Now that Diebold Has Thrown the Election to the Republicans...

...oh, that's right.

It was yet another overblown fear that the media latched onto but have not revisited since Democrats won last week's election.

At the MRC's Business & Media Institute, we don't forget so easily.

Check out the story by my colleague Julia Seymour over at businessandmedia.org.

Now that the votes have been cast and counted, Republicans lost, and the silence of the national media has been deafening.

The idea was that somehow the company Diebold had programmed the machines to let Republicans win. The theory, perpetuated by left-wingers posting on Daily Kos and The Huffington Post and Bev Harris’ book, “Black Box Voting,” was embraced by all three broadcast networks, as well as CNN and MSNBC.

Following Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) defeat in 2004, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann ignored statements by the candidate’s own Ohio attorney about the lack of evidence of “confirmed fraud.” Instead, Olbermann ranted for days about fraud causing the Kerry defeat during his show “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

Leading up to the 2006 election. Lou Dobbs and Kitty Pilgrim waged a five-month long, two-person war against electronic voting in regular “Democracy at Risk” segments during CNN’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

Dobbs fostered mistrust of electronic voting throughout his broadcasts. “When it comes to the federal government, don’t expect much assurance that your electronic vote will be counted accurately. New standards for electronic voting machines may not be ready in fact, for years,” he warned on Oct. 29, 2006.

And on election day 2006, NBC’s Brian Williams said there were complaints of “plain old trickery at the polls.” As Williams tossed the story to reporter Chip Reid, the response came, “Well, most of it, Brian, is electronic voting.”