Desperation! Ed Martin Switches to New Conspiracy Theory

Since Ed Martin's previous conspiracy theory was one of the most pathetic political stunts of the 2010 elections, he has now moved on to start spreading a different ridiculous theory about why he lost by 5,000 votes to Russ Carnahan. In right-wing rag The Daily Caller today:

Martin is alleging that, because of a seven-hour failure of the voter verification system that checks whether people who show up at the polls are in fact eligible to vote, there is a possibility that ineligible voters were able to cast ballots in favor of his opponent....

“We’re trying to find enough stuff we can use to make it plausible,” Martin told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “I don’t know that any of this is going to rise to enough. We’re getting a lot of feedback from people.”

Martin is basing his latest conspiracy theory on this nonsense from the tea party's Jen Ennenbach:

Jen Ennenbach of the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition said her group is backing Martin up in his push for an investigation into the election process.

“We are also calling for an investigation into the Secretary of State’s office because we had an election judge come into the St. Louis Tea Party headquarters just to vent his frustration and let us know what was going on,” Ennenbach told TheDC.

Ennenbach said the election judge, who she wouldn’t name, came to her after having witnessed busloads of mentally handicapped service workers, who are ineligible to vote per their medical condition, cast ballots during the timeframe when the verification system was down.

“The judges could not strike the vote because the verification system was down,” she said.

Ennenbach, it should be noted, in addition to being a birther, also is convinced that her phone lines are tapped:
But more to the point, this particular conspiracy theory was already undermined by a blog post from another St. Louis tea partier. Here's what Jim Durbin had to say on 24thstate:

I know for a fact that illegal votes were cast in this election. An investigative team from local tea parties uncovered the voting of ineligible voters in Jefferson County prior to the election, but we were not able to find malice. The system had registered voters with mental handicaps who were voted by the Jefferson County election authority. A review of the registered voter rolls identified assisted living centers with large numbers of registered voters who lacked the franchise to vote because they were under guardianship. It's possible that hundreds of ineligible votes were cast, but the process to uncover those votes couldn't fully be done by private citizens because of privacy laws.

That said, we did identify 31 cases of registered voters who were possibly ineligible. And we know 8 that voted, at least one of which was not eligible to vote and should be taken from the rolls. That was based on just two locations. Because we had no villain, we held off reporting the information until after the election, as our plan was to work with cooperative election authorities rather than making a scandal out of what was really a systemic problem.

So that's their evidence. Even if you assume Durbin is correct, which is generally not a good idea, all they have is one person voting whom they believe is ineligible to vote. And one person voting not as part of any malicious scheme, but simply because an assisted living home took people to vote.

So, to summarize, Ed Martin's latest conspiracy theory is fourth-hand testimony where a birther who thinks her phone line is tapped cites a demonstrably dishonest blogger claiming that he heard that one person voted who was ineligible to vote. And that's why Ed Martin refuses to admit his 5,000 vote loss.