I'm no longer convinced Bush won

I'm serious. There are news reports coming in from all over the country about voting machine errors, BIG voting machine errors, and in at least two races, a state House race in NC and a referendum in FL, once the vote-tally problem was caught, it changed the result of the race!

I don't normally buy into this tin-foil-hat/black-helicopter stuff, but there are enough real news stories out that this is getting serious. And here's the rub: Since many areas of each state, and many states in the country, uses the same machines, it's not unreasonable to assume that they ALL suffered the same software glitches, but that local election officials simply don't know yet. How's that for scary?

Some folks at DailyKos, BradBlog, Democrats.com and others are tracking all of this. It's a lot of stuff, frankly because there's lots of evidence. I've got to tell you, after reading all of this, I have zero confidence that any of these machines were correct. Who the fuck knows who won? Isn't it great - we've reached the point where we no longer trust our election results in America. Who says our best days are behind us?

Some examples:

- In Broward County, Florida, 97,434 ballots were affected by a glitch that basically erased votes (I believe the erasure was finally caught and reversed, but what if this happened in machines elsewhere and wasn't caught?).

- "A computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct. 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." - Ohio.com

- In NC, 11,238 more presidential electronic votes were recorded than were actually cast.

- 4530 early votes were lost - LOST - in North Carolina: "Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes. Expecting the greater capacity, the county used only one unit during the early voting period. 'If we had known, we would have had the units to handle the votes,' said Sue Verdon, secretary of the county election board. Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost." - Yahoo News

- "New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.... It appears that such an attack may already have taken place, in a primary election 6 weeks ago in King County, Washington -- a large jurisdiction with over one million registered voters. Documents, including internal audit logs for the central vote-counting computer, along with modem "trouble slips" consistent with hacker activity, show that the system may have been hacked on Sept. 14, 2004. Three hours is now missing from the vote-counting computer's "audit log," an automatically generated record, similar to the black box in an airplane, which registers certain kinds of events." - BlackBoxVoting.org

Find out more here, and here, and here, and here.