Sin of Omission

Via  Stephen Spruiell's Media Blog at NRO, Captain's Quarters  notes a detail omitted by the Washington Post in its account of a Democrat-issued report on  barriers to Ohio voters in the last presidential election. Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters:

The Washington Times finds its own nuggets of information that the Paper of Record and the Post deem unimportant to its readership. An earlier independent audit of Ohio's vote conducted by election attorneys for the state legislature did find some evidence of fraud. Not surprisingly, given the source, the DNC's audit appears to have missed this: [and here, Morrissey quotes the Washington Times:]

In a stinging reply to the report, Mr. Mehlman agreed that there were numerous election abuses that took place in Ohio last year, but said they were perpetrated by Democrats or their political allies. In one instance, he said, "Democrat allies attempted to disenfranchise Ohio voters by submitting registration cards for Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and Michael Jordan."

In March, a group of Ohio election law attorneys conducted a review of the state's election for the House Committee on Administration. It found, among other things, that "thousands of false and fraudulent voter-registration cards had been discovered and became the subject of numerous investigations by boards of elections, actions by local law enforcement and many media reports."

"Overwhelmingly," this report said, "these problems were reportedly traced primarily" to four Democratic political allies who supported Mr. Kerry: ACORN, America Coming Together, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP National Voter Fund.

[end of Morrissey post]

The Washington Post does quote RNC chief  Ken Mehlman  as condemning the Democrats' report, "charging that some Democratic-aligned groups had engaged in fraudulent or illegal voter registration activities in Ohio." But the Post account, written by Dan Balz on A10, leaves it as an unsupported charge.

Still, Balz unambiguously cites the Democrat's study's own author as denying any Republican vote-rigging conspiracy:

Walter R. Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University and member of the [Democrat-study] task force, said Ohio suffered from a "gross administrative failure" on Election Day. But he later said there was no "support whatsoever for the claim that there was a large-scale misallocation of vote from [Democratic nominee John F.] Kerry to [President] Bush in Ohio" and said it is highly unlikely Kerry would have won the state in any case.

That conclusion runs counter to charges that circulated widely after the election maintaining that Bush had defeated Kerry in Ohio because of manipulation of the voting. Those assertions, fueled in part by exit polls that had showed Kerry winning Ohio, became a major issue among many Democratic activists and resulted in a challenge to the certification of Bush's victory when Congress convened in January.