A Jan. 5 Newsmax article by David Patten is headlined, “Franken’s Coup: Anatomy of a Vote Grab,” but Patten doesn’t really provide that regarding the Minnesota Senate race. Instead, he uncritically repeats claims by the campaign of Al Franken’s opponent, Norm Coleman, and other conservatives making various allegations about the race’s recount and allows no one to respond.
This is the second time that Patten has baselessly accused Franken of a “vote grab.”
As he has previously, Patten claimed that Minnesota Secretary of State Mark 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 is coming only from Patten and his right-wing fellow travelers — as we’ve noted, those “ties,” according to Patten’s own reporting, are limited to getting endorsed by ACORN and taking a campaign donation from Soros. (Patten claimed this was evidence of “extensive ties.”)
Patten quotes mostly Coleman campaign officials and right-wingers in his article, but does not permit anyone to respond to the claims they make. He also hides the true identity of one person he quotes, “Kevin Hassett of Bloomberg.com.” In fact, Hassett is a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute; Bloomberg merely published his commentary about the Minnesota Senate race.
Patten lets his anti-Franken bias show in other ways as well. He complained that the Minnesota canvassing board “deposed Coleman as the apparent winner” and that Coleman has been victimized by “a nightmarish electoral chronology.”