• by Tom Siebert , Op-Ed Contributor, November 10, 2006

Now that the Democrats have won all of Congress, Donald Rumsfeld is the first neoconservative sacrifice, and George Bush is mouthing platitudes about bipartisan leadership (a week after he told Americans that if they voted Democratic, the terrorists win), the media will go back to ignoring all the problems in Tuesday's election with voting flaws, corruption, and intimidation.

After pretty much ignoring the alarming troubles with computerized voting and voter disenfranchisement of African-Americans and other minorities that have been going on for at least a half dozen years and definitely won Bush the White House in 2000 and arguably 2004 as well, the media tried to play catch-up in the month or so prior to election day 2006.

Now that the election's over, however, the "Democracy worked" story is a much happier tale to tell than to dwell on the dirty voting tricks and chain of mistakes that computerized voting machines--which leave no paper trail--wreaked on the election.

A quick rundown: Machines made by Sequoia Voting Systems have a yellow button in the back that a person can push to vote for the candidate of their choice as many times as they want. There was some coverage when the news came out the day before election day, but now it's gone away. I read a bunch of stories about this, but not one of them was written by a reporter who bothered to ask why this button would even need to be part of the machine's design.

In New Jersey, run by a Democratic Party Machine, there were complaints from almost two dozen Republican voters who said their vote (on Sequoia equipment) was flipped from GOP candidate for Senator Tom Kean, Jr. to the ultimate winner, Democrat Robert Menendez. In Florida, run by a Republican machine, a close election the GOP Congressional candidate won by less than 400 votes saw over 18,000 ballots left blank for that contest, dramatically below the state average (on equipment made by Election Systems and Software).

Search around the Internet, look for local newspapers, and you'll find more examples of problems with their computer voting equipment. In Virginia, where the race between incumbent Republican George Allen and the ultimate winner Jim Webb was ultimately settled by about 8,000 votes out of more than 2.3 million cast, Allen had no choice but to concede because a recount would have been meaningless and given the identical result; there's no paper trail--no mechanism for an independent audit.

Not that Allen deserved to win after the examples of voter misinformation and intimidation that led to an FBI investigation in Virginia. The same goes for Maryland Republican Governor-no-more Robert Ehrlich, whose campaign bused homeless people from Philadelphia to his state to hand out false sample ballots that claimed Ehrlich and fellow losing candidate for Senator Michael Steele were Democrats. You can find additional examples of states reporting voter intimidation and dirty tricks from the Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune.

What's next? Most of the complaining about voting irregularities and computerized voting has been done by progressives and the left. This election might have gone their way, but one would hope they're not so one-dimensional that now since they've won, their loyalty to the principles of Democracy is now shallowly satisfied. There remain serious and unaddressed problems with the American voting system. The media needs to keep pounding it now. It's more likely, however, that you'll start hearing about it again in October 2008.

Meanwhile, I called CNN yesterday about why they censored Wednesday night's rebroadcast of the Larry King show, after guest Bill Maher outed a high-level homosexual Republican party operative during the show's original live broadcast. I spoke to a pleasant publicist named Bridget Leininger, who kept repeating things like "unexpected gossip," "unsubstantiated claim" and "rare occurrence."

Leininger couldn't say whether the censoring of a King rebroadcast had ever taken place before, nor was she interesting in engaging in a philosophical discussion about whether such Big Media clampdown efforts even matter anymore in our new media world that saw the King/Maher exchange plastered all over YouTube, HuffingtonPost, and a bunch of other places all day yesterday.

If Maher had gone on King's show looking to out somebody, that would be one thing. But he was trying to make a point about the number of gay Republicans in a party that vilifies them, and King kept pushing him for an example, as if he was calling his bluff--and when Maher delivered, it must have freaked CNN out. I'd love to know who made the call to censor it from future broadcasts, but Leininger wasn't telling.

But the thing that amazes me the most is that King's response to Maher's revelation was that he'd never heard it before. If that's truly the case, Larry's even more out of touch than I feared.

One final note on the Camp Falcon attack in Iraq, since it looks like this is a story the mainstream media has just let slip away. Last week, on the MediaPost blog for Media Occupation, there was a comment from the editor of Jihad Unspun, who disputed my claim that it was a propaganda site. She gave me her email address and invited me to correspond to clear everything up. I emailed her, saying I would like to be contacted with "Brian Herring," the man who allegedly wrote the story on her site that said over 300 Americans were killed at Camp Falcon. I've gotten no response.