Making the votes count

Soon after the election when it became apparent that Ohio was a strong enough win for Dubya not to force a recount, I wanted to to write up a post on where voting in the country stood in the aftermath of the election.

Well, new items and rumors kept me from going ahead with the post (I wanted some dust to settle), but I think it is safe now to issue my opinion:

I think it was an unfortunate thing that this election was not totally rigged and then exposed as such.

Now let me clarify that: I don't wish that because I wanted Kerry to win (I have plenty of other wishes under that particular heading). No, instead I mean that I truly wanted to see who truly won win (be it Bush or Kerry), but not without a massive case of electronic voting fraud that perhaps swung a meaningless state or two to the other side.

And I don't wish this for the sake of tarnishing someone either... Lord knows Bush has enough of that and it doesn't seem to matter anyway. No, I wanted it because anything less and we would continue on our blithely ignorant path to the point where the trap is sprung and the democracy is completely unaware of it.

Do you not think that this issue has been swept under the rug? Check this shit out... I consider myself to be rather informed, especially on issues like this, but even I hadn't heard half of this stuff. Really, take a look:

They discovered that in the 15 counties using touch-screen voting systems, the number of votes granted to Bush exceeded the number of votes Bush should have received -- given all of the other variables -- while the number of votes that Bush received in counties using other types of voting equipment lined up perfectly with what the variables would have predicted for those counties.

The total number of excessive votes ranged between 130,000 and 260,000, depending on what kind of problem caused the excess votes. The counties most affected by the anomaly were heavily Democratic.

Sociology professor Michael Hout, who chairs the university's graduate Sociology and Demography group, said the chance for such a discrepancy to occur was less than 1 in 1,000.

"No matter how many factors and variables we took into consideration, the significant correlation in the votes for President Bush and electronic voting cannot be explained," he said in a statement. "There is just a trivial probability of evidence like this appearing in a population where the true difference is zero -- less than once in a thousand chances."

I mean, damn! Potentially a quarter million votes, all where paperless electronic voting was used, all in favor of Bush... why isn't this national news?!? And this:

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

But all that we got were statements on this issue sounding something like this:

So far, the only national "mainstream" media to come close to this story was Keith Olbermann on his show Friday night, November 5th, when he noted that it was curious that all the voting machine irregularities so far uncovered seem to favor Bush. In the meantime, the Washington Post and other media are now going through single-bullet-theory-like contortions to explain how the exit polls had failed.

People in the mainstream media just don't want to invest the time and resources into such a hot potato... they need to retain their access to their sources, etc. and the storyline for the whole thing was written a long time ago anyways (strange conspiracy theories by wackos, etc.).

But why is it so strange when it is so damn easy to do?!? These systems are so bad that they are practically begging to be hacked... do you really think that all folks are going to be able to withstand the temptation to change the numbers, whether on a personal or coordinated scale? We're not talking registration of corpses to vote in Chicago here... hundreds of thousands of votes could be changed in seconds with no trail. This is not being Chicken Little here; it is what could happen (or maybe already has).

So again, I wanted a big mess that would shame Florida 2000 so that we get this said and done with... but I didn't get it, and that worries me.

Update: Having read that, it certainly wasn't the post I had intended... it's more of a rant than anything. But I guess that is fine... I just want to purge myself of my total frustration and worry over this issue, and maybe this served that purpose. But given that I think that this is one of the most important issues in the country (more so than the Social Security debate) yet is getting no attention, I imagine my bile will return rather quickly.

Update: Nice thought, but I imagine this will either get no play in the media or will get tons of scorn... a big mess would have been better.