Ohio recounts! Well, not yet.

Whether you think all these irregularities are just the randomness of life and nothing fishy whatsoever, or whether you are pinning your hopes, dreams, and the possibility of an Ambassadorship in a Kerry Administration to whatever the hell is going on in Ohio, most people can agree that it'd be a good thing to settle what happened in Ohio for certain. The arguments against having recounts are generally pretty sketchy -- I can't even remember what the GOP explanation for suing to stop the recounts in Florida were in 2000, but something along the lines of "this is slowing down Democracy" or "this is just prolonging the inevitable."

I say, let's prolong the inevitable!

Bev Harris, the activist behind Black Box Voting, one of the major Internet websites fighting against paper-trail-less electronic voting in America, has been organizing a new endeavor, one that I think is greatly worth supporting just to get to the bottom of Ohio: Help America Recount. Here's her explanation:

Getting out the vote is good, but getting a 123 percent turnout is too good to be true. This happened in Fairview Park, Ohio. In Broward County, Florida, voting machines can do the moon walk: They count back-wards, but only on certain ballot measures.

If you want to buy a recount in Ohio you don't need to live there...you do need to be a US citizen and you need to get out your check book. How much is Democracy worth to you...starting next week no one can stop us from auditing Ohio were gonna get em.

In New Hampshire, voting trends seemed to depend more on which voting machine was used than on what party voters were affiliated with. When asked to produce “zero reports” at poll opening, some Florida touch-screen machines reported votes were already in the system, apparent stuffing of the electronic ballot box. Gahanna, Ohio had thousands more votes show up than voters.

Accounting for provisional ballots has been murky, and anomalies have now surfaced in Cuyahoga County, Perry County, and Youngstown Ohio. Florida optical scan machines in 40 counties had statistically improbable results, which did not exist in Florida touch-screens. Technicians got inside access to a central tabulator in Collier County during the middle of the election, and modem security settings may have been disabled for Diebold machines.

As hundreds of anomalies pop up, citizens are thinking:

Who really won? Don’t know. Gotta audit!

That's right -- Ohio, unlike Florida, actually has recount mechanisms in place. (Way to go, Ohio! Baby, if you ever wondered, wondered, whatever became of me, I'm living on the air in Cincinatti -- sorry.)

Apparently, Ohio law allows for any five Ohioans who did not vote for the winning candidate can file for recounts. It costs $10 per precinct. So it'll cost about $200,000 to pay for a state-wide recount. Hey, what's $200,000 after Bush and Kerry just paid over 200 million each for their campaigns. I'm pullng out my wallet as we speak...

Adopt a precinct! One way or another, let's get some answers -- whether its a good solid debunking or... well, we'll cross that road when we come to it. But we only have a week from Friday.