O’Reilly voter registration

Voter irregularity problems are common. However, they usually don’t become an issue unless a race is very tight.

Most notably, in 2000, many media outlets claimed thousands of voters had intended to vote for Gore but the ballot confused them. No, Franken did not accuse them of lying. After all, the ballot design was confusing.

While the good people of Florida get a pass however, Bill O’Reilly is accused of lying.

O’Reilly had claimed to be an independent. It turned out he had registered as a Republican in 1994.

The form O’Reilly filled out did not specify “party registration,” it said “party enrollment.” The reason this matters is that the instruction simply read:

You must enroll in a party to vote in a primary.

[As reprinted in Lies, p. 79 Paperback]

It sounds like the form is asking the person to select which party “to vote in” for the primary elections. There was no box for “independent”. So, O’Reilly may have thought he was enrolling to vote in the Republican primary rather than thinking he was registering as a member of the party.

There are other possibilities, too. O’Reilly believes he left it blank and somehow someone else assigned the status. (Lies, p. 79 Paperback)

In fact, it could have been left blank for quite some time…