This article makes the case that there was substantial vote fraud in Florida, benefitting (needless to say) the Republicans. (Thanks to Ben Love for the pointer.) Here is the crux of the argument:
"While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.
"In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.
"In Dixie County, with 4,988 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.
"The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush."
What is not clear is what percentage of the voters in these counties were registered with either party. If, for example, most registered voters in these counties were independents, then the results may be less incredible.
If anyone has more information, or knows of other analyses of this data, please let me know.
UPDATE: And voting irregularities in Ohio too, according to this article. (Thanks to Bill Edmundson for the pointer.) It would be nice to believe that a majority of American voters did not, in fact, support Bush & co. It would be even nicer if Bush were not likely to be sworn in for a new term come January. But perhaps we need to face up to the country we're living in; as Katha Pollitt sharply puts it:
"Maybe this time the voters chose what they actually want: Nationalism, pre-emptive [actually, "preventive"] war, order not justice, 'safety' through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President. Where, I wonder, does that leave us?"
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