Ring the bell, bang the pot, blow a fuse -- vote fraud is real!

Bev Harris still has not made the promised announcement. However, after her recent find in Florida -- I refer to the "duplicate" poll tapes which contain mysterious additions to the Bush vote -- the landscape has changed. (True, the New York Times hasn't deigned to cover her work yet -- but you can read about it here!)

Even many skeptics are coming around to the view that "something funny" occurred on November 2. If you look closely at various news accounts, you'll see that the focus is now on the question of whether that "something funny" was funny enough to swing the election.

I'm reminded of that old punch line (occasionally attributed to dear old G.B.S.): "We've already established what kind of lady you are. Now we are discussing price."

We've already established that this election was crooked. Now we are discussing how crooked.

Here's a poser: What if we discover that Bush would have won (barely) even if his forces had not engaged in systemic e-vote manipulation? (I doubt that such is the case -- but for the moment, consider the idea as a hypothetical.) Would his reign maintain any legitimacy? In some countries, I am told, the law stipulates that any politician who attempts to rig the vote will automatically lose his post, regardless of the degree of tampering.

While you ponder that one, here are some links....

The Provisionals. You'll recall from our previous discussion that, even without a recount in Ohio, provisional ballots stand a good chance of shrinking the margin between Bush and Kerry considerably. Maryland lawyer Jonathan S. Shurberg argued that if 70% of the provisionals were deemed legit, and if 85% of those went to Kerry, the margin shrinks from 136,000 votes to 56,000 votes.

Some had hoped the "allowable" provisionals could go as high as 90 percent, the figure in 2000. But Ken Blackwell ain't gonna let that happen. According to the Plain Dealer, he's tossing out one out of every three provisionals.

Not what we hoped for -- but still fairly close to Shurberg's figure. Since most of the provisionals will swing Democratic (many were handed out in minority areas, where manipulators kept the machines sparse and the lines long), expect the margin to shrink by at least half. Then cometh the recount, which may turn up enough undervote ballots and "pumped up" precincts to swing this election.

On election night, Blackwell promised the provisionals would be counted within ten days. Why is he dawdling? Because the electoral college meets on December 13.

Oh...and remember what I said earlier about the poll books? Computers create those books, which means that manipulators can erase random names in Democratic districts. And that is just what seems to have happened:

Seventy percent of the rejected ballots, or 5,595, won't count because there was no record of their registration.

"I find it inconceivable that over 5,000 voters in the county would wait an hour in the pouring rain to vote if they haven't registered," said Dr. Norm Robbins, a neurosciences professor at Case Western Reserve University who volunteered for the Greater Cleveland Voter Registration Coalition.

Robert Bennett, the elections board chairman who also chairs the Ohio Republican Party, said provisional ballots were cross-checked by name and address before they were disqualified. But he acknowledged that errors may have seeped into the system.

"Seeped." Gotta love that wording. Yeah, those errors just "seeped" in -- much as a mugger might "seep" money from your wallet.

The counties, it seems, have differing standards when it comes to determining the legitimacy of a voter's registration information. Citing Bush v. Gore -- of all things! -- Ohio Democrats have taken the matter to court, in order to impose a state-wide standard.

Also in Ohio: You'll want to read Bob Fritakis on "How the Ohio election was rigged for Bush."

This analysis details an odd phenomenon in east Cleveland. In precincts where voters historically favor Democrats to an overwhelming degree, far-right third party candidates received large numbers of votes -- sometimes ridiculously large numbers.(Remember the "Jews for Buchanan" phenomenon of 2000?) Since the Bush percentage of the vote is consistent with that seen in past elections, any vote switch must have come at Kerry's expense. Yeah, the numbers are small -- but shennanigans of this sort do add up.

Greg Palast may be the first reporter outside the blogosphere to note the divergent attitudes toward exit polling, depending upon whether the subject is the Ukraine or the United States.

Florida. If you were a Florida resident traveling outside the country (perhaps due to military service), your vote would have counted even if your absentee ballot arrived ten days after the election. All you needed was a November 2 postmark. But what about the many absentee ballots that "accidentally" reached Broward county voters late? Shouldn't they receive the same courtesy? U.S. District Court Judge Alan Gold denied a preliminary injunction to include these ballots in the count; the matter may yet go to trial.

The name Bush popped up repeatedly, even when voters tried to select Kerry. This scenario occurred across the country in precincts using electronic voting machines, and it occurred so often only a fool or a disinformation peddler would endorse the notion of voter error. I have yet to encounter a single anecdotal report of the opposite tableau -- a Bush voter faced with the name Kerry.

Now Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco is looking into the matter. Rice University computer science professor Dan Wallach and security expert Bruce Schneier have agreed to help test the machines -- if they get access. I'll report on their findings...

Swing state analysis. Computer scientist Bob Burnett, co-founder of Cisco Systems, has completed a study of the swing states and the exit polls, and his report takes us past the simplistic "exit polls can be inaccurate" crap we've been hearing from the mainstream media.

The 2004 presidential exit polls were wildly off the mark in swing states; the difference between the expected and actual results was not randomly distributed, it was all in Bush's favor.

Because of these discrepancies, I studied the election results in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. What I found were not answers, but more questions.

Interestingly, he says the most worrisome anomalies occurred in New Mexico, which has yet to finalize its results. We've already noted other reports from NM, where (if you believe the numbers) the Native American population showed an unusual fondness for the G.O.P. this year.

The mainstreamers are coming around. Another "respectable" journal, Oregon's Register-Guard, has published a terrific story by Dianne Lobes on vote fraud allegations.

Keith Olbermann discusses the finessed wording of the Democratic party's releases announcing their involvement in the Ohio recount. Do not count me among those screaming at Kerry for not leading the charge on this issue. If he were to claim "I wuz robbed," he'd make himself the butt of nightly jokes from every comic on the boob tube. As I've said earlier: At this point, low key is the best key.

Of course, certain lefties are never happy unless the Democratic candidate acts in a politically suicidal fashion.

Remember those "terror warnings"? "Terrorism" was the excuse given by officials in Warren County, Ohio, when they kept outsiders from peeking at the counting process. Neither the FBI nor Homeland Security had any knowledge of this alleged threat. Now reporter Erica Solvig of the Cincinnati Enquirer has uncovered the fact that the lock-out was planned well in advance, on October 25. Fishier and fishier...

Electronic countermeasures? Are web sites devoted to this issue under attack? Brad Freidman says he has experienced "denial of service" difficulties. So has Jeff Fisher. The Yahoo group Election Fraud 2004 mysteriously went down for about a week (and seems to be down again at this writing). Bev Harris' site is often unreachable, but the volume of hits she receives may explain that phenomenon. I've heard rumors (just rumors) of other affected sites. No problems on my end so far. Are we starting to jump at shadows, or should we demonstrate concern?