Megyn Kelly retracted her original – and false – report about Colorado election ballots being printed at home. But she did so in the course of doubling down on promoting fears of voter fraud.
Yesterday, I mistakenly posted that Kelly had not retracted her reporting. I have pulled that post and rewritten it. Here is the revised version:
As I previously posted, Kelly incorrectly announced last week that a new (Democratic) Colorado law “literally allows residents to print ballots from their home computers, then encourages them to turn ballots over to ‘collectors’ in what appears to be an effort to do away with traditional polling places.” She said it with a hammy show of scorn and disdain. Kelly was publicly debunked by both Colorado television station KUSA and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow who pointed out that only military and overseas voters can print a ballot from home. They also noted that that law is nothing new.
On Monday, October 27, Kelly revisited the issue. She corrected her mistake but did so in a way as to suggest that it was merely a technical error in an important warning about voter fraud. In fact, her correction was so deeply hidden in the introduction to her guest, Colorado’s Republican candidate for Secretary of State, that I missed it while watching the show. Then, when the preface was excluded from the FoxNews.com video of the interview, I misstated that Kelly had not made the correction. I am including an embed of that portion of the segment below.
In it, she said:
Well, Colorado is a key part of the Democrats’ firewall in trying to keep the senate blue, along with Iowa and North Carolina. If any one of those states turns red, Harry Reid believes Democrats will likely lose the senate. And right now, things are not looking very good for Democrats in Colorado. With Democratic incumbent Senator Mark Udall polling three points behind his GOP challenger, Representative Cory Gardner.
That is in part why Colorado’s voting laws have come under new scrutiny, including new provisions that allow same-day voter registration and require no picture I.D.
Last week, we said the new law also allows all voters to print out their ballots at home. That, actually, is not the case. Members of the military and some others, like Coloradans overseas, can indeed print out their ballots at home, but this was the case even before the new law passed.
The new law is also controversial, however, because it also requires all registered Coloradans to automatically receive their ballots by mail and allows them to return those ballots by mail. But why is that a problem?
Wayne Williams is the country clerk of El Paso County, Colorado. He has been warning about this law for a while now and he’s also running for office.
Kelly never explained how she made her mistake.
As I originally said, Kelly’s interview with Republican Wayne Williams was reasonably fair and balanced. Quite a contrast to her lapdog interview with Michelle Malkin and David Bossie in which the “voter fraud Frankenstein” in Colorado was first raised and accepted without question. Still, it was clear that Fox intended to double down on scare mongering about Colorado voter fraud at the same time that Kelly worked to distance herself from it.
Kelly asked Williams, “Why is it a problem that all these Colorado registered voters would get their ballots sent to them by mail at home and they can return them by mail?”
Williams' answer was pretty ridiculous. It amounted to the possibility that a boogeyman would be in the house forcing you to vote his way. Williams said, “There are some Coloradans who prefer not to get a ballot mailed to them because there might be someone in the household, a union boss, an employer, who intimidates them once they get that ballot. They would prefer to just have the ability to go into a polling place. They can go into a polling place now but if they’ve already cast that mail ballot, if someone has influenced them and they cast it already, they don’t have the ability to go into a pristine polling place in which no one can influence them.”
Kelly appropriately challenged that assertion, saying it sounded like “a small sliver of the population” while a counter argument is that the system makes voting easier for large numbers. “Is that concern valid enough to wipe out that convenience?” Kelly questioned. She also said, “And, by the way, who lives with their boss?”
Williams claimed, “The boss knows when the ballot’s gonna show up… the union boss knows when the ballot’s gonna show up and they can try to come over and obtain that ballot from you and turn it in for you.”
Gee, how often does that happen? Kelly didn’t ask. Instead, she moved on to probe Williams’ concerns about voter fraud regarding same-day voter registration.
We’ve been reporting for many years about Fox’s zombie voter-fraud frights. It’s not only a convenient way of helping their GOP BFFs institute their voting restrictions, it also tees up the de-legitimization of a close Democratic win. It just so happens that’s a real possibility in Colorado. But I can guarantee you that Fox won’t have a care in the world about voter fraud if the Republicans win in that state.
Watch the segments below.