As you know, TPM has been on the ‘vote fraud’ bamboozlement front for many years now. That was the root issue behind the US Attorney firings scandal — prosecutors who weren’t willing to whip up phony ‘vote fraud’ indictments to game elections. So as TPM grows and we send more reporters into the field on reporting assignments, we decided we should send our reporter Ryan Reilly to this weekend’s annual summit of True the Vote, the big emerging ‘vote fraud’ activist group in the country.
Alas they didn’t make it easy.
When we saw that they were asking media to register, we thought that sounded great. But when we tried, the True the Vote folks told us they weren’t credentialing journalists. Then they sat on our request to attend for long enough that when they finally got back to us the whole event was oversubscribed and they weren’t letting any more people register. Anyway, we figured we’d send Ryan down anyway, figuring they’d probably let him attend. But the word seemed to be out to all the major attendees not to let Ryan in the hall under any circumstances.
So our reporter ended up cooling his heels in the lounge at the hotel where the event was being held watching proceedings on the live feed on the web. But all was not lost. He still got some good stuff. We’ll bring you more shortly.
