I write this diary in order to respond to a concept I saw again and again in BooMan23's diary,
Christopher Hitchens thinks the OHIO VOTE WAS STOLEN". Namely, that since the Republicans screwed with the Ohio vote, this magically translate to Bush having lost the nationwide popular vote as well.
First things first; when you are alleging election fraud in the oldest Democracy on the planet, the burden of proof is on you. You try going on national TV and start talking about how Bush actually lost the election, conspiracy..etc... you'll be laughed out of the studio. Stick with what you have firm support for. If you cannot pick apart Hannity's mocking and false response to this... don't even try. A quick refutation with facts is all that will work. The amount of hay that the Right could make with one 'wacko' statement that is not verifiable is untold. SEE: "Memogate".
Moving on to factual stuff below the fold.
Supposedly there is a national conspiracy, a devil's alliance of Diebold and Republican election officials, which - disregarding Ohio - led to Bush's popular vote victory. This is asinine. The best disproof of this is the case of King County, in Washington State. As most dKos regulars probably know, the Governor's election was so close that both a machine and a manual recount were performed. This led to Chrstine Gregoire (D) becoming governor, although the earlier results showed Dino Rossi (R) victorious. The Secretary of State, Sam Reed, is a Republican; he stood by WA state law despite his own party's attempt to block the recounts.
King County does not use the infamous Diebold voting machines. It uses instead optical scan machines. However, during a machine count it uses the GEMS software, developed by Diebold. This software is what is actually vulnerable to the hacks and patches, as discussed in Black Box Voting. Virtually any discussion of Diebold voting irregularitys actually involves the GEMS software; the lack of receipts by Diebold voting machines renders manual recounts impossible. Since optical scan machines were used, though, a manual recount was conducted.
Diebold Elections Systems AccuVote systems use software called "GEMS," and this system is used in 37 states. The voting system works like this:
Voters vote at the precinct, running their ballot through an optical scan, or entering their vote on a touch screen.
After the polls close, poll workers transmit the votes that have been accumulated to the county office. They do this by modem.
At the county office, there is a "host computer" with a program on it called GEMS. GEMS receives the incoming votes and stores them in a vote ledger.
King County is the obvious target for vote manipulation in the United States. Dean Logan is the Director of Records and Elections for King County, as discussed in this Seattle Weekly article.
In 1990, Dean was convicted of first-degree theft in King County for 23 counts of embezzlement of more than $385,000 from a law firm, where he was "a computer systems and accountant consultant," according to Superior Court records. Dean's thefts at the law firm, the records state, "occurred over a 21/2 -year period of time . . . The crimes and their cover-up involved a high degree of sophistication and planning in the use and alteration of records in the computerized accounting system that defendant maintained for the victim. . . . " Dean served just under four years for his crime and was released in 1995.
On top of that, King County is the biggest county in Washington State; there was a close election predicted; it probably wouldn't have the scrutiny on it that Ohio / FL would... almost ideal.
In the first election count, King County showed 505,243 votes for Christine Gregoire, 350,779 votes for Dino Rossi, and 18,906 votes for Ruth Bennett, the Libertarian.
The Machine Recount added 593 votes to Gregoire's total, 348 to Rossi's total, and 30 to Bennett's total.
And the final Hand Recount added an additional 358 to Gregoire's total, 179 to Rossi's, and 16 to Bennett's. Most of these were missed votes, or votes whose choice could not be determined by the optical scan machines. Nevertheless, the accuracy of the optical scan devices was higher than, say, punch card systems.
The fact that the counting machines themselves are virtually flawless is meaningless in the context of the larger discussion, because they are only flawless in counting flawlessly prepared ballots. For example, both optical scan and punch card machines will test to the same high certification standards, yet the average residual vote rate for punch card ballot systems is nearly double that for optical scan.
The large performance difference between the two systems is due, not to mechanical failure, but to a higher rate of "human error" by those voters using the punch card ballot system versus those using optical scan. This is a reflection of the way people relate to the particular technology... a concept that should be well familiar to user interface designers, or anyone who has ever manned the technical support line at a software company.
Of course, even hand recounts can make errors. But with so much scrutiny of the Washington elections and in particular King County, it is not believable that any kind of large scale futzing of the numbers has escaped utterly undetected. And King County was basically named a threatened voting area.
Thus to me it seems that it is not likely that there was any sort of national voting fraud conspiracy of a scale necessary to secure a lead in the millions for the Chimperor. It's just not going to work.
In the oldest democracy around, you need proof before you can start throwing around wild accusations like that and expect a hearing. If you can get a turncoat with reliable evidence of such goings on, I'll be the first to get behind it.
There was a humongous effort to lie, spin, and deceive the American people. There were large efforts to intimidate minorities into not voting. But this is not the same as national voting fraud. And if people try taking that onto the national pundit circuit, they'll get slaughtered. It's not fair that the Right can condemn us with lies and we need the purest truth to counter, but that seems to be the way of it right now.