Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Maybe after the so-called Rathergate debacle, people are just gun-shy about buying into "proof" of any kind of wrong-doing. Still, I was surprised at the absence (as of 7 a.m. this morning anyhow) of blogiversal commentary on this post by Steve Soto, at his Left Coaster site. If this story is anywhere near true, well, the floor is about to fall out from under the November 2 results.

Aside from the absence of attention by Atrios, Kos, Oliver, Josh Marshall, et al., of course, there's also no mention of this in any of the major So-Called Liberal Media outlets. (When I first read the story last night, I immediately switched on CNN. Larry King was interviewing Leonardo DeCaprio there. On MSNBC, the topic of the moment was whether Scott Peterson would be getting -- or for that matter deserved -- the death penalty. Sigh...) (And yes, I did flip over to Fox News briefly. Hannity & Colmes were considering whether Al Gore should be President, now or in the future.)

So again, if true, this will be an amazing coup for blogdom.

A couple worrisome elements to it, however. One comes towards the end of the Online Journal (OLJ) article summarizing the investigation so far:

People may wonder why a group of intelligence insiders would come forward to a non-major media outlet with such tantalizing information at this time.

Umm... yeah, I was wondering exactly that. And I wasn't awfully reassured by the sentence which followed:

The corporate-beholden media cannot be trusted to report such a news story.

If there's any substance to the story, though, I'm sorry: I just do not believe that the major media outlets are so thoroughly corporate-beholden that they'd ignore it. More problematically, why not take the story to, say, Mother Jones? Granted, MJ isn't "major" -- but it seems also be more likely to be taken seriously (or at least followed up) by the biggies in their own investigations.

A flag also went up in my head as a result of the comments on The Left Coaster piece. One comment said, well, let's see the source code for the program if this is on the level. Another comment said the source code is already available online, and provided a link to it. But if you follow that link, before seeing the program behind the vote-fraud scheme, you get to read what is apparently a first-person account by the same Clint Curtis covered by the OLJ piece. One problem: In this first-person account, his former employer (for whom he supposedly developed this program) is referred to as "Wong Enterprises." In the OLJ piece, though, it is identified as "Yang Enterprises."

Given that Curtis was the primary source behind the OLJ article, it's hard to imagine that the "I" on justaflyonthewall.com is the same person. Or rather, it's gotta be either Wong or Yang; one of those names is wrong. The answer is apparently that Yang Enterprises is right, Wong is (sorry) wrong.

(The other link provided in the Left Coaster comments, to ChuckHerrin.com's Hack the Vote site, seems much more legitimate to me -- I'm a database analyst in real life, and I know Microsoft Access and Visual Basic well enough to say that this is 100% plausible.)

I think it's great to rely on news blogs (e.g., OLJ) as canaries in the coalmine. They may, in fact, be right on the money with some bit of breaking news or the other. I just have to keep tempering my enthusiasm for reports of GOP/right-wing malfeasance with the certainty that if Report X, Y, or Z is correct, it will eventually reach the major media. At that point, even the most benighted winger will have no choice but to pay attention sneer.

Update: The story did indeed get some sub-rosa attention. Easiest way for me to direct you to it all is to send you to this diary entry (from yesterday afternoon!) by poster jfern, on dKos. (Tip of the hat to skippy for the link.) Note too that BlackBoxVoting.org is very skeptical of the whole thing -- and given BBV's general aggressiveness on all things e-voting-related, I think we can take that as a pretty damning red flag.