Certified and/or certifiable

Certified and/or certifiable

Keith Olbermann
December 6, 2004

SECAUCUS - Exactly one month to the day before Congress will open the votes of the Electoral College, the Secretary of State of Ohio certified the state’s vote this afternoon, that moment in time which separates the Re-Count Exhibition Season from the Re-Count Regular Season.

Exactly per his legally-supported schedule, Kenneth Blackwell this afternoon made the November 2 vote official. With provisionals, absentees, and corrections, it turned out to be not a 136,000 vote margin for President Bush, but rather one of 119,000. The certification was almost immediately greeted by two protests, the prospect of a third, and the details of a fourth.

Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb today scheduled a news conference for Tuesday afternoon in Columbus at which the re-count request from he and Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik will be formalized.

Still delayed, a long, long, long-shot bid - spearheaded by attorney Cliff Arnebeck - to have an Ohio Supreme Court Justice contest the actual election — holding off making the first count official until voting irregularities are reviewed. Mr. Arnebeck told us this afternoon that it now may be Wednesday before his suit is filed.

But the protests are not just from the fringes any more. Citing the long lines, shortages of ballots, voting machine meltdowns, and spoiled ballots, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe announced his party would spend "whatever it takes" to conduct what it calls "a comprehensive investigative study" of the vote in Ohio, one to be completed some time next year.

But just as McAuliffe insisted that the study was not intended "to contest the results of the 2004 election,” a slightly different message was coming from what remains of the Kerry-Edwards campaign in Ohio. Kerry's lead electoral attorney there, Daniel Hoffheimer, echoed the McAuliffe tone, noting "neither the pending Ohio recount nor this investigation is designed to challenge the popular vote in Ohio.”

But in another moment of perplexing tantalization from the Kerry camp, Hoffheimer also said, “while the election of the Bush-Cheney ticket by the Electoral College is all but certain..."

Well that’s enough to drive the remaining Kerry faithful right out of their capsules. File it next to “regardless of the outcome of this election,” and the debate over whether the campaign in Ohio should “join” or “participate in” the Glibs’ recount.

Meantime, what happens when the losing party in the election wants to investigate the election, but has no standing nor political capital to conduct actual hearings in, say, the House of Representatives? It hosts a "forum" — a friendly little informal gathering of members of the House Judiciary Committee in the Rayburn Office Building, Wednesday morning.

John Conyers and as many as dozen of the other 15 Democrats on Judiciary, who say they want to "discuss any issues and concerns regarding the numerous voting irregularities that have been reported in Ohio during the 2004 election."

Conyers has invited a special guest — none other than Warren Mitofsky, the head of Mitofsky International, one of the two companies that conducted exit polling for the television networks. Conyers has written to Mitofsky, asking him to release any of the so-called "raw data" from November 2, the materials constituting the exit polls that fired such controversy, particularly on the internet, and show up to Wednesday's little gathering.

Conyers' office told us Mr. Mitofsky has yet to R.S.V.P.

Interestingly, in the letter to Mitofsky, Conyers is not at all informal. He says Mitofsky can best serve truth right now “by testifying at a hearing we will be holding…”

If you’d like somebody to testify on behalf of the proposition that you’re not nuts for reading about, nor asking, questions, try the Public Editor’s column in Sunday’s edition of the Portland paper, The Oregonian. There, Mike Arrietta-Walden says the foremost complaint received from readers, is about his newspaper’s spotty coverage of voting irregularities. It’s very possible that a lot of the reader feedback was encouraged by websites, but that’s par for the course, as Mediaweek’s piece on the number of Brent Bozell-generated form letters received by the Federal Communications Commission.

What matters most, perhaps, is that while Arrietta-Walden notes the geographical distance between Portland and most of the election hot spots dictated the paper would have to rely on wire services, he still sees his newspaper (and others) as asleep at the switch: “That coverage, especially from national newspapers, has not been extensive and deep, but The Oregonian hasn't taken full advantage of what coverage there was. The lukewarm interest shown by many newspapers partly stems from the fact that leaders of the Kerry campaign and experts with several nonpartisan election watchdogs have repeatedly said that the errors detected would not amount to a reversal of the election. Journalists have moved on to other, pressing stories of the day.”

Arrietta-Walden is also cautionary about the wisdom of letting the blogs drive the net. He didn’t mention Wayne Madsen by name, but he might well have.

When Mr. Madsen’s internet piece positing a $29,000,000 payoff to “fix” the election made the rounds, I wrote here that the journalism didn’t live up to many minimum standards, and the logic, even fewer (somebody promised to pay off people to rig the election computers, gave at least some of them the full history of how the money was to be laundered — and then didn’t ante up?).

Mr. Madsen followed up with another piece in which he claimed to have an actual copy of the check. A single election-fixing check for $29.6 million. One-stop shopping for the political scandal of the millennium.

Now, he is back with an even longer, more intricate story that drags in NASA, Lockheed Martin, Brazilian computer maintenance technicians, Nigerian scammers, and a reputed affidavit that fingers a Florida congressman.

The problem is that the amazing check for $29.6 million, whose authenticity was the cornerstone of Madsen’s first two stories, not only turns out to be a fraud, but now, its fraudulence becomes one of the cornerstone’s of Madsen’s newest story. As he told the Pacifica radio station (KPFT) in Houston Sunday, “Yeah, it turns out that the $29 million check, although a valuable clue, was a fake. But it looks like the people who released the check did so as a way to say ‘hey, look here, don’t look at the check, look who’s behind it, look around it, follow the money that these people have been involved with…’”

Once again, if any part of Mr. Madsen’s writing on the election is proved and valid, I’ll not only repeat my offer to pay his way for him to pick up his Pulitzer Prize — I’ll physically carry him there myself. There could very well be facts — even important facts — hiding in there somewhere.

But to turn on a dime and write that a document is real, and hard evidence of a crime, and then come back and admit that it’s fake, but still hard evidence of a crime, is an intellectual leap of faith worthy of Evel Knievel. It violates every precept of good journalism, to say nothing of good investigation. I won’t even ask about logic.