Martin Screams Voter Fraud! Out of One Side of Mouth. Just Asking Questions Out of The Other

Ed Martin held a press conference at 1 PM yesterday to explain why he refused to accept his 5,000 vote loss to Congressman Carnahan in Missouri's Third District. Martin tried to present himself as "just asking questions," and many reporters followed his lead:

Stopping short of alleging voter fraud, Martin is raising questions about the possible appearance of wrongdoing and calling for the Secretary of State to appoint a special investigator to look into the race.

I'll have more to say later about how this conference actually reveals the emptiness of Martin's claims, but for now you can watch part of it here:


Interestingly, at noon the same day, the St. Louis tea party held a rally outside the St. Louis City Board of Elections where they screamed "Voter Fraud," put a megaphone in the ear of someone videotaping them, and outright claimed that the election was stolen. Again, I have more to say about their behavior, but for now you can watch the video here:



So here's what I want to focus on: the same people at the noon tea party rally screaming Voter Fraud! are the "Ed Martin supporters" who stacked the press conference where Ed Martin pretended to be reasonable. This is especially interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, at about the 7:55 mark of the tea party rally video, you can hear them call for a huddle, and you can audibly hear Ben Evans (the unhinged guy with a bullhorn) of the tea party say, "I don't want to speak out loud for these guys over here, because they're working for Russ." Afterward, it's a bit hard to hear, but he then says "we're going to go down to Ed Martin's." At 8:30, you can hear a woman saying, "No, not the tea party headquarters. Ed Martin headquarters." And at the end of the tape (9:44 mark), you can hear a woman giving giving directions to Ed Martin's HQ. So the tea party is clearly giving instructions for their membership to go to Ed Martin's headquarters, and does not want people "working for Russ" to know about it. Also worth noting, they had to end their noon rally very early in order to get to Ed Martin's 1 PM press conference.

But get to the press conference they did. I compared the two videos, and it turns out that nearly every person at the Ed Martin press conference were people who were sent over by the St. Louis tea party. Below the fold, I'll provide the exact evidence.

So here is the evidence that the vast majority of the people at the press conference were the very same people at the tea party's Rally To Restore Insanity outside the board of elections:



































Isn't it just amazingly interesting that basically all of the people at Ed Martin's 1 PM press conference "just asking questions" were busy screaming "Voter Fraud!" just 30 minutes prior? It sure seems like Martin wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, his angry mob runs around screaming whatever absurdities they feel like. And on the other, Martin pretends that he is not behind the madness.