Fox News has recently reported supposed incidents of voting machine errors where an intended vote for Romney turns out as a vote for Obama. Is this intended as an excuse for why the election was lost? Or is it to give cover when election-day votes are switched in the other direction?
Lately Fox News has been reporting stories like the following:
Imagine going to vote for your presidential candidate and pushing the button on a touch-screen voting machine -- but the "X" marks his opponent instead.
That is what some voters in Nevada, North Carolina, Texas and Ohio have reported.
Fox News has received several complaints from voters who say they voted on touch-screen voting machines -- only when they tried to select Mitt Romney, the machine indicated they had chosen President Obama.
The voters in question realized the error and were able to cast ballots for their actual choice.
This is a rather nefarious sounding report, which implies that some effort is afoot to steal the election for Obama. But what Fox neglects to mention in their article is that
it is more likely the Republicans and their backers - including Mitt Romney's own son - who own the companies that make those machines, and that in all four of these states, Republican administrations are in control, and have a far greater ability to affect access to these machines.
My initial thinking was that this was just Fox News making up excuses in advance for why their Golden Mormon lost. If Romney doesn't win, why, the election must have been stolen! But then a deeper concern arose. What if these reports have been made so that when voting machines start turning tens of thousands of Obama votes into Romney votes, the vote-counters can brush them off by saying, oh well, this is unimportant, this happens both ways?