Reply #23: This article from AlterNet made be really angry today...

[Emit]

http://www.alternet.org/story/20934/

Election 2004: Stolen or Lost
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Many of us fear that the Ohio election was stolen because people – like talk-show sleuths, blogger number-crunchers, forensic attorneys, crusading professors and partisan activists – keep telling us so. We don't even know most of these people, yet we gladly forward their e-mails and web links, their pronouncements, analyses, essays and statistical exercises. While their credentials may not be that impressive, we listen to their conspiracy theories because – frightened by the direction our country has taken – we want to believe them...
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...I, too, was alarmed by charges that outright fraud might have changed the outcome of the most important presidential election in recent times. So I recently traveled to Ohio – where I connected with a group of attorneys who were fighting to have the Ohio presidential results overturned, and the state – and, by extension, the presidency – awarded to Kerry. In legal pleadings known collectively as the "Contest" these attorneys are not shy about using the F-word...
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Voting Irregularities

Charge: Misallocation of voting machines
Finding: True
Intentional? Probably not...

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Charge: Miscounting of absentee votes
Finding: False

...Suleman explains that the poll books Lange looked at had been printed before absentee voting ended – including those who voted in the final days before the election at the Board's offices. The books would – according to practice – be updated to include everyone. Like Anthony in Franklin County, Suleman is a Democrat.

Charge: Tampering with voting machines
Finding: Probably false

There were a number of anecdotal claims that personnel from voting machine companies came into several counties and seemed to do something improper with the machines before the recount began. I had the opportunity to listen to an audio tape of a film crew interviewing an official of Triad, a ballot counting contractor accused on the internet of various indiscretions – in which the man appears to be very patiently and logically explaining the exact role of company personnel in preparing machines for recounts. I asked Contest attorneys if they wanted to listen to the tape, but they were too busy rushing out filings – which included allegations involving Triad....
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..."I think incompetence is the most likely explanation in most of these cases," says Mark Griffin, who ran the legal team for Kerry that oversaw the provisional ballot count and recount in Cuyahoga. "If there's fraud, it's in the tabulation. But it wouldn't be in Cuyahoga, where we got a big turnout."

Challengers May Have Good Intentions But Bad Facts

The lawyers on the Contest team are well-meaning, intelligent people. However, like all lawyers, they're about arguing their side, not getting to the bottom of things. Each time I checked in, one of them (always the same person, always insisting that our conversations were "off the record") would introduce a new operative theory of what had happened, of what "evidence" was the most meaningful indicator of the shenanigans that had gone on.

By the day I left, my "source" was telling me that the legal discovery process was not going well, and so they could not, in a timely fashion, get the information needed to show how the "fraud" was perpetrated.

Attorney Don McTigue, a senior official in the Ohio Secretary of State's office when a Democrat held the office, now devotes his entire legal practice to elections. "We don't have evidence of fraud," says McTigue, who represented the Kerry campaign for the recount...
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You wouldn't have much of a case for conspiracy if you didn't have Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell. As Ohio's chief elections official and the Bush state campaign chairman, he was already juggling a couple of hats that should have been nowhere near each other. Furthermore, Bush traveled to Ohio on election day to meet with Blackwell. There's no doubt that Blackwell consistently ruled in a manner that seemed to favor Bush. But the impact of these rulings on the election was probably minimal...

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Charge: Voting company fraud
Finding: Unlikely

As for Diebold and other vilified companies, in all probability, they didn't, and wouldn't, risk the ignominy and consequences of fixing an election....

Charge: Exit poll results were more accurate than actual ballots
Finding: False
Explanation of Problem: Imperfect nature of polls

Now to the central issue: the claim that exit polls, which never lie, showed Kerry winning. Our understanding of this – and the argumentation in the Contest – is based largely on an analysis by Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D. But Freeman is not an expert in polling...

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Conclusions

While it's appallingly easy to mess around with a computer, it's a lot more difficult to rig an election.

To have a conspiracy of this magnitude, you'd need more than a bunch of individual mishaps – you need a plan and coordination. And you'd need a large number of collaborators willing to commit felonious and treasonous behavior of the highest order...

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Half-baked conspiracy theories are damaging to the public confidence in democracy. We could use a few less conspiracy theorists, and a few more Griffins. It takes a pretty big person to admit that one's own side screwed up, or was simply bested in a fight (even a nasty one), or to accept, and tackle, the growing alienation of potential voters in America. And the unexciting, labor-intensive process of analyzing and fixing the machinery of the people's will.
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