Incorrectly Reports Voting Machines Undelivered 'ALL OVER LOS ANGELES'

Brad Friedman Byon 2/5/2008, 1:29pm PT

As happened on the day of the New Hampshire primary on January 8th, disinformation on the net about problems at the polling place were rampant. But wrong. The disinfo, as The BRAD BLOG was able to debunk that day, seems to have originally emanated from the DRUDGE REPORT.

It looks like Mr. Drudge is busy getting the story wrong again today, reporting that "The board of elections failed to deliver voting equipment to polling places ALL OVER LOS ANGELES"...

After running the above story for a number of hours at his site --- and sending corporate mainstream media folks and Internet blogsites alike into a tizzy, as well as helping to ring our phones off the hook --- DRUDGE has finally updated the item with the real story, and it's far less scary...

"Board of elections failed to deliver voting equipment to polling place [singular!] in Los Angeles," he now reports, and adds a vague "reports of issues at other locations..." linked to this MSNBC story about a problem at one polling place in West Los Angeles where voting machines were not delivered.

The same story, of the one precinct where equipment was not available, was reported an hour or two ago by AP.

MSNBC's report says that:

Dozens of people were sent to other polling places nearby, but [Bernie Cade, the electoral inspector at the Westside Jewish Community Center] said a voting troubleshooter was on hand and the polling place was accepting hand-marked ballots.

A polling place without voting equipment is obviously a problem. But it's a far cry from Drudge's red-lettered "ALL OVER LOS ANGELES" scream. We've spoken to a number of election officials and Election Integrity experts monitoring voting here in L.A. and we've been able to find no other reports of the same issue happening elsewhere.

Drudge has since moved the above headline down on his page, where it is now hidden among his other stories today.

There were, and are, scattered reports about problems at polling places here in Los Angeles. We're trying to track them down and learn how significant and/or wide-spread they are. We even encountered an interesting issue ourselves when we went to vote today. We'll report on those issues, and others elsewhere around the country, shortly...

UPDATE 5:15pm PT: The edited headline has now been removed entirely from the DRUDGE REPORT. Farhad Manjoo of Salon also chased down this phony report from Drudge today.

Surprisingly, LA Times offers some actual legitimate reporting on election integrity problems here today (aside from their headline reference to "glitches" instead of the more accurate "failures".)



