Three Fox hosts have allowed Congressman Allen West (R-FL) to repeat his unsubstantiated allegations that election official wrongdoing led to his failing bid to retain his seat. The Fox hosts not only failed to push back on West's legally unfounded position, but neglected to report that these complaints are about Florida election system problems that have been ignored or exacerbated by the state GOP.

In support of his refusal to concede the race to represent Florida's 18^th Congressional District - despite the fact that the state has already certified Democrat Patrick Murphy's victory -  West has been complaining that “irregularities” in county officials' performance during the ballot tabulation process, the change in voting tallies as the tabulation proceeded, the outcome of a partial recount, and the accounting of more ballots than voters, requires another partial recount of all votes cast during the early voting period. On the November 12 edition of Fox's Hannity, West made all of these accusations to host Sean Hannity, who responded that he thought a vote shift away from West to Murphy during the counting process was “unbelievable.”

West repeated these claims to Fox host Greta Van Susteren on the November 13 edition of On The Record, and again on November 14 in a recorded interview with Fox host Martha MacCallum for America's Newsroom. Like Hannity, these Fox hosts did not press West on his insinuations of election malfeasance. The most obvious example was Van Susteren, who referenced West's second lawsuit filed in a Florida state court seeking an early vote recount in defiance of state law, but made no mention of his first failed lawsuit. That lawsuit, which also sought to "count paper ballots and to impound voting machines," had been denied on November 9 by a state judge. In addition to noting that West's motion had “woefully failed to establish a proper demand for injunction,” the judge scolded West for contesting the election results in court when “the Supreme Court of Florida 30 years ago has said the courts should not get involved in the election process under facts and circumstances which we have here today.”

More significantly, Hannity, Van Susteren, and MacCallum all failed to report that West's unsubstantiated complaints about the dysfunctional Florida election process is partly attributable to recent voter suppression efforts. As reported by the Orlando Sentinel, the incoming Republican House Speaker has already “conceded” that Florida's difficult election process and its “embarrass[ing]” irregularities may have been caused by early voting and registration changes pushed through by Republicans in the state legislature. In conjunction with budget cuts that targeted county election offices, recent GOP attempts to restrict opportunities for voting resulted in the predictable and widely reported chaos that West now complains about.

The swing in vote tallies, however, is an old problem and one that none of the Fox hosts addressed. Not only is West complaining about a losing margin more than three times that of Gore's for the entire state of Florida in the presidential election of 2000, West is also complaining about a swing in votes from himself to Murphy that is only about a quarter of the infamous Volusia County swing in votes away from Gore for Bush. Further, the optical-scan voting machines at the center of West's complaints are of the same make as those used in Volusia in 2000, as reported by election integrity expert and Salon contributor Brad Friedman, but that important context was absent from Fox's segments on the issue.

The make of the voting machines is also relevant to West's challenge of the partial recount of early votes in St. Lucie County. The election supervisor there has already explained the partial recount of some votes was necessary because of an electronic memory cartridge failure. Hannity, Van Susteren, and MacCullum not only failed to report this fact, they also failed to report such memory cartridge failure is an extremely common problem in Florida, as was extensively detailed by the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Finally, the discrepancy between voters and votes tallied that West references has already been explained by multiple outlets as a consequence of tabulation machines erroneously counting two-page individual ballots as multiple ballots. This too was unreported by Fox News as it continues to give Allen West a platform to advance his unproven reasons for refusing to concede, without challenging the problems with his claims and providing the necessary context of a Florida election system badly in need of reform.