Nick Schulz, my old editor at Tech Central Station, coined the term “Laphams” or “Laphamisms”, when Lewis Lapham, then the editor of far left Harper’s magazine, described the scene at the 2004 Republican convention before it took place.
Is the Coakley campaign Laphamizing itself? Note yesterday’s date on this press release:
For Immediate Release: January 18, 2010
Contact: Alex Zaroulis (617) 549-0358
Campaign Manager Kevin Conroy:
We’ve received several independent and disturbing reports of voters across the state being handed ballots that are already marked in favor of Scott Brown. This is obviously a serious violation, and our legal team is taking immediate steps to protect the integrity of this election.
We do not yet know why this is happening, but you and everyone you know needs to be aware of the situation so that you can carefully inspect your ballot. If a vote has already been marked, you must return the ballot to the elections official, demand a clean ballot, and call our Voter Protection Hotline at 617-351-6866.
Screen capture here, since they’ve “fixed” this latest gaffe even before I hit publish on this post. (Their press release was the talk of Twitter for several minutes, which may have alerted the Coakley staff.) Click on image below for full size version:
It’s certainly a brave new world when liberals are claiming — ahead of time! — of Republican voter fraud in Massachusetts. Or as Jon of the Exurban League jokes, “Coakley’s hinting at voter fraud? Yeah, the big Massachusetts Republican Machine has the whole state wired.”
Of course, considering Coakley has hired Marc Elias, who previously served as lead attorney for Al Franken’s legal team, this is could very well be the start of a delaying tactic. As Jim Geraghty has noted, “Norm Coleman can explain how winning a race on election night doesn’t always mean you get to take the oath of office.”
Update: “Coakley’s last gasp?”
Update: “Brown Campaign Responds to Coakley Accusations of Marked Ballots.”
And as Jim Geraghty notes, “Hey, if somebody gets a ballot marked, it ought to be reported to the proper authorities and the circumstances reviewed, to determine whether it’s a human error or something nefarious. But if this was a widespread issue, you would have had it complaints everywhere — it’s not like there are other races on the ballot to distract voters.”
Geraghty adds that not even Salon is buying Coakley’s spin: “The Democrat’s campaign readies a possible claim of voter fraud based on thin evidence.”
Update: And neither is the Massachusetts Secretary of State. “Mass. secretary of state dismissed vote problems”, AP reports:
The Massachusetts secretary of state is discounting reports of voter irregularities in the state’s Senate special election.
A spokesman for Secretary of State William Galvin said Tuesday two reports of spoiled ballots could not be verified or found to be widespread.
In one case, someone voting in Cambridge claimed a ballot had already been marked for Republican Scott Brown. There was no way to verify the claim, but the ballot was destroyed.
In another case, a person in Boston reported finding a ballot inside a privacy folder also marked for Brown. Officials say it may have been left inadvertently by an earlier voter.
Aides to Democrat Martha Coakley called a news conference to raise voter awareness of the concerns.
And while AP can’t be bothered to let you know, like Coakley, Galvin is also a Democrat.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! A campaign so inept they can’t even cheat correctly.
Coakley voters were being handed ballots YESTERDAY? Let’s see their affidavits.
Translation:
They have hundreds of absentee ballots they shouldn’t have, all pre-marked for Coakley, so they just filled in five other ballots marked for Brown, planted them and here we are.
They planned this yesterday, or even earlier.
In a race where Democrats are on record saying they must absolutely cheat if that is what it takes to win, they are DISTURBED that the other side might possibly be cheating. “Disturbing reports” may be the worst hack phrase in the business.
Probably not true but much more believable:
January 19, 2009 2:38pm EST
“In five separate instances this morning, Chicago-based SEIU teams were arrested inside official polling places. In each case, police took possession of 808 absentee ballots that had been pre-marked for Coakley. When asked if she was disturbed by the blatant attempt to steal the election, Brown’s campaign manager, Beth Lindstrom laughed and said, ‘Disturbed?! Not even surprised. They called their shot.’”
Shame the Google cache has the updated version.
Speaking of which, here’s a little oddness about Coakley’s site for the techies in the audience. Here are the complete contents of her robots.txt file as of 7:50pm EST:
# See http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html for documentation on how to use the robots.txt file
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /
That’s it. To translate it into English, what this file is doing is preventing the Wayback Machine aka the Internet Archive from putting any page from Coakley’s website in their archive. Which is… odd. Because that’s all it does. So it was deliberate, but I struggle to come up with a good reason why it’s deliberate. For comparison, you can look at the robots.txt at Scott Brown’s site. It does exclude certain login/tech areas from being crawled, but that is entirely typical in robots.txt files. Scott Brown’s robots.txt file doesn’t exclude the Internet Archive.
But hey, maybe it’s all just an innocent mix-up. Maybe Coakley’s staff just… forgot the date of the election. Normally I’d mean that as a joke, but consider all her screwups in this campaign…
As the Coakley campaign slips into Phase 5 (Lost? Protest and sue, slip in new ballots…) it just goes to show, sometimes the good guys do win.
And Phase 6 (the Blame Fixing) will be even more entertaining.
As a disinterested observer in Australia, this leaves me confused. If somebody handed a Coakley supporter a ballot that had already been filled out in favour of Brown, doesn’t that mean that the clerk who handed over the ballot has (knowingly or not) deprived Brown of the vote–not Coakley?