An Election Is Just an Excuse To Screw People Over:
Now, the Rude Pundit is no conspiracy buff. He doesn't give a shit who shot Kennedy, he doesn't care whether or not the House of Windsor is the rightful heir to the throne, he believes Area 51 and Roswell are boring places in the middle of a goddamn desert, and, frankly, he thinks that anyone who wastes time debating this nonsense, like whether Illuminati or the Masons or some satanic intertwining of the two, along with the Jews, runs the world, oughta do something more useful with his or her life, like obsess on J. Lo and Ben or Prince Charles' cock and where it might have been.

But something weird and creepy is going on with the shift to computer voting in the United States. Since the hanging, dangling, and flaccid chad debacle, many areas of the country are shifting to computer-based voting systems, including touch-screen machines. That's not news. And, yeah, it's freaky weird when the head of Diebold, the company selling voting machines around the country, and in Ohio, declares that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." And it's vaguely suspicious that so many Republicans, in particular, oppose paper verification of votes. Still more disturbing is the fact that, really, the programming and its code are constantly shown to be faulty and open to hacking.

Let's be clear here: after the cluster fuck of the last Presidential election, a couple of percent of faulty machines could screw the pooch to soreness.

Then we've got the first cases of fuck-ups: There's this from Indianapolis, where, in a county of 19,000 registered voters, the computer data showed 144,000 votes cast. Hell, in Virginia, Republicans are challenging results from the touch-screen voting machines in Fairfax County.

And it's that last one that's so tantalizing. Here's the Rude Pundit's conspiracy:
We know that Republicans are big, whiny pussies who will manipulate, lie, and steal in order to win elections or get their way. Look at California. Look at Max Cleland in Georgia. We know from Joe Conason, Al Franken, and others that had George W. Bush lost the electoral college and won the popular vote (as many thought would happen) that his machine of right-wing nuts would have shut down the country until Bush was declared the winner. So, fast forward to a year from now: if Bush loses, the lack of action now on the malfunctioning machines and code will lead to Republican protests that the computers failed and that the election should be invalidated because of this. And, remember, there's no paper trail.

Sound far-fetched? One hopes. But otherwise, we're in for another long slog through the continuing twilight of democracy.