Why did I not know about how serious this all really was?

I have already said, mainly from gut instinct that this election was probably rigged by the Republicans, but I just spent the better of 3 hours in shock and horror reading noteworthy news articles and diaries pointing to undeniable facts that there is something fishy going on, and it is bigger than I ever dreamed.

I had to sleep on it and after I woke up I still had to take a walk to think more about it before writing simply because my brain was too tired, and my mind couldn't then and still cannot deal with the implications of all of this being true.

It all started when mr ralph pointed me to an article coming out of Columbus Ohio which states that a computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President Bush 3,893 votes extra in a Gahanna precinct.

Another news article was quick to point out:

Deducting the erroneous Bush votes from his total could not change the election's outcome, and there were no signs of other errors in Ohio's electronic machines, said Carlo LoParo, spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.

Of course we should take everything Blackwell says as the gospel right? Somehow I find it hard to believe that the machine in error was the only one that used that kind of cartridge yet,

Other electronic machines used in Ohio do not use the type of computer cartridge involved in the error, state officials say.

There ya go. All nice and tidy isn't it? A few extra votes were recorded. We're meant to simply forget about it. But I couldn't, and I can't. So I kept reading and so should you.

I then found a very indepth piece from Hunter who has a diary over at daily kos.

I couldn't do a better job at presenting all the information, so I give him all the credit for bringing it to light. I will just quote him to further prove my point. Please read his entire entry and see if you aren't a believer too.

According to Hunter, there are two states in which "fraud" has been raised, Ohio and Florida.

The Ohio numbers are regarded by many with great suspicion because the GOP launched, in the weeks before the election, an organized effort to intimidate minority voters, fund push-polls and other robocalls, and generally depress turnout in Democratic precincts. Anecdotal evidence is that it did not work -- turnout was high, and there were very few reports on election day of Republican intimidation at the polls. [and]

The possibility of fraud has been raised primarily because the results from Ohio are not what people were expecting to see. Republican turnout was very large, and Democrats seemed to vote for Bush in surprising numbers. That is indeed curious, and needs to be analyzed.

And it doesn't just stop there, because these unusual numbers doesn't necessarily mean any intentional fraud took place...BUT

it is also possible to explain the discrepancies from fraud or error. Intentional fraud, or unintentional error, would in this case consist of misreporting of the numbers from each precinct. Note that few of these Ohio precincts use anything other than the punch-card systems; fraud would be present in the central machines that sum the votes, not from in-precinct shenanigans. Nationwide, these machines are manufactured by Diebold and other vendors; longtime readers will remember Diebold as the heavily-Republican-leaning company (Diebold executives are heavy Bush contributers) whose chief officer announced in a Republican fund-raising letter that the company was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

If that doesn't get your blood going, nothing will.

So you may be asking yourself now, who is going to do something about this?? Well, for one we know that all the votes in Ohio are being counted, even as I write this. Ohio has to count all provisional ballots whether Kerry asks them to or not, they are legally required to.

You may be saying about now, "But Kerry already conceded." Kerry's concession is not legally binding. The "concession" is a political concept and therefore if during the counting of provisional ballots -- or any recount that may be needed of all the votes were to show Kerry the actual victor, he will definately step up and be our President.

I was surprised to see a very indepth article about voting fraud resulting from electronic machines was in print from March 2004. It goes into great detail about how e-voting threatens democracy.

Bev Harris is a voting activist who through her site, Black Box Voting .org is conducting the largest Freedom of Information action in history.

At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit.

Black Box Voting is a nonpartisan, nonprofit consumer protection group for elections and you can donate to their effort as the FOIA's are not free. You can also join their campaign and volunteer for their organization called Help America Audit through the site.

Bev has spent a lot of time compiling evidence of voter fraud. Her work is detailed in the wired magazine article I mentioned above. Just one of the many things I found hard to digest is

In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, which allocated $3.9 billion in matching federal funds to help states upgrade to new e-voting systems. Touted as the answer to the hanging chads in Florida that marred the 2000 presidential election, e-voting machines have been lauded by their makers as faster, more accurate and easier to use than punch-card and lever machines. But election glitches involving the systems paint a different picture, depicting machines that sometimes fail to boot up, fail to record votes or even record them for the wrong candidates. Computer scientists say the machines are also easy to hack.

In addition to glitches, there are concerns about the people behind the machines. A few voting company employees have been implicated in bribery or kickback schemes involving election officials. And there are concerns about the partisan loyalties of voting executives -- Diebold's chief executive, for example, is a top fund-raiser for President Bush.

Now if you've read all the articles and followed all my links you are now in the same position I am in. I keep asking myself two things: What exactly is going on here, and do I really want to know?

You may also find the following from metafilter interesting as well since it also points out the mysterious links between Diebold and ES&S that Bev Harris discovered as well as Howard Ahmanson (the original funder of ES&S) a Christian Recostructionist who has talked about imposing Biblical law on the US. It is indeed another hefty chunk to swallow, and another reason why I couldn't ignore what I was reading.

How is all of this not making bigger news than it has? I think the people who want to keep it all quiet are more important and bigger than those of us that are wanting it to go public.

Of course I hate George W Bush. I am probably the last person you would want to be impartial when it comes to this sort of thing, but what I hate even more than W is the idea that our freedom could be slipping out from under our noses and we are not paying attention. We are just letting it go. Something must be done.