National Media Mocks Ed Martin's Bogus Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theories

Ed Martin's "voter fraud" conspiracy theories were being mocked by national media outlets even as he finally conceded to Congressman Russ Carnahan.

Dave Weigal of Slate, in a post called "When in Doubt, Cry "Voter Fraud":

Republican congressional candidate Ed Martin has lost the race for Missouri's 3rd district by 4,418 votes, a close but not razor-thin margin out of the 193,604 votes cast for him and incumbent Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-Mo.). This is not the sort of result candidates usually contest. For example, Colorado Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Ken Buck conceded to Sen. Michael Bennet in fairly short order after trailing by by 15,646 out of 1,582,498 votes cast for the two of them.

But Martin is crying "fraud"...

What's the evidence for this? There isn't any. There is nothing that suggests that the late counts from St. Louis weren't in line with every other late count from St. Louis. There are no local Republicans backing him up; they won a lot of races in the state while he was losing, and the vote patterns don't point to anything unusual in a district that's voted Democratic since the 1940s. But when you spend six years informing your base that urban Democrats are untiring agents of voter fraud, that's a hard lesson to unteach.

Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones, in a post titled"GOP Crying Wolf on Voter Fraud?":

If such dirty tricks had actually happened in Nevada or elsewhere, you'd expect that the tea party right would be up in arms about the results. But instead, the deafening silence suggests that there wasn't much there in the first place. It's not surprising, then, that Missouri Republicans want Martin to shut up and concede that he lost already. In the build up to the election, Republicans were deftly able to amplify voter fraud allegations to whip their base into a frenzy. But after the fact, when it's clear that few such shenanigans actually took place, candidates like Martin make it appear that the right was just crying wolf in the first place.

Ed Martin's shameless behavior during and after the election deserves this mockery, and so much more.

h/t FiredUp Missouri via Twitter.