I’m used to sloppy writing on TPM, and lots of typos, but whoever is responsible for the headlines in the right column of TPM‘s home page has really outdone himself today.

The headline Even More Uncounted Ballots In Minnesota? links to a TPM Election Central post about the rejected absentee ballots that have been known and written about for weeks now. (That post has a slightly different, but still indefensible, title: Even More Ballots In Minnesota?)

It is well known that some absentee ballots are believed to have been rejected for no valid reason, just due to administrative error. That’s why the Secretary of State’s office recently directed each county to sort through rejected absentee ballots:

A wrinkle to the U.S. Senate recount was added today when the Secretary of State’s office asked county election officials to sort through an estimated 12,000 rejected absentee ballots.
[...]
Out of an estimated 12,000 absentee ballots that were initially rejected, (Marc Elias, Franken‘s lead attorney) estimated that as many as 1,000 could have been improperly tossed out.

In an e-mail, sent Monday afternoon to officials in all 87 counties, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann asked them to re-examine the ballots and sort them into five piles: Four would contain ballots that were rejected for reasons directly related to state law, while a fifth pile would contain ballots that do “not meet one of these four reasons, or if the reason used to reject the absentee ballot is not based on factual information.”

It is the 171 ballots that ended up in the fifth pile that TPM is pleased to describe as Even More Uncounted Ballots In Minnesota? All the more ironic, because the real story is not that there are more uncounted ballots than we knew about, it is that the number of ballots in the fifth pile is much smaller than expected. (Correction: The 171 ballots in question were only for Minneapolis. A report on December 11 suggests that the total number of fifth pile ballots could reach as high as 2,000.) )

Then there’s Police: Mumbai Attackers Snuck Into India From Nepal. Clicking on the headline takes you to an AP story, which tells us that an “Indian militant based in Nepal who helped Pakistani gunmen cross India’s porous borders to stage attacks is being brought to Mumbai for questioning”. Although it is unclear to police whether he “had any links to the recent Mumbai siege, … he had participated in Lashkar operations against Indian targets before.”

Just to be clear, a police spokesman said that they have no idea if the Mumbai attackers had snuck into India from Nepal. So TPM went with the headline Police: Mumbai Attackers Snuck Into India From Nepal.

AP‘s original headline was Police: Militant group snuck across Indian borders. As in, Lashkar-e-Taiba militants had snuck into India from Nepal in the past. It looks very much like TPM‘s headline writer doesn’t read the stories at all. He reads only the headlines, and he is required to change them around a little from the original. Hard to do that right if you have no idea what the story actually says.