This story is why all of us, when talking about the 2004 election, need to remember its all dependent on if we get a handle on this electronic voting issue- otherwise we can kiss the white house and the Senate goodbye.
See Rob's original diary- an excerpt from his link:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm
AN exceprt from the link above:
Consider this:
How plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude, with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving incoming results that late in the night - was really the simple result of a "faulty memory card"?
We also now know, again thanks to the work of Black Box Voting investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's Jim March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several Florida counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by insiders.
[See... Bev Harris's " Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program " for details and Jim March's "DIEBOLD'S VOTE-TALLY SOFTWARE- Security Review Instructions"for a kit to demonstrate the hack on your own computer.]
We do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts.
Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties?
Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to correct than conventional wisdom suggests?
Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in counties all over Florida?
Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book "The Best Democracy Money can buy" and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale inquiry into the Florida debacle.
Perhaps more importantly. With paper-less touchscreen voting systems in place in many Florida counties come November 2004, should such events occur again, there will be no record with which to conduct a recount.
And the other big mystery of course is this: if someone did try to rig the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
