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Since ABC's Peter Jennings aired a whole host of election fraud conspiracy theories Tuesday night - suggesting that "maybe once again the country got it wrong" in last week's vote - the Canadian-born anchorman will undoubtedly want to interview Howard Troxler, columnist for the St. Petersburg Times.
While Jennings claimed he was performing a "public service" by covering the wild-eyed complaints, it's Troxler who has performed the genuine public service, by delivering the kind of report that ABC should have - but didn't.
Here's some highlights of Troxler's comprehensive analysis in today's Times:
CLAIM: Kerry really won Ohio.
There are still 155,000 or so uncounted provisional and absentee ballots. If by some miracle Kerry got almost all of them, he would win. A miracle. [Bush's Ohio margin of victory was 136,000 votes.]
Furthermore, there also were 93,000 "spoiled" ballots in Ohio that, had they gone to Kerry by a miraculously large margin . . . uh, well, still wouldn't have been enough. . . . .
CLAIM: A machine in Franklin County, Ohio, recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush.
This is perfectly true, and one of at least two serious machine mistakes around the country. When the results cartridge of an older-generation machine was plugged in to the counter, it reported almost 4,000 extra votes for Bush, when only 638 people had voted in the precinct.
At the risk of being labeled part of the plot, I want to point out that they caught this obvious mistake. You can't "stuff' the ballot box. There is a signed, independent record of how many people voted. . . .
CLAIM: Electronic voting machines in Carteret County, N.C., mysteriously "lost" more than 4,500 votes - most of the votes cast in the county election!
This one is true, too, and disturbing. According to the Carteret County News-Times, the county's machines counted only the first 3,005 votes and didn't count the rest.
The Carteret screwup didn't change the presidential outcome, but a couple of state races were close enough to be affected. Besides, the standard of "no harm, no foul" is not good enough. But I would point out that even this mistake was obvious and immediately detected. . . .
CLAIM: Voting patterns in some Florida counties were suspicious because Bush got many more votes than the number of registered Republicans.
Several impressive-looking charts and graphs are flying around. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann singled out five Florida counties for what he called a "sudden" outbreak of "irregularities:" Baker, Dixie, Holmes, Lafayette and Liberty.
In those counties, Republicans make up only 7 to 24 percent of registered voters. But Bush won there with between 64 and 78 percent of the vote.
How can this be? Easy. They are northern "Dixiecrat" counties where being a registered Democrat but voting Republican is an old habit. The same counties voted overwhelmingly for Bush in 2000, and his father in 1988 - when registered Republicans made up as little as 2 percent of the electorate!
That's just the tip of the iceberg of Troxler's analysis. We trust that the folks in elite media will take some time chewing over his full report before they lend any more credence to the kookball complainers who want Kerry to "unconcede" the election.
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