Controversial Vote Totals Rear Their Heads Again

The exit poll irregularities get another spotlight trained on them in the form of sportscaster Jim Lampley. Yesterday over at Arianna’s House of Blogs, Lampley called the 2004 presidential election “the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.” He even used In These Times and Common Dreams to bolster his argument. Congressman John Conyers, who conducted hearings into the matter last year, gave Lampley a shout-out elsewhere on the blog, and Byron York of The National Review offered the “don’t you go worrying your pretty little head” conservative rebuttal. Lampley and York go a couple of rounds here and here, and as of this writing, York has had the last word. Lampley’s original post was a call to action and investigation, not a detailed declaration of what went wrong where, so whether he’ll spend his energy with a public tussle against York remains to be seen. Of course, we should also be wise to the possibility that the whole thing is a publicity stunt to get people talking about the Huffington effort in the first place, which would mean Lampley will certainly be back for more. There's nothing like a fight to make people stop and look.