In a further confirmation of the corruption and machinations behind the Palestinian elections last weekend, dozens of election workers walked off their jobs protesting Mahmoud Abbas' victory:

Forty-six members of the Palestinian election commission, including top managers, resigned Saturday, saying they were pressured by Mahmoud Abbas' campaign and intelligence officials to abruptly change voting procedures during the Jan. 9 presidential poll.

Two senior members of the commission, Ammar Dwaik and Baha al-Bakri, resigned early Saturday, and officials later said 44 more members resigned. Six top election officials were among those who resigned.

The resignations raised questions about Sunday's vote giving Abbas an overwhelming victory with 62.3 percent, though the officials who quit said the alleged irregularities did not fundamentally affect the final vote tally.

The resignations didn't raise the questions, or at least the questions shouldn't have waited for them to be raised. Last week, newspapers and broadcasters around the world praised the elections as a major step forward for democracy in the Middle East even as the terrorist group Fatah changed rules in the middle of the day to accommodate a "higher" turnout. Most of them described Abbas' victory as a "landslide" and wrote paeans to the mandate supposedly given to him from the Palestinians. Meanwhile, Fatah allowed people to vote in any precinct without any verification of their eligibility or even if they had already voted. Adding two hours to the vote and changing the rules almost doubled the turnout, a clear indication of fraud to anyone except, apparently, the geniuses in the newsrooms.

Now the workers that Fatah pressured to change those rules midstream have made it impossible to ignore the fraud and coercion at the heart of Abbas' "mandate". These people, who wanted a clean election, were betrayed by a world press that wanted Abbas elected more than a real election. The international press betrayed those who wanted a real poll instead of a coup d'etat.

In fact, the fraud also points out that Palestinians treated this "election" as a non-event, with only 30% bothering to vote at all until Fatah rigged it so that the same 30% could vote again. Again, the world press betrayed those who wanted to believe in a Palestinian commitment to democracy and peace. However, those betrayed in this instance are their readers, the ones who relied on the press to give us honest reporting and consistent analysis. Instead, they aided and abetted voter fraud in order to get the result they desired.

I wrote last week that the Palestinian election was nothing more than farce. I'm not happy to have been proven correct, and I take no satisfaction in pointing out that the mainstream media once again allowed its biases to affect its reporting. Until they take responsibility for giving us honest reporting -- when outfits like CBS fire division presidents and managing editors for shoving false and misleading reports down our throats -- we will continue to see these embarrassments in our media.

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