Flashback: Patten vs. Franken

The right-wing bias and misleading reporting of Newsmax managing editor David A. Patten is legion, but nowhere more so than his reporting on the contentious 2008 Minnesota Senate race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Al Franken.

As the close race went through numerous recounts, Patten took sides by becoming an advocate for Coleman and making false and misleading claims about Franken.

A Dec. 22, 2008, article by Patten, headlined "ACORN, Soros, Linked to Franken Vote Grab," failed to fulfill the promise of its headline. Rather, Patten attacked Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie as allegedly having "extensive ties to both the ACORN organization now under federal investigation for vote fraud, and to MoveOn.org ultra-liberal kingmaker George Soros." And what were those "extensive ties"? "In 2006, ACORN endorsed Ritchie in his bid to become secretary of state, and Ritchie also received a campaign contribution that year from Soros." That's "extensive"?

Patten also alleged that Ritchie was a beneficiary of a Soros-funded project whose "express purpose is to seed state election bureaucracies nationwide with partisan activists ... who are strategically positioned to influence the outcome of close recounts like the one now underway in Minnesota." Patten added that the project "was founded after Democrats involved in George W. Bush’s narrow 2000 election victory blamed Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris for influencing the outcome."

As for evidence that Ritchie was spearheading a "Franken vote grab," Patten offered none. Instead, he quoted Matthew Vadum of the Capital Research Center -- who has a history of making dubious claims -- calling Ritchie "a hard-core liberal who was endorsed by ACORN and funded by ACORN" and who had "a permissive attitude toward the recount process." Patten also stated that "ruling after ruling by the Ritchie-led State Canvassing Board has gone against Coleman," but failed to note that Republican Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty approved the canvassing board's composition, and that a lawyer for Coleman's campaign reportedly said that the "state should feel good about who's on the panel."

If this all sounds a little familiar, it's because eight years earlier, Newsmax was on the other side of a similar election controversy. Then, Newsmax was all about defending then-Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris during the 2000 presidential election recount, declaring her "the one and only hero to emerge from the election crisis" and asking its readers to email their support to her.

But a search of Newsmax's online archives found no reference to the one relevant piece of information about Harris that was the basis for much of the controversy surrounding her: she was the Florida co-chair for George W. Bush's campaign and had campaigned for him, and her certifying Bush as the winner in the face of controversies surrounding the voting process made him the president.

That would seem to have obvious relevance in an article on the alleged political affiliations of state election officials, but Patten failed to mention the precedent. Patten also offered no evidence that Ritchie was behaving any different than Harris, whose behavior Newsmax endorsed and defended.

(While Patten was writing this, people on the Newsmax mailing list received a fund-raising letter from the Republican National Lawyers Association baselessly asserting that Franken and "his liberal allies are working feverishingly to steal the Minnesota Senate election.")

A Dec. 31, 2008, article by Patten uncritically repeated a claim by Republican Sen. John Cornyn that Franken "is falsely declaring victory based on an artificial lead created on the back of the double counting of ballots," adding that "Minnesotans will not accept a recount in which some votes are counted twice, and I expect the Senate would have a problem seating a candidate who has not duly won an election." Patten made no attempt to explain the "double counting" issue -- perhaps because if he did, he would have to reveal that it's not an issue at all.

As Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com explained, the "double counting" issue was based around the fact that voters who cast ballots on election day that could not be read by the vote scanner were required to cast a duplicate ballot. But for the recount, the original ballots, not the duplicates, were counted. Coleman is claiming discrepancies between the original vote count and the recount as evidence that "double counting" was taking place. But as Silver pointed out:

Coleman's proposed remedy is that original ballots should be thrown out in any instances where they can't be paired with duplicates. If that remedy is adopted, then each of two things will happen: (#1) The state will prevent some ballots from being double-counted, and (#2) The state will also throw out some perfectly legal ballots. The process of identifying potential double-counted ballots is simply too imprecise to have the one thing without the other.

Can these two harms be weighed against one another? Suppose that if you rule on Coleman's behalf, you'll prevent 20 votes from being counted twice, but also throw out 20 legal votes. Most of us would probably not consider that to be a productive trade-off. But what if you could prevent 30 votes from being double-counted, in exchange for throwing out 10 legal ballots? Does the trade-off then become acceptable? Should you double-count 50 ballots if it prevents one voter from having his vote thrown out? Or, does the right of a voter to have his vote counted inherently trump that of the risk of counting some other voter's ballot twice?

By not explaining the duplicate ballot issue, Patten falsely suggested the issue has legitimacy when, in fact, it was just a tactic by Coleman and fellow Republicans to forestall Franken being declared the winner.

A Jan. 5, 2009, article by Patten was headlined, "Franken's Coup: Anatomy of a Vote Grab," but instead of offering the promised anatomical analysis, Patten uncritically repeated claims by Coleman's campaign and other conservatives about the race's recount and allowing no one to respond. Patten again claimed that Ritchie "has been criticized for ties to the ACORN voter-registration organization the federal government is investigating for alleged vote fraud, as well as to left-wing billionaire George Soros." But that criticism was coming only from Patten and his right-wing fellow travelers. Patten also hid the true identity of one person he quoted, "Kevin Hassett of Bloomberg.com"; in fact, Hassett is a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, not a Bloomberg employee. Bloomberg merely published the commentary from which Patten quoted.

Patten also made his pro-Coleman, anti-Franken bias all too clear by complaining that the Minnesota canvassing board "deposed Coleman as the apparent winner" and that Coleman has been victimized by "a nightmarish electoral chronology."

Distorting another race

As the recount controversy dragged on, so did Patten's biased reporting. A March 31 article on how New York Republicans are seeking "a wide-ranging injunction to prevent Minnesota-style snafus seen in the Al Franken-Norm Coleman race from disrupting the hard-fought 20th congressional district race in upstate New York" carried the headline: "NY GOP Moves To Block Franken-Style Vote Grab." At no point in the article did Patten support the headline's contention that questions about the Minnesota election and recount, in which the lead transferred from Coleman to Franken, equates to Franken "grabbing" votes from Coleman.