The 2004 election conspiracy theory

Project censored have a report from an academic in California, Dennis Loo, who believes that George Bush won the 2004 election with the help of widespread fraud. There certainly were anomalies in the vote but I'm not convinced there was the kind of centrally orchestrated fraud theorised here. Some very smart evoting experts monitored the election and picked up on most of the issues mentioned and others. In spite of the problems, though, the likes of Ed Felten, Avi Rubin and Bruce Schneier have never suggested that the election was stolen, as believed by Dennis Loo.

Certainly there remain unanswered questions and the explanations thus far offered for some of the inconsistencies don't hold water. The sum of a series of unexplained difficulties does not always amount to a central conspiracy, however. Though there would seem to be plenty of merit in investigating local anomalies in order to track down the real causes. Complex processes will always exhibit complex localised problems and folks like Rubin and Felten have gone to great lengths to explain the issues with introducing electronic voting machines into the election process. Their predictions the the kind of problems we would see following the inappropriate deployment poorly designed version of these machines will to some extent have been borne out in the 2004 election. Getting to the root of the actual causes in the various localities in the live election will be important so that the process can be repaired for the next time.