They admit, Computers gave Bush extra votes in Ohio

I've been reluctant to start blaming Diebold for Bush's win. But in the last 2 days, there's been a couple of new developments.

First, we have CNN going ahead with the story (found here) that Bush got more votes than he should have. Of course, they downplay the seriousness of it.

The thing is, they can't explain how it happened. And they refuse to conclude that since the code which was deployed on one machine is the same code that is deployed on all machines, that the problem could have occurred elsewhere.

No, that's just one logic chain they'd rather not look at too closely.

They also make a passing reference to the problems that happened at other touch-screen voting stations around the country. But it's just that, a passing reference to a "handful" of problems. But if you read the actual story at CNN (see here) you see that they refer to over 1,100 problems.

So all of this was at least enough to reawaken my doubts about whether Diebolds known system flaws were exploited for any one candidates gain.

Then finally, Greg Palast got into the nitty gritty of it.

Now Greg Palast is a far cry from the "loony left" or tin-foil-hat-wearing-conspiracy freaks. He deals with facts. He's been called one of the most important journalists of our age, and is often used by British publications and tv, but for various reasons he is little known in the US. He's one of the only people (the only person?) that the Bush family tried to sue. They had to drop the case because Palast could prove everything he was saying was true. His investigation into Katherine Harris' exclusion lists in Florida 2000 were ground breaking, and his best selling book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" was on the New York Times best seller list for something like 6 months to a year.

Palast reckons not only that Kerry won Ohio, but he reckons he can prove it. I haven't looked at his evidence yet, so I can't say for certain if I'm going to find it convincing or not, but based on his previous work, I suspect it will be good stuff.
posted by Manchild at 1:45 AM