In the wake of a Shameless Plug

Well, today (if luck holds) the Mac Weekly comes out and I have a nice column, "Cracking the Black Box Election," which describes some of the voting irregularities that the mainstream media generally refuses to talk about. In a move that has already sparked widespread rumors that I'm a self-aggrandizing megalomaniac, I have a reference to this site in the piece. For that, all I can say is that I'm a shameless Internet whore living in the age of self-made celebrity.

After press time, I discovered I made a couple mistakes in the column which I should correct here. In both cases, I understated the extent of examples of voting problems. First, I said that Volusia County double-counted hundreds of ballots in the 2000 election. In fact, they counted an extra 4000 votes fot Bush, and a Diebold optical scanner added a negative 16,000 votes for Gore... that is, subtracted about 30 times Bush's margin of victory, before a staffer caught the mistake. Another low-ball mistake on my part was saying that one machine in Broward County started counting a ballot initiative backwards at 32,767. In fact, a whole set of machines started counting backwards. I knew these things before I wrote the piece, but I slipped up and I'm sorry.

I was under a lot of time pressure when writing the piece, and quite hungry as well. My biggest complaint about the Mac Weekly this semester has been the irregular distribution of pizza, and I must call for equality and more grease from week to week as a solution.

Anyhow, I need to give some links. This week, Bev Harris at Black Box Voting stormed a farewell party for a Palm Beach County elections director, serving her with a lawsuit. Provisional ballot counting in Cuyahoga County, Ohio provided Kerry with 9,242 more votes, and there has been some legal wrangling about the qualification of these votes.

There will be hearings starting next Wednesday in Congress about voting irregularities, a source has told Brad Blog. I highly recommend checking out Bob Fitrakis' work in the Columbia Free Press (OH), who has been investigating the strange tales of Nov. 2. A public hearing he held provided the crazy quote about electronic votes jumping from Kerry to Bush that I started my piece with. Read this piece for stunning reports of administrative incompetence and very suspicious poll behavior from Fitrakis.

This PDF file sent as a complaint to Ohio's insanely partisan Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell (via Bradblog) has all kinds of interesting stuff in it, including reports of odd irregularities, conservative judicial candidates awash in money, and the mysterious Warren County lockdown.

Well, sadly that's all I've got time for before lunch & class. Keep on rockin' in the free world.