Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) reported last night on Countdown on a number of interesting irregularities in the 2004 presidential election (here from his blog):
There [Florida], 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County— Bristol, Florida and environs— where it’s 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.
…
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I’ll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
As noted, Olbermann was surprised that no one complained about the Cuyahoga County results. Well, not so surprising: in spite of the extra votes (or ever being of an open mind, perhaps because of the extra votes), Kerry won Cuyahoga County in a landslide:
Cuyahoga
Kerry 433,262 67%
Bush 215,624 33%
(http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/OH/P/00/county.000.html)
Now putting on my conspiracy-theory hat: if you are going to steal an election by submitting a few extra votes (or 93,000 extra votes for that matter), what better way than to do so in a county that the opponent wins easily anyway!
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