Today's TNT article about the election contest is not just another example of shoddy reporting. It's lazy, derivative shoddy reporting, just an unattributed repackaging of this week's howlingly weak article from the Seattle Weakly, complete with quotes from the same ignorant "experts" -- "Election formula could multiply cases"
The Republican challenge here, however, is based on a statistical formula that’s never been tried in Washington or used successfully anywhere else.Had reporter KENNETH P. VOGEL done his homework, he would have learned from the Republican legal team that (I quote from their Trial Brief p. 38)
Numerous states deem proportional deduction of votes sufficient to overturn or decide an election. In Frese v. Camferdam 76 Ill. App. 3d 68 (1979), the court affIrmed a trial court decision overturning the results of an election and seating an election contestant by proportional deducting illegal votes "in a ratio of each candidate's vote at a given polling place to the total vote cast at that place with respect to the type of ballot cast."Exhibit A of the Trial Brief lists several other cases from various states where proportional deduction was decisive in an election contest and dozens of other cases where courts accepted such evidence as valid.
The apparent point of the story is especially perverse: that election challenges are inherhently bad for the system and therefore so is this one. Why not portray this particular challenge for what it is: an attempt to help clean up the elections system so that voter confidence is restored and fewer challenges are needed in the future?
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 22, 2005 11:46 AM | Email ThisI say "like judicial rulings", because the same state exists within our justice system today. Judges decide on the ruling they want to make, and then they send their clerks off to build the defense of that decision. And when a judge can't defend a ruling, or doesn't wish to make the only possible ruling, they will either refuse to defend their decision, or simply rule not to rule, which sadly is their right.
Objective reporting is quickly abandoned by reporters once they know what their editors want the result of their "investigation" to be. Then the reporter can afford to be lazy because as long as they report what their bosses want, little else matters.
Posted by: Mike on May 22, 2005 12:12 PMIs it just me or does anyone else notice the AP, NYT, LA Times, and very few other actually write any of the stories run in the newspapers.
This is how stories like the desecration story get the "ring of truth" the left keeps on with. Nobody bothers to do any real reporting and relies exclusively on a handful of questionable source.
Even Fox News does this. I remember that much of the Lacy Peterson coverage that originated from that most reputable of all sources, the National Equirer.
Bottom line - Don't trust the news - ANY of it!
Posted by: Deadwood on May 22, 2005 12:14 PMNow if the Frugal Gourmet were a Republican, the TNT would be on him like the spokesman-review.
Posted by: Dogbert on May 22, 2005 02:13 PM