UPDATED: Tales From The Dark Side

Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens (who's spent his recent years on the Dark Side) takes a look at the Ohio election issues in the current Vanity Fair. I was expecting him to tell us how the exit polls got it wrong, but instead he writes that something's fishy since so many 'isolated incidents' favored Bush over Kerry.

Of course, Vanity Fair does not post its articles on the internet, so you'll have to buy it and read it....it's the "Hollywood" issue.

UPDATE:

Here's some excerpts:

No conspiracy theorist, and no fan of John Kerry's, the author nevertheless found the Ohio polling results impossible to swallow: Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines.

I did not think that John Kerry should have been President of any country at any time.

The Federal Election Commission, which has been a risible body for far too long, ought to make Ohio its business. The Diebold company, which also manufactures A.T.M.'s, should not receive another dime until it can produce a voting system that is similarly reliable. And Americans should cease to be treated like serfs or extras when they present themselves to exercise their franchise.

First, the county-by-county and precinct-by-precinct discepencies. In Butler County, for example, a Democrat running for State Supreme Court chief justice received 61,559 votes. The Kerry-Edwards ticket drew about 5,000 fewer votes, at 56,243. This contrasts rather markedly with the behavior of the Republican electorate in that county, who cast about 40,000 fewer votes for their judicial nominee than they did for Bush and Cheney. (The latter pattern, with vote totals tapering down from the top of the ticket, is by far the more general-and probable-one nationwide and statewide)...In 11 other counties, the same Democratic judicial nominee, C. Ellen Connally, managed to outpoll the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominees by hundreds and sometimes thousands of votes. In Cuyahoga County, which includes the city of Cleveland, two largely black precincts on the East Side voted like this. In Precinct 4F: Kerry 290, Bush 21, Peroutka 215. In Precinct 4N: Kerry 318, Bush 11, Badnarik, 163....In 2000, Ralph Nader's best year, the total vote received in Precinct 4f by all third-party candidates combined was eight.

In Montgomery County, two precincts recorded a combined undervote of almost 6,000...that number represents an undervote of 25 percent, in a county where undervoting averages out at just 2 percent. Democratic precincts had 75% more undervotes than Republican ones.

In Precinct 1B of Gehanna, in Franklin County, a computerized voting machine recorded a total of 4,258 votes for Bush and 260 votes for Kerry. In that precinct, however, there are only 800 registered voters, of whom 638 showed up.

Miami County also managed to report 19,000 additional votes for Bush after 100 percent of the precincts had reported on Election Day.

Machines are fallible and so are humans, and shit happens, to be sure, and no doubt many Ohio voters were able to record their choices promptly and without grotesque anomalies. But what strikes my eye is this: in practically every case where lines were too long or machines too few the foul-up was in a Democratic county or precinct, and in practically every case where machines produced impossible or improbable outcomes it was the challenger who suffered and the actual or potential Democratic voters who were shortchanged, discouraged, or held up to ridicule as chronic undervoters or as sudden converts to fringe-party losers.

Whichever way you shake it, or hold it up to the light, there is something wrong about the Ohio election that refuses to add up. The sheer number of irregularities compelled a formal recount, which was completed in late December and which came out much the same as the original one, with 176 fewer votes for George Bush. But this was a meaningless exercise in reassurance, since there is simply no means of checking, for example, how many "vote hops" the computerized machines might have performed unnoticed...

...There is one soothing explanation that I don't trust anymore. It was said, often in reply to charges of vote tampering, that it would have had to be "a conspiracy so immense" as to involve a dangerously large number of people. Indeed, some Ohio Democrats themselves laughed off some of the charges, saying that they too would have had to be part of the plan. The stakes are very high: one defector or turncoat with hard evidence could send the principals to jail forever and permanently discredit the party that had engaged in fraud.

I had the chance to spend quality time with someone who came to me well recommended, who did not believe that fraud had yet actually been demonstrated, whose background was in the manufacture of the machines, and who wanted to be anonymous. It certainly could be done, she said, and only a very, very few people, would have to be "in on it."

I asked her finally, what would be the logical grounds for deducing that any tampering had in fact occurred. "Well. I understand from what I have read", she said, "that the early exit polls on the day were believed by both parties." That, I was able to tell her from direct experience, was true. But it wasn't quite enough, either. So I asked, "What if all the anomalies and malfunctions, to give them a neutral name, were distributed along one axis of consistency: in other words, that they kept on disadvantaging only one candidate?" My question was hypothetical as she had made no particular study if Ohio, but she replied at once, "Then that would be quite serious."