Florida Voting Irregularities Redux

Let me begin by pointing out that I am not an election conspiracy nut. The 2000 Presidential Election pisses me off because of two things: 1) Al Gore didn't have the balls to keep the re-count going and 2) The Republicans, who are all about freedom and democracy didn't want the re-count to continue. What we've learned since is that re-counting can change the outcome of a major election, as in the case of the Washington State Gubernatorial Race back in 2004. And that was before the advent of computerized balloting machines.

Fast forward to this week in, of all places, Florida, where reports are cropping up about problems with the automated machines. If you read the article two things will probably jump out at you. First of all, the errors talked about are all in favor of the Republicans. Secondly, the article quotes election officials saying that they are aware this is occurring and blame it on equipment

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If the error is due to an equipment problem, why does it seem to only be favoring one party? Odd, for sure.

I am sure someone will send me an email along the lines of "Ryan, if someone were going to do this with computers, wouldn't they be smart enough to not show the voting errors on the confirmation screen as described in the article?"

This assumes a couple of things that I don't hold to be absolute truths including that the people perpetrating this effort are intelligent. If the vote-changing occurs behind the scenes, we won't have any way of knowing about it, unless someone does an independent audit of election results. This is vote-changing in a very demonstrable way, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the company that makes these machines (Diebold) is a huge GOP contributor. Check out www.opensecrets.org to see what I mean there.