...you won't want to watch this... or read this horror story from West Virginia (who would've thought, just six months ago, West Virginia would be this fierce?)
1) The horror show... this is former NRCC head Tom Davis at the National Press Club, answering a question from the audience about whether the GOP is going to be up to their usual tricks this time around. Remember: this is a GOP-friendly reporter asking a fellow GOPer if the GOP is going to put the band back together, as it were. The response is the most frightening political thing we've seen since Wally O'Dell, the guy in charge of many of Ohio's voting machines in 2004, said he was "committed to delivering [the state's] electoral votes to George Bush."
Note that it isn't so much what he says but how he says it... and the almost sinister laugh from the room. It's the closest thing we've ever seen to the media admitting the GOP is disgracefully and possibly illegally purging voters.
2) In case you think we're exaggerating or even, somehow, imagining that this hasn't been going on for years, here's another classic example:
Virginia Matheney and Calvin Thomas said touch-screen machines in the
county clerk's office in Ripley kept switching their votes from
Democratic to Republican candidates.
"When I touched the screen for Barack Obama, the check mark moved from
his box to the box indicating a vote for John McCain," said Matheney...
When she reported the problem, she said, the poll worker in charge
"responded that everything was all right. It was just that the screen
was sensitive and I was touching the screen too hard. She instructed me
to use only my fingernail."
Even after she began using her fingernail, Matheney said, the problem persisted.
She isn't the only one. The Charleston Gazette has reported that West Virginia is experiencing these problems all over, with election officials attributing the malfunction to "shifting" that occasionally occurs in transporting the machines to the polling sites. No one, of course, had an explanation for why there were all changing only Democratic votes.
More here. Image via Mother Jones.
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