Planting the Seeds for Recounts and Riots

John Ralston highlights a letter from the RNC's chief counsel to the elections commissioners of six states, four of which are swing states, saying:

I write regarding the media and citizen reports of voting machine errors taking place in your states. I understand that, in a significant number of cases, voting machines in your states have populated a vote for Barack Obama when a voter cast his or her ballot for Mitt Romney. I further understand that the causes of this problem are varied, and include miscalibration and hyper-sensitivity of the machines.

There is nothing in the letter to support this claim. He then demands, this fellow, that they take various steps to correct this problem, or "problem."

This is just the old throwing of the chair Bobby Knight style. Forget Romney winning the popular vote and Obama winning the electoral vote. That's only happened four times. And if it does happen, Obama is the winner according to the Constitution. It wasn't the popular/electoral vote split that was the problem in 2000, it was the Florida voting.

So consider this. Obama wins with 290 electoral votes, including Ohio (18) and Colorado (9). Let's say the margin is 1 percent or a little less in both of those states. He needs the electoral votes of both, of course, to pass 270.

You can bet the mortgage that Republicans will keep this thing going for weeks under such a situation. And they'll find the retired white military man whose ballot got lost or something and make a national symbol of him on Fox. That's what unnerves me. That this crap could go on for weeks. And you know the right would just be like feral wolves.

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Michael TomaskySpecial Correspondent

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