Florida's doyen of disenfranchisement
Katherine Harris appears in South Dakota today to lend aid and comfort to trailing GOP House candidate Larry Diedrich. In context of the Bush machine's determination to win "by any means necessary", this lookback at
Josh Marshall's incisive coverage of the Thune campaign's dirty tricks in the 2002 Senate race.
South Dakota GOP floated stories of massive vote fraud, and got big media play ... but their hottest "smoking gun" came down to a case of mistaken identity -- a known case of mistaken identity -- and a local TV reporter literally embedded with the Thune campaign.
TPM, 2002-10-06:
The story first got picked up by local TV news reporter Jill Westbrook as a case of "massive voter registration fraud." ... predictably, picked up by Fox News. ... virtually all of those registrations checked out when later examined. The exact number of ones with problems is unclear from the articles but it seems to be a handful out of many at best. Perhaps as few as two. ...
TPM, 2002-10-13:
Is the Thune campaign in South Dakota whipping up these allegations of absentee ballot vote fraud to suppress voter turnout on the state's Indian reservations and in other counties? Are they spoon-feeding this stuff to pliant members of the press?
TPM, 2002-10-13:
... the most aggressive reporting of this story -- picked up in Drudge and other places -- has come from Sioux Falls's KSFY TV, the local ABC affiliate. ...
John Thune's campaign spokesperson Christine Iverson is a former reporter for KSFY.
John Thune's Washington, DC spokesperson Jennifer Hayes is also a former reporter for KSFY.
KSFY News Anchor Mitch Krebs was scheduled to moderate this Monday's League of Women Voters debate ... until the South Dakota League of Women Voters found out that Krebs was the emcee at a September 17th fundraiser [for Thune]...
Enter [KSFY reporter] Shelley Keohane ... Keohane says she got in touch with the other Eunice Taylor. What she fails to mention is that that afternoon, before this segment was produced, she had interviewed the other Eunice Taylor and that Eunice Taylor told her that she had in fact filled out and signed the application. ...
Where did Shelley Keohane get the documents which helped her put together the Eunice Taylor stunt?
... a Sioux Falls lawyer named Jon K. Lauck, who happens to be the Chairman of Lawyers for Thune Committee. ... It turns out that Jon Lauck and Shelley Keohane live at the same address in Sioux Falls.
For more madcap hijinks from this highly jinky cast of characters, see Talking Points Memo and search on "South Dakota".