look at efforts to solve such problems and -- without exception, in my experience -- you'll find Democrats opposing the solution.

Look, I'm not trying to be partisan here, but what choice have I got? I keep hearing how awful those horrible Republicans are, but when I dig into it, I keep finding evidence suggesting egresious misconduct and vote-stealing by Democrats. And yes, I disagree with some of Blackwell's decisions as well, but, as I point out, they don't seem to have had much impact.

(iv) in Butler county a down ballot and underfunded Democratic State Supreme Court candidate implausibly received more votes than the best funded Democratic Presidential candidate in history;

Yes, once again Conyers brings us more evidence that manufactured votes -- if we believe they exist -- seemed to have a strong propensity to support Democratic candidates.

On Air America they screamed that people weren't looking into all this, and that Democratic party leaders seemed to have abandoned efforts to probe more deeply. Gosh, I can understand why.

(v) in Cuyahoga county, poll worker error may have led to little known third-party candidates receiving twenty times more votes than such candidates had ever received in otherwise reliably Democratic leaning areas;

Even if the worst were true, these contested votes only total to several hundred. Again, against a backdrop of an 118,000 margin for Bush, that's not enough to "steal" an election.

(vi) in Miami county, voter turnout was an improbable and highly suspect 98.55 percent, and after 100 percent of the precincts were reported, an additional 19,000 extra votes were recorded for President Bush.

I'm suspicous of turnouts over 100%, not under 100%. And the Conyers Report, or at least this summary, appears to by lying, as this Democratic Underground post demonstrates: the 19,000 added ballots were not all for Bush, and didn't even change the balance between Kerry and Bush when tallied.

(The DU forum participants are shocked that the "discovered" ballots had the same proportion voting for Bush/Kerry as the larger sample. To them, this seems incredibly unlikely, and is near-certain proof of fraud! :-) In reality, it's the principle that "sampling" is based on: small, randomly-chosen samples should reflect the same percentage as the overall body -- in reality, we would suspect fraud only if those ballots were different, and swayed the vote one way or another.)

[Update 9/21/05: This particular argument has gotten a lot of publicity since Paul Krugman repeated it in the New York Times. But it turns out this is an utter myth: The turnout for Miami County was actually only 51.6%, as demonstrated here.]

Mr. Blackwell's failure to articulate clear and consistent standards for the counting of provisional ballots resulted in the loss of thousands of predominantly minority votes...

Mr. Blackwell's failure to issue specific standards for the recount contributed to a lack of uniformity in violation of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clauses...

Sadly, many states -- including many which went for Kerry -- fail to have consistent state-wide standards for counting provisional ballots. To allege this only hurts those in Ohio, and only minorities -- if it hurt anyone at all -- is quite a stretch, one obviously made for partisan reasons. But every charge can be made to sound more important, apparently, by claiming minorities were hurt. (What a shameful, partisan use of these people.)

The voting computer company Triad has essentially admitted that it engaged in a course of behavior during the recount in numerous counties to provide "cheat sheets" to those counting the ballots.

MSNBC's Keith Olberman -- a liberal -- was also concerned, too. He looked into it, and couldn't find any evidence of intentional wrongdoing on Triad's part, and concluded that election officials themselves (half Democrat, half Republican) might were probably trying to avoid a tedious hand-recount -- and the Triad representative was apparently simply responding to their requests for how to avoid a hand-recount in precincts which should have been (but weren't) randomly selected on election night:

There doesn’t appear to have been anything illegitimate about the actions of a “manufacturer’s rep” at the Board of Elections of Hocking County, Ohio, about two weeks ago....

Mr. Whidden told me by phone this afternoon that there are a lot of puffs of smoke. “86 of Ohio’s 88 counties have pre-selected their random precincts,” he claims. Their motivations — and even Triad’s — may not be as nefarious as would appear. Ohio law states that if the 3% hand recount doesn’t match the original vote, the entire County’s vote must be recounted by hand. These County Board of Elections, especially in the smaller jurisdictions, are comprised largely of volunteers, and a full, hand recount means an incredible amount of work, which as human nature would suggest, they’d prefer to avoid....

So there’s the early picture from Ohio: the best-respected of the computer companies, Triad, tries to help one of its customers out. The customer wants to go home without doing the heavy lifting that the law requires, but which to them seems utterly academic. The process is repeated across the state. Benign intentions; potentially pernicious outcomes.

It's a rather complicated story, you're more than welcomed to read the whole thing, if hearing all the available evidence interests you.

Again, this kind of behavior, on the part of the board officials, is certainly not desirable. But this is apparent evidence of laziness -- in both Democratic and Republican areas, on boards split among both parties -- not a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise Ohio's voters.

Conclusion

Well, sorry that was so long. The principle of evil advantage applies here: It takes just a second to make up a lie, but it takes a lot longer to refute it. A huge number of charges levelled, claims that democracy itself was stolen, yet each charge I examined was found to be half the truth, or even far less. Each story was carefully tailored so that only one part was presented to the reader -- and any facts which undermined the appearance of "vote stealing" by Republicans were kept out of the analysis -- as was overwhelming evidence of such actual instances of such behavior by Democrats. (125% registration???)

Isn't "half-truth" just another word for "lie"?

What I've done here can be done by anyone -- and it sure could have been done by the crack team of commentators on "The Majority Report", much less by any of the web sites promoting this nonsense. Sadly, getting to the bottom of things, and finding out if they're really true seems to take a back set to, well, "winning", or scaring people, at all costs.

No wonder they don't take callers.