Then there was the voting machine in Ohio that yielded a result at one point of MINUS 25,000,000 votes!

Completely aside from the fact that lots of voters were effectively prevented from voting by lines so long you had to wait -- in rain or burning sun -- 2 to 6 hours to vote! -- aside from those problems (mostly in heavily Democratic areas) there were about 30% of the votes cast on electronic machines with NO PAPER TRAIL and with "proprietary software" such that not even the county or state election officials are legally allowed to view their source codes!

To quote Greg Palast    GregPalast.com "Are [we] INSANE??!!"

BlackBoxVoting.com

Not only HAVE their been quite a few reported cases of ACTUAL malfunctions -- e.g., you touch the screen for X and Y's name lights up, or the machine breaks down and loses 2 hours worth of votes -- but even if there were no KNOWN problems, how the heck can anyone have faith that the machine count is free from both unplanned malfunctions and deliberate tampering? Especially when the manufacturers -- the only ones allowed to program them and view the code -- are loyal to one party? (The head of Diebold is a major contributor to and operative for the Republican Party and even openly stated that he pledged to do whatever he could to deliver Ohio for The President.)

Say what you will about pollsters, but exit polls conducted by reputable and respected polling firms have an excellent track record in predicting Presidential races. At least they did till Florida in 2000 -- especially West Palm Beach Co., home of the "butterfly ballot." And till this year, when we are all at the mercy of the unverifiable paperless machines to know what the vote count IS in many counties!

When there's no other way of checking the accuracy of the machines, comparing the official count with the exit poll figures is the next best thing, and doing that this year casts suspicion on the accuracy of the official results.

There have some analyses of election results that show that Bush averaged 5% more votes in counties where the infamous electronic machines were used than in places with a paper trail. If this is true, it's all the more remarkable because, at least in some states, like Florida, the electronic machines tended to be used in counties that usually vote heavily Democratic.


One more "voting problem" that's being overlooked by the media because "the margin in the election is too big for it to matter":
There are hundreds of thousands of votes -- maybe millions -- that have not been counted and may never be. E.g., over 37% of Floridians voted by absentee ballot -- many of them Democrats who did not trust the paperless machines. They have not been counted and, since Kerry's already conceded, Florida does not plan to count them. Many states don't bother counting absentee ballots, provisional ballots, or ballots that require hand counting (ballots spit out by a machine, ballots with write-in candidates, etc.) once they've determined who gets their electoral votes.

But this is a sort of catch-22, innit?

You don't bother making sure all the ballots in a state are counted, even if the election is close, if a candidate has a wide enough margin in the popular vote.   And you base that popular-vote margin on INCOMPLETE state counts, incomplete because you've decided the national margin is wide! Etc. Etc.


We are SERIOUSLY in need of ELECTION REFORM!

It was supposed to happen after the 2000 fiasco, but the Dubya admin. had better things to do with the money (like give it to Halliburton and the like), so the states never got the funding they needed to implement the reforms. Now the news media are saying these reforms should be in place within 4 years.
FOUR YEARS?!
Why the heck should we expect things to be better 4 years from now when in many ways they're WORSE now than they were 4 years ago -- partly because the media don't bring the problems to the public's attention till a couple weeks before a friggin election?!

Do I think the results of this election were clear, accurate and fair? Not on your life!