Dave Davies: TV and voting in Phila.: Sense vs. sensationalism

I don't know how we survived it.

I mean the chaos and terror that gripped the city on Election Day: radical thugs bullying voters; machines breaking down; election workers weeping in despair; disenfranchised citizens turning into mobs; dogs and cats living together . . .

At least those are impressions you'd get if you'd tuned into cable television or hit the right Web sites Tuesday.

Election problems are now hyped to the point of hysteria by conservatives and their media allies, and, I'm sad to say, by some liberal-leaning watchdog groups that seem to have an interest in painting a picture of voting disarray.

By far the most insanely exaggerated story of the day was the "Black Panthers at the Polls."

It seems that some time Tuesday morning, a couple of knuckleheads in boots, black berets and shoulder patches that said "New Black Panther Party" began standing in front of a polling place at 12th and Fairmount, one of them holding a nightstick. When approached by a Penn student filming on a camera phone, one said they were "security."

Before long, the polling place was visited by Republican poll watchers, the police, assistant district attorneys, volunteers from the watchdog group Committee of Seventy and many, many reporters.

There were no arrests. Committee of Seventy president Zack Stalberg said that his organization hadn't gotten a single complaint from a voter, and in an online video a man can be seen nonchalantly entering the building behind the Panthers.

But the story was quickly featured by Fox News and radio host Rush Limbaugh, and breathlessly repeated in a news release by the Republican National Committee. Limbaugh said Democrats were trying to "steal the election."

By the end of the day, "Black Panther" was the second-most- frequently-used search term on Google, and Stalberg was fielding a call from a London reporter asking about Black Panthers' intimidating white Republican voters at a polling place.

"Basically, it was all horsebleep," Stalberg said yesterday. "I assured him there weren't a lot of Republican voters there, and it wasn't much of a problem."

If you missed the Black Panther story, you might have seen headlines on MSNBC about widespread voting problems in Philadelphia.

They appeared after the national group Election Watch called Pennsylvania a "major voting-problem hot spot . . . Hundreds of calls from voters are reporting major obstacles to casting their ballot . . . which could disenfranchise tens of thousands of Pennsylvania voters."

Their statement listed several troubled polling places in Philadelphia. I visited two and found what I expected: They'd had early problems with voting machines, which were quickly responded to by city technicians and had long-since been repaired.

Further reporting Tuesday convinced me that the machine problems were isolated and fairly promptly resolved. Which is normal.

Remember, there are 1,681 voting divisions in Philadelphia. For every one, election officials have to recruit and train local election workers, get machines and voting materials to them and provide technical support.

With that many polling places, there are always a few problems. Stalberg said that his fellow watchdogs with national hotlines just got carried away this year.

"I appreciate the effort to keep elections clean," he said, "but you have to keep your senses about you, and sometimes small things are just small things."

Indeed. If we staffed a national hotline for complaints about supermarket lines, I'm sure we'd discover a national epidemic of problems.

About 700,000 of us voted in Philadelphia Tuesday. Some of us had to wait in lines, but this was an election in which a historic registration surge and large turnout strained the system.

The problem with hyping every minor election problem is that it creates noise that distracts us from issues that need real attention.

In this election, it appears that some late-registering voters didn't appear on the rolls, and some who applied early for absentee ballots didn't get them.

Focusing on real problems is the way to get results. But it may not get you on TV. *