jwz‘s much smarter than I am and he’s got some suspicions about statistical variances in our ever-so-tight race (election rigging). In some weird sense I just want people in the future to be able to know for sure what really happened in 2000 and 2004.
[T]he mainstream media has been saying that there were a “handful” of “glitches” with the voting machines this time around. Well, the first-hand accounts being posted on blackboxvoting.com (syndicated on LiveJournal as bboxvoting_rss) are pretty extreme, e.g., “Franklin County’s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry’s 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.”
I’ve also read many reports where people said that they clicked on “John Kerry”, and when they got to the confirmation screen, it said “George Bush”, which they then corrected. I have not read a single report of someone having the opposite problem (trying to vote for Bush and having the machine try to vote for Kerry.) Have you?
…
And in Florida, some numbers and graphs: districts using electronic voting machines tended to skew Republican, while those without electronic voting ran even with predicted ratios.
“Here’s your ‘mandate’, right here.”
You don’t steal an election with a landslide, you steal it with 3%. You stay within the margin of error across the board so that it’s not obvious.
So, I believe this vote was rigged.
I also think it’s entirely possible that Bush would have won anyway without the rigging (since Rove is clearly better at mobilizing fundamentalists than the Kerry people were at mobilizing anybody else.) But I think the fix was in.
But like I said, the fact that it was even close is disturbing enough.