Do I believe that any of my recent posts about election results will get anything changed in this election? Not at all. It would be nice, but it’s just not going to happen. That doesn’t mean I should just stop. There were clearly problems with vote counting this year, and I have no idea who the country really voted for. By pointing this out, and getting people to look at them, hopefully we can fix them for future elections.

I can accept the fact that John Kerry wasn’t a great candidate. I can accept the fact that George Bush won reelection, if that is the case. What I cannot accept is that I don’t trust the vote count results. Honestly, I don’t think any of these things I’ve mentioned are enough to push Kerry over the top. Bush won the national popular vote by a huge margin, and both Florida and Ohio by significant amounts, probably more than can be accounted for with fraud.

What I want to accomplish with all this is to clean up the election system to the point where I will trust it in 2008 (or 2006, really). We need to get for-profit companies out of the business of making voting machines, or at the very least make all of their systems auditable with a paper trail. It doesn’t look good when the CEO of Diebold says he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year.” It doesn’t look good when the exit polls (yeah, yeah) are so far off. It doesn’t look good when there are hundreds of thousands of extra votes, and lots of reports of missing votes. It doesn’t look good when vote counts are walled off from observers under the “threat of terrorism” excuse.

I have no delusion that I can fix the problem for this year. I have no strong evidence that, even if fixed, Bush wouldn’t still be the President-elect. I want to help restore my faith in our election process for the future. It’s going to take a lot of work to do that.

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