More write-ups

Josh Levin, whose original piece in Slate didn't do enough to set me at ease, now writes more in Slate, basically going further to debunk the "large numbers of Bush votes in opti-scan using Democrat districts" in Florida -- citing both the voting patterns in '96 and 2000 and their similarities to this year ... Bush seeemed to get 10% more in each of those districts than he did in 2000, which is a large surge but not completely unexplainable via the incumbent rule and so on. I still find that it's strange that other counties with similar make-up did not experience such a Bush surge, though -- that pesky Lee county still sticks out for me.

The Boston Globe joins the fray, with an article on today's front page that "Internet buzz on vote fraud is dismissed." (That headline seems just a tad hasty.) The Globe reporter uses such nuanced specific statements as "Kerry campaign officials and a range of election-law specialists agree that while machines made errors and long lines in Democratic precincts kept many voters away, there's no realistic chance that Kerry actually beat Bush." A veteran Kerry advisor named Jack Corrigan says that Bush didn't steal the election. An NYU professor named Troy Duster -- a supporter of Nader in 2000 -- states that "'It sounds like a paranoid fantasy, but I think the data suggests that even if Bush won, he didn't win by the kind of margins that are out there. We have a crisis here of potential legitimacy with all the stuff going on on the Web, and the way to deal with this is to do the research."

That's right. Do the research. Clear everything up. And then let's back our duly elected President.