CBS has finally concluded its investigation into the Rathergate memos:
Four CBS News employees, including three executives, have been ousted for their role in preparing and reporting a disputed story about President Bush’s National Guard service.The action was prompted by the report of an independent panel that concluded that CBS News failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece. The panel also said CBS News had compounded that failure with a “rigid and blind” defense of the 60 Minutes Wednesday report.
The two scandals have quite a bit in common. In both cases, bloggers noticed discrepancies that should have been caught by the professionals. The pros responded with a defense of “business as usual, nothing to see here.” The mainstream media also failed to take notice initially. But after repeated posts uncovering more and more damning evidence of misconduct, in both cases the story finally broke out of the blogosphere into the wider world.
CBS did the right thing by appointing an independent commission to investigate the conduct of its employees. Washington State needs the same thing: a commission to investigate the problems with this election. Why, when the potential for misuse was already known, were provisional ballots not color coded? Why did King County enhance ballots in violation of state election law? Why does it take months for dead voters to be purged from the rolls? Why were military absentee ballot send out so late? And more importantly, who was responsible for these decisions and how can they be held to account so it doesn’t happen again?
Posted by Andy MacDonald at January 10, 2005 08:40 AM | Email Thishere's a link to the wall street journal for a column in today's paper. My step dad in Idaho found this for me-he's pulling for Dino!!!!
This is kudo's to you Stefan and your valliant effort for Dino Rossi.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110006139&ojrss=wsj
Posted by: darcy on January 10, 2005 08:52 AMThe only reason I can offer for not having color coded or otherwise distinguishing provisional ballots is expense. Remember that the ballot for each precinct is unique. In order to color code provisional ballots, you would need to print two sets of ballots for each precinct, regular ballots white, and provisional ballots, oh... flaming pink.
In practice, according to the rules, the elections inspector is supposed to "mark" a ballot provisional by folding it. If this does not happen, it is an error by the inspector. Let's say we went to color coded ballots. Is it possible that the incompetence that would allow unfolded ballots to be handed out to provisional voters could also forget to use the pink rather than the white ballot?
Having just offered the too expensive explanation, I will now repeat that we are already double and triple printing many precincts' ballots because of the provision for non-English speaking voters. I suppose if we can bear the expense for non-English speaking voters, we could certainly bear the expense for provisional ballots.