The mania behind the New York 23rd Doug Hoffman stolen election conspiracy theory

In response to my blog post last night on Doug Hoffman alleging without evidence that the special election for New York’s 23rd Congressional district was stolen by ACORN, unions, and Doug Hoffman, some guy at RedState writes something absolutely hilarious:

At this point, the only new spin out there is that the Gouverneur Times (the folks who broke the story when that election official used the ‘v’ word) is poorly edited, new, and hence, not a real news source (I say, have a sense of humor about it: just because they can’t spell “Governor” doesn’t mean that they were wrong about what the election official said or what meaning that statement portends).

via mschmitt’s blog – RedState.

This is hysterically funny. This mschmitt character has spent countless hours setting out to prove how the NY-23 election *could* have been stolen. He states it is a *fact* that a virus was implanted in all of the voting machines by an ‘operative’ without actually having any evidence that such a thing happened.

But he can’t spend 30 seconds figuring out that the ‘Gouverneur Times’, the source of all the stolen election fan fiction, is named the ‘Gouverneur Times’ because it’s based in the town of Gouverneur, New York. Not because the paper’s publisher and managing editor, who have enough problems with the English language as I point out, can’t spell ‘Governor.’

I would say I rest my case, but the New York State Board of Elections did a more thorough job in the Watertown Daily Times this morning:

But John Conklin, a state Board of Elections spokesman, said in a statement Friday that “there was no virus in the voting machines on Election Day in the 23rd District or anywhere else. The (Gouverneur Times) article is full of inaccurate information and unfortunately quoted a single word from a commissioner who mischaracterized the issue in question.”

Mr. Conklin said the state board learned that a software problem caused some Dominion voting systems to freeze during pre-election testing, but said most of the machines were fixed before Election Day.

“However, the human review of the software problem did not adequately identify every machine that had the problem and, as a result, there were some scanners which did freeze on Election Day,” he said.

In those instances, poll workers stopped using the voting machines and offered emergency paper ballots instead.

“In the end, the new optical scan voting systems guarantee we have ballots as marked by voters ensuring that every vote is counted,” the spokesman said.

Update: Now mschmitt calls me ’sparky’ and says it was just a joke. Apparently I’m slow for thinking that a blogger with poor editorial judgment believes a shockingly hayseed-ish remark he made about a website with even poorer editorial standards. Of course, when he really believes that ‘an operative’ no one has seen and no one can actually point to has infiltrated the NY-23 voting machines and implanted a virus on every single one of them, what could possibly cause me to question his judgment? Keep up the fan fiction mschmitt, whoever you are.