During the January 7 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor Dick Morris baselessly claimed that Al Franken is “cheating” in the Minnesota Senate race, that “Minnesota's doing it for him,” and that "[t]his is outright larceny. It's a total theft." Morris made the comments while discussing the Minnesota Canvassing Board's certification of the recount, which shows that Franken finished with 225 votes more than incumbent Republican Norm Coleman. As evidence, Morris again made the debunked claim that in Minnesota, "[t]here's a county where there are 177 more votes than there are voters."
As Media Matters for America noted, Morris made the same claim -- which echoes an assertion in a January 5 Wall Street Journal editorial -- during the January 5 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. After co-host Sean Hannity said of the recount, “We've got one county -- ended up with 177 more ballots,” Morris added: “Yeah, Ramsey County -- 177 more ballots than people voted.” In fact, according to a December 14 article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which cited election officials explaining human and technological errors in the voting process, a “machine jammed in Maplewood, resulting in 177 ballots going uncounted until the final day of the recount in Ramsey County.”
Media Matters further documented radio host Rush Limbaugh and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough also echoing the Journal editorial's unsubstantiated claims during their January 5 broadcasts.
From the January 7 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:
O'REILLY: Al Franken -- you think he's cheating?
MORRIS: Franken.
O'REILLY: Think he's cheating?
MORRIS: Yeah, I think there's funny business -- funny business going on in Franken's thing. Sure, he's cheating, and sure that Minnesota's doing it for him. I mean, there's no question that there's cheating going on. There's a county where there are 177 more votes than there are voters. There are 25 precincts where more votes are counted than people voted.
The question is, which votes were counted, and which ones were right, and which ones were wrong? But obviously there are hundreds of illegal ballots in there. And the Democratic Party is riding roughshod over the state of Minnesota. And the National Republican Lawyers Guild -- you can go to dickmorris.com, and there's a link, give them money, because they don't have George Soros behind them -- they are litigating it, and this has to stop. This is outright larceny. This is just a total theft.
O'REILLY: Are you -- are you willing to go -- are you willing to go so far --
MORRIS: How can you have 177 more votes than you have voters?
O'REILLY: Are you willing to go so far as to say that you believe Coleman won the election?
MORRIS: I think obviously he won the election. He got 225 more votes, and the re-canvass and the recount has done nothing but obscure that reality by double counting phony votes. You know, there was one vote that was for Franken, and they crossed out Franken and wrote Frankenstein, and they counted it as a Franken vote?
O'REILLY: All right. I don't know what's going to happen out there. I don't like the whole situation. I don't trust the secretary of state.
