There has been a lot of yelling and screaming about voter fraud among the Kossacks. I would like to make few points and an appeal.
If the vote was hacked or manipulated we will be able to tell if we do a manual recount. If we don't do a manual recount we will never know.
Take, for example, the strange results in Florida where Bush seems to have performed better on the optical scan equipment than he did on the e-voting equipment.
All those optical-scan ballots exist in hard copy. All we have to do is count them, and if we see a pattern where Bush's tally is inflated we will be able to reconstruct how it was done, even if the evidence (code) that changed the vote tally is gone.
More below the fold.
What we want is proof of voter fraud, so that we can challenge the certification of the election. We will never be able to recount the e-votes, so we will never be able to establish what the actual vote was. But if we can establish that votes were stolen for Bush on the optical scans then we will have the moral high ground to question the election.
I have no idea what would be the legal chaos/fallout from such a discovery.
In Ohio, we also want to do a manual recount. We want to find out whether the votes were added correctly. We want to look at the undervotes. We want to look at the absentee ballots. We want to look at the provisional ballots.
But again, unless there was a hacking of the computers it seems impossible for Kerry to win the Ohio election.
Again, we are looking for voter fraud.
So far, we have evidence of vote tabulation problems, but we have no evidence of voter fraud. There is only one way to establish voter fraud and that is to do a manual recount.
The election is not close enough to legally require a recount. And there is not enough evidence of voter fraud to use that as a casus belli for a manual recount.
If we want a manual recount we will have to pay for it.
I am not a lawyer, or a computer programmer, or a statitician. I really can't tell what the likelihood is that the exit polls would be off by a certain percent. And I don't care.
What I want to know is whether the vote was hacked or not.
And if Kerry was robbed of the election we will be able to tell immediately by counting the votes manually. In Ohio, this should be straight forward. Just count them and see who won.
In Florida it will only be possible to determine whether the optical scan vote was hacked. But if it was, we will be able to reconstruct the real numbers from those ballots. Theoretically, that might be enough to give the state to Kerry. Although I am sure that it would become a legal mess because of our inability to recount the e-votes.
So, for all of you screaming that you know the vote was hacked...calm down. You don't know. But you know how to find out.
For all of you complaining about the use of the words "voter fraud", we are indeed in a hunt for voter fraud.
We'd like to know how accurate the vote tabulators are too. But we really want to win the election much more. And we know what we need to do to win the election. We must find evidence of voter fraud or Bush will be inaugurated as the next President of the United States.
That does not mean that we want to prove that there was voter fraud if none existed. It means that we think voter fraud may have occurred and we demand to find out if at all possible.
All our efforts should be aimed at a manual recount of the Ohio and Florida votes. If proving fraud in New Hampshire helps that cause, then great.
I am not a strategist either.
I just know that we won't win this election by fighting over provisional ballots. If we are really down by 3 million votes nationally and 130,000 in Ohio then we are going to lose.
But if those numbers are phony we CAN prove that they are phony.
And that, to me, should be what we set as our goal.