Ok, first of all, I recognise that I WANT TO BELIEVE that the election was rigged, because I would feel less bad about a coup than I would about the people actually voting these fundamentalists into power. (But that there was a chance of the race being even close was already profoundly disturbing.)

That said, the mainstream media has been saying that there were a "handful" of "glitches" with the voting machines this time around. Well, the first-hand accounts being posted on blackboxvoting.com (syndicated on LiveJournal as bboxvoting_rss) are pretty extreme, e.g., "Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct."

I've also read many reports where people said that they clicked on "John Kerry", and when they got to the confirmation screen, it said "George Bush", which they then corrected. I have not read a single report of someone having the opposite problem (trying to vote for Bush and having the machine try to vote for Kerry.) Have you?

bellaciao.org has some graphs of the major discrepencies between exit polling and vote counts. They're pretty incredible! Now, maybe the exit polling methodology is just fundamentally broken, but isn't it funny when you see pictures like the one at the right, knowing that last year, Diebold's CEO swore that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to President Bush."

And in Florida, some numbers and graphs: districts using electronic voting machines tended to skew Republican, while those without electronic voting ran even with predicted ratios. "An analysis of variance conducted on the percent change for each party ([Actual vote minus expected vote]/expected vote) in each county, with 'machine type' as a predictive factor, indicated that machine type was a significant predictor of percent change in voting. Counties using E-touch machines showed significantly positive percent changes in vote for both Republican and Democrat candidates, with greater mean percent changes for the Democrat. However counties using Op-scan machines showed significant positive percent change only for the Republican candidate, the mean change for the Democrat being insignificantly greater than zero."

You don't steal an election with a landslide, you steal it with 3%. You stay within the margin of error across the board so that it's not obvious.

So, I believe this vote was rigged.

I also think it's entirely possible that Bush would have won anyway without the rigging (since Rove is clearly better at mobilizing fundamentalists than the Kerry people were at mobilizing anybody else.) But I think the fix was in.

But like I said, the fact that it was even close is disturbing enough.