I'M WE'RE JUST SAYIN': My First Guest Post!

Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome, the one and only, Ninja Bob:

My apologies to the bloggers out there who may have covered this already, but as I was saying to my good friend Tony (whose name may or may not have been changed for privacy reasons) over the weekend, I don't care if a recount brou-ha-ha lasts two days, two weeks, or two years, we have to get to a place in this country where if you vote, your vote gets tallied correctly. I've been reading about Ohio voter counts being higher than the number of registered voters. Florida voting machines that counted backwards after reaching a certain number. Heavily Democratic precincts voting inexplicably for Bush. Machines where votes aren't being counted, or adding thousands of extra votes. And yet, with these, and other, irregularities in swing states, there is a deafening silence in the "liberal" media about it. Keith Olbermann is just about the only nationally broadcast news person even mentioning it...WHY?

This is exactly the kind of thing that leads to revolutions. When America was formed, it was a truly unique system to peacefully transfer power between rival political factions. Have we now become so complacent and comfortable that, as a country, we can't be bothered to ensure the system works correctly? Worse, why is the prospect of examining the process so distasteful to the general public? It drifts quite a ways from Thomas Jefferson's ideal of a government by an informed electorate. In fact, his exact words were,

". . . whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right."

So hey, things are wrong, they're attracting notice, and it's our responsibility to set them right. If we don't, we are not being governed, we're being farmed. That's right, I wrote "farmed". Just sedated sheep, content to let the government do what it wants so long as it doesn't bother us with pesky details.

For my part, when I saw a chart on some website claiming voter chicanery in Florida, I decided to go to the source. The state of Florida posts not only it's election results, but also totals for voter registrations and percent of voter turnout, county by county. It has some interesting data. Things like, huge turnout for Bush in heavily Democratic counties. So much so, it looks like the numbers got accidentally reversed. Don't believe me, check it out here.

So, I come across this website, TruthOut, with a pretty well researched article by William Rivers Pitt about the current goings on. Here's a sample to whet your appetite, but you should probably read it for yourself:

(A poster named "TruthIsAll" on the Democratic Underground forum laid out the questionable results of Tuesday's election in succinct fashion): "To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that incumbent rule #1 - undecideds break for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule - an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling - was wrong; That the approval rating rule - an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election - was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were not tampered with in this election."

And, because you probably don't have anything better to do on a Wednesday, here are some other links about the subject: