Our man Keith has updated his blog on the various aspects of election fraud that he's been looking into. Here's the latest:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
A bunch of cats across the parking lot (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK - The election vote mess is like one of those inflatable clown dolls. You knock it down with your hardest punch, it goes supine, and then bounces back up, in the meantime having moved an inch or two laterally.
The punch, of course, is the explanation that the 29 more-votes-than voters precincts in greater Cleveland appear to have been caused by the addition of Absentee Ballots. The total difference between registered voters and votes (93,000) might be explained by that process, but it does little for one's confidence in the whole result from Ohio.
The problem is, the rubber clown immediately bounces back with the report that officials in Youngstown managed to catch a slight glitch in their voting there: a total drawn from all the precincts that initially showed negative 25,000,000 million votes cast. It evokes a Monty Python sketch ("Mr. Kevin Phillips Bong - Sensible Party - 14,352. Mr. Harquin Fim Tim Lim Bim Bus Stop Fatang Fatang Ole Biscuit Barrel - Silly Party -- minus 25,000,0000).
No reason to worry about the integrity of the outcome in Ohio, is there?
The most pleasing thing of the last three days of blogs and newscasts is the reassurance from political professionals that all of you (all of us) who have wondered about what went on a week ago yesterday are not necessarily nuts. We might not necessarily be right, but there are some very stodgy, very by-the-book folks who thing we're damned right to be asking.
"Ohio was rife with allegations," Jonathan Turley said on last night's show. He's not merely a superior expert on the Constitution, teaching it at George Washington University's law school, but back during my first incarnation at MSNBC, as host of The Big Show and The White House In Crisis, Jonathan was a regular guest who regularly said that the investigation and impeachment of President Clinton was largely being done within the framework of the Constitution, and as bad as much of it looked, it was well within the margin of error.
Professor Turley is no partisan.
"There was litigation over pockets of voters," he continued, on the subject of Ohio. "There was far more litigation than was indicated in the news programming." He should know - he was on the clock and on the set working for CBS News throughout the campaign, and straight through to 6 AM in the hours after the vote. "So when you look at provisionals and absentees and then those pockets of votes, yeah, there probably is enough of a margin if things broke for Kerry that he could turn the state. Is it likely? No. But it is not impossible."
Turley noted that a complaint now, without John Kerry's sponsorship, is also a longshot: "Without the candidate, judges don't work as hard" when it comes to overturning a set of returns, or a county's report, or a state's. But, he added, "remember that over 70% of Ohio's votes were done with punch cards and we know that when you do a challenge to those, they tend to turn over."
Paging Mr. Gore! Mr. Albert Gore, please report to the blog...
On the show last night there was also confirmation of something I speculated about here 24 hours ago. Craig Crawford, one of our MSNBC political contributors and also a columnist for Congressional Quarterly, admitted that the concession did trigger a kind of `we can all go home now!' exultation in the media. "Since John Kerry conceded," Craig said, "there wasn't that great desire to run out to Columbus and try to figure this out. And the concession is the key because we're often wimps in the media and we wait for other people to make charges, one political party or the other, and then we investigate."
Bless Craig Crawford for saying that. If you haven't seen him a lot on the tube you may be misled by his Aw-Shucks delivery and willingness to laugh at the subject matter. The political insight, shorn of the political pomposity that so many of the pros evince, is as refreshing as his laugh. Next to that admission that the Starting Line mentality pervades so much of political journalism, came the message about investigating, prodding, pushing, yelling, shouting, and blogging: "This is the time to do this. There's still time before the results are certified. It doesn't mean it'll change the outcome - but it's good."
Craig also connected a few unpleasant dots. Kerry, he says, is "definitely interested in running in 2008," and the image of Gore's political death after the 2000 re-count may have played as much of a part in his hurried concession as any realistic appraisal of his chances in reversing the election by reversing Ohio.
He didn't, however, endorse any conspiracy theories. "My experience with Election Supervisors is that they're very independent, often real characters, hard people to actually organize into a conspiracy. I think it'd be easier to herd a bunch of cats across a parking lot."
But - as I pointed out to him after he crafted that colorful bit of imagery - when one voting machine can add 4,000 votes for one presidential candidate in a 650-vote precinct, and another one in the same state can turn a day's balloting into a net result of negative 25 million, it may also be true that altering those machines may be easy enough that it could be pulled off not only by conspiratorial Election Supervisors, but also, just by a bunch of cats from across the parking lot.
Thoughts? Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com