O'Donnell LOST in Delaware

Apparently, Christine O'Donnell's "stunning upset victory" in Delaware was yet another stroke of electronic magic--just like Scott Brown's "stunning upset victory" in Massachusetts in February.

There, as the Election Defense Alliance has reported, it turns out that Martha Coakley won the hand-counted paper ballot vote by 2.8%, while Brown "won" his 5-point "victory" only where the "votes" were "counted" electronically (with no spot-checks of that "count," no systematic audit and no exit polls).

[The EDA's report, and my summary, are at http://markcrispinmiller.com/2010/09/did-scott-brown-really-win-in-massachusetts-must-read/.]

And now it turns out that Christine O'Donnell's "win" in Delaware was just as iffy; or even iffier, since she "beat" Mike Castle--electronically, which is to say, unverifiably-- by 6+ points, while Mike Castle actually beat her, according to the paper-based absentee ballots, by over 10 points. (Brad Friedman goes into the details below.)

It's all quite weird, of course. But what's far weirder is the total silence on such matters by both parties and the media. Somehow the doubtfulness of Brown's "win," and now O'Donnell's, hasn't raised the faintest question as to whether the Tea-Baggers really represent electoral majorities. And so the Standard Narrative we all keep hearing now --the Tea-Party's booming, the GOP is badly split, the Democrats are in big trouble, blah blah blah--is just about as useful as the horoscope in this morning's New York Post.

I'd like to know what it would take to get the press to pay attention to these wild anomalies--not just the two I've noted here, but also Alvin Greene's preposterous "win" in South Carolina, and all the many others of this campaign season and the last ten years.

It's starting to appear as if there's nothing that will make the penny drop inside the heads of all those jounalists and pundits, who couldn't any longer blather on about the game of "politics" (as they imagine it) if they allowed themselves to look into the by-now-overwhelming evidence that this whole game is rigged--and will stay rigged until we, as a nation, finally stop ignoring all the signs of fraud, and start

discussing what to do about it.

MCM

p.s. Publicly, Karl Rove's been lobbing many spitballs at O'Donnell, thereby creating yet another tasty "story" for the press, about the "rift" between the GOP's "insiders" and the "insurgent" Tea-Baggers, etc., etc.

I'd say we all should be a wee bit skeptical about Rove's noisy putdowns of his party's nominee. For one thing, we can generally tell that Karl Rove's lying when his lips are moving; and, secondly, it's not so easy to believe that Rove would have much problem with a candidate who, however "nutty" he may claim to find her, has the same good shot at "victory" on Election Day that she enjoyed last week., since Team Rove will no doubt themselves be running the election apparatus.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical. So let's just say that, if Rove is genuinely put off by O'Donnell's victory over Mike Castle, he should stand up, right now, and demand a thorough probe of her election. (Certainly no Democrat will do it.)