The conspiracy theory collection continues to grow...

[denny]

Here:
http://www.stolenelection2004.com/

Particularly:
http://www.stolenelection2004.com/Florida.htm

"Detailed County by County analysis in Florida by voting machine type of expected votes based on voter registration of Democrats and Republicans as compared to actual recorded votes shows that Republicans picked up an extraordinary increase in votes only in those Counties which have optical scanner voting equipment. The disparities are so great that one comes up with the inescapable conclusion that Bush won Florida as a result of election rigging in Counties using the optical scanner voting equipment."

Comments

[random-goblin.livejournal.com]

the bias in optical scanning may be related to this snippet from greg palast "...for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans."

greg palast you may recall pointed out large amounts of dodgy voter purging in florida 2000, the guardian ran the story, the NY times picked up on the story and initially wanted to run with it

however, after several weeks and no story greg rang the NY times to find out what was keeping the story.. "oh they replied.. we checked it and it wasn't true" they said.. a shocked mr palast asked exactly what checking they had done... "we phoned jed bush's office and they said it wasn't true!" came the response.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Did they have international observers in the end, or not?

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Yah. http://www.osce.org/news/show_news.php?id=4505

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

Their initial report makes interesting reading; the most interesting points being that the observers had only limited access, and that the US falls significantly short of international agreements as regards the democratic process.

Once you consider that that report will have been written very carefully to give the US administration plenty of get-outs (otherwise OSCE simply wouldn't be invited back), it becomes clear that the US voting process must be considered "Not good enough".

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

What particularly interested me was the tiny amount of space they gave to the issues surrounding the non-auditable voting machines... I only noticed a couple of references to 'allegations' or 'concerns' from the public, and a sentence saying that they hadn't received any direct proof of corruption, or something like that.

I suspect their full report's focus is going to be much more on the disenfranchisement of minority voters rather than the possibility of outright fraud at the vote-counting stage. There seems to be a fair amount to write about in either area...

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

tiny amount of space

If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything? >;)