Did Harry Reid 'Steal' the Nevada Senate Election?

Updated: 5 hours 54 minutes ago

David Knowles
Writer
AOL News Surge Desk

(Nov. 3) -- Dirty tricks?

On Tuesday night, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was basking in the glow of his narrow victory over tea party upstart Sharron Angle. Throughout the course of the campaign, polls had shown the race to be an extremely tight contest, with the lead swinging back and forth between the two candidates all the way down to the wire.

But let's back up to the waning days of the battle, with the contest far from decided. That's when Cleta Mitchell, Angle's attorney, sent out a fundraising letter in which she proclaimed the following:

As Sharron Angle's campaign attorney, I am sorry to report that the Democrats and their cronies are up to their same old tricks of trying to manipulate the election in hopes of skewing the results in their favor.
Mitchell went on to say that allegations that Reid's supporters had offered free food and gift cards to residents in exchange for votes. While those allegations were investigated and discounted by the Nevada secretary of state, the notion that Reid's victory was the result of outright thievery was kept front and center today by none other than right-wing radio provocateur Alex Jones.

At Prison Planet, Jones' Google gaming website, Jones and editor Paul Joseph Watson hatched their latest conspiracy claim.

"A serious investigation into potential vote fraud needs to be launched immediately in Nevada," the authors wrote, "after incumbent Harry Reid beat Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle by a clear five points, despite pre-election polls showing Angle four points ahead, amidst suspicious evidence of vote flipping and other dirty tricks on behalf of the Reid campaign last week that were dubbed 'criminal' by Angle's campaign attorney."
Citing polling data and a report that electronic voting machines in one Nevada county had automatically preselected Reid's name during early voting, Prison Planet argued that the evidence of dirty tricks was all too plain.

On the other hand, the site used only polls that backed up its conclusion, and the very story that Prison Planet used to demonstrate the alleged voting machine tampering contained the following information that Jones and Watson fail to mention:

Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said those claims were "patently false" and said at no time did any of those voters report the incident to staff at their polling location.

"In fact, although over 160,000 people have voted early in Clark County, those allegations that have been made have gone directly to the media as opposed to the election board officers," he said.
Though her campaign first brought up the prospect of Reid attempting to steal the election, Angle herself made no mention of that notion in her concession speech.

Reid eventually won by just over 40,000 votes.
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Related:

Stealing the Election
by Pamela Geller

Fifteen Missouri counties have more people registered to vote than they have people who are aged eighteen or older. This is egregious, illegal and contemptuous of the rule of law. And it is just the tip of the iceberg.
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