Media downplays vote-counting problems

Media downplays vote-counting problems
By Media Matters

Washington Post columnist and editorial board member Anne Applebaum wrote a widely criticized column this week, suggesting that concerns over paperless electronic voting were unfounded because she doesn’t take a receipt when she uses an automated teller machine (ATM).

At least, we think that was her point; it was a little difficult to tell for certain.

In what CJR Daily called a "well-deserved smackdown to Anne Applebaum," the Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby pointed out the absurdity of Applebaum’s comparison of voting machines to ATMs:

Could any comparison be less apt? No, you probably haven’t checked this week to see if your bank is stealing your money. But duh! The reason you haven’t checked is obvious — banks provide extensive paper trails, and a major bank would quickly be caught if it swiped that nine bucks every week. (As anyone except a "journalist" would know, many Americans do check their bank statements quite religiously.) And duh! Let’s note another fact which would be obvious to anyone outside Applebaum’s tribe. Here it is: If banks were allowed to run audit-free systems, many banks would of course steal your money! Only a fool would fail to know it.

Media Matters for America, meanwhile, noted:

Applebaum’s lack of interest in how her vote is recorded may stem from her lack of concern with whether voter fraud swings an election — or from her apparent unwillingness to spend an extra day counting votes in order to ensure that the correct candidate gains office. From Applebaum’s November 3 column:

The worst possible outcome [to the 2004 presidential campaign] would be, and will always be, a repeat of Florida 2000: lawyers, spin doctors, courts and protests that would drag out the result past last night. ... One disputed election [the 2000 presidential election] didn’t destroy the majority’s faith in that extended democratic process. But nor, arguably, would a few cases of voter fraud in Ohio yesterday, or a few examples of egregious voter suppression in Florida, however critical the districts in which they took place and however much they affected the result. Let’s face it: If it’s really that close, as it was in 2000, either candidate could plausibly be declared the victor. And the best outcome for the country would always be for the apparent loser to concede and for the nation to hand victory, quickly, to whoever the apparent winner might be. What would, over time, destroy the majority’s faith in the process is a system in which every el! ection was litigated or a system in which the result was regularly and doggedly disputed. [emphasis added]

Applebaum doesn’t indicate who should decide on the "apparent" winner, if vote-counting doesn’t make the winner clear on election night. Rather, she simply indicates that she wants a candidate to concede before her bedtime. To Applebaum, democracy is apparently something to be rushed through, rather than conducted correctly. Little wonder, then, that she doesn’t mind her vote being crumpled up and thrown away like an ATM receipt.

Applebaum’s recent columns about the 2004 presidential election are not the only testaments to the dubiousness of her claim on the Post’s valuable op-ed real estate. MMFA noted earlier this year her odd review of Bill Clinton’s memoirs. And on September 3, 2003, she devoted an entire 780-word column to the proliferation of acronyms, which, she warned ominously, "isn’t exactly democratic."

But Applebaum isn’t the only media figure who apparently doesn’t care whether votes are recorded and counted accurately. MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann has used his Countdown with Keith Olbermann program to highlight voting irregularities, only to be mocked as a "voice of paranoia" and accused of perpetuating "idiotic conspiracy theories" by media conservatives.

http://mediamatters.org/