WaPo Print Edition Downplays McCain Military Ballot Lawsuit in Virginia

The McCain campaign filed suit yesterday against Virginia in federal court to "force the state to count late-arriving overseas military ballots," reported the Associated Press in a November 3 story. While the Washington Post's Web site carries the 5-paragraph AP article, the paper's print edition this morning punted on running a separate follow-up article.

Instead the Post devoted a few paragraphs on the lawsuit inside a larger Metro section frontpager by staffer Anita Kumar about how the NAACP unsuccessfully filed suit to make "last-minute changes to Virginia's voting procedures in response to allegations" by the civil rights group "that the state is not prepared to handle the predicted historic voter turnout."

McCain's lawsuit garnered just five paragraphs, four of them at the tail end of the 23-paragraph article. The treatment of the McCain suit is not all that surprising. As we've noted before at NewsBusters, the Post tends to yawn over concern about disenfranchisement of military personnel casting overseas absentee ballots:

A Fairfax County registrar's attempts to disenfranchise soldiers voting by absentee ballot is one step closer to being reversed thanks to a legal opinion issued yesterday by Virginia Attorney General Robert McDonnell (R). Although the Old Dominion is a hard-fought battleground state in the 2008 presidential election and John Kerry-backing Fairfax County should be a true-blue source of Obama votes, the story was given just five brief paragraphs on the page four "Virginia Briefing" feature of the October 28 paper's Metro section.

The fact that the registrar, Rokey W. Suleman II, is a partisan Democrat who has worked hard to register inmates at the county jail was unreported in both Christian Davenport's Oct. 28 brief and his full October 27 online article. In fact, Suleman's name itself was missing from the print edition squib.