Kausfiles on the case!

Mickey Kaus links to us today, in his newest post on the bunking and debunking. The only problem: Mickey focuses on the YFP and Glenn Reynolds debunking of the Florida irregularities with opti-scan and Touchscreen ballots, a side to the irregularities story that has been pretty much debunked in the last few days, due to all the 96-2000-2004 comparisons and establishment as many of these heavily "Democratic" counties as Dixiecrat conservative. (Mickey also, to his credit, blows a cannonball through our pointing towards Lee County as a county that didn't have a huge surge in Bush voters -- citing that Lee already had more Republicans registered than Dems. I again scanned the Florida results, and he's right -- none of the counties, including Lee, having enormously large GOP surges over the GOP registration were counties that had more than 30 or 35% Republicans registered.)

But Mickey cites the "opti-scan vs. touchscreen irregularities theory" in Florida as what was the most salient case of fraud, but I'd actually maintain that the much more salient evidence are these machines acting pretty damn strange in Ohio and Florida. And what was going on in Warren County. And Franklin County. And Broward County.

What might unfortunately be the case, though, is that the really funny business occurred before a single vote was cast -- in how voting machines were allocated in order to ensure long lines in heavy Democratic (read: urban) districts. Let's put on our tinfoil cap -- just for a second, I swear -- and think about it.

You get the Secretaries of State of both of these states deciding how many machines each precinct gets (let's again ask why Kenyon College only had TWO machines), you decide to keep the number of machines smaller in Democratic precincts -- the result would be that you both have extremely long ("unconscionably long" seems to be the key phrase") lines AND then when you get the vote totals to a certain level... the machines start counting backwards! It couldn't be a better strategy if it was manufactured by the Parallax Corporation! I'm just saying!

So again, the problem is that none of the debunkers seem to be establishing what went wrong in Broward County and why, and what went wrong in several parts of Ohio.

The election probably wasn't stolen. There probably wasn't widespread fraud. But is there enough evidence of irregularities to merit a GAO investigation and an independent Ohio recount? As the stories continue to pile up, you bet your ass there is.