Shenanigans

Link: (emphasis mine)

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.
Franklin County’s unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry’s 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.
[…]
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. …

It’s important to note that while most of Ohio uses punch-cards, they are taken to central tally centers where ballots are fed into processing machines; machines manufactured by — you guessed it — Diebold. Machines running Microsoft Windows and using Microsoft Access databases. (Microsoft, security is job #1!) “[Diebold is] committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year,” CEO Wally O’Dell promised last September.
And then there’s this:

MONDAY Nov 1 2004: New information indicates that hackers may be targeting the central computers counting our votes tomorrow. All county elections officials who use modems to transfer votes from polling places to the central vote-counting server should disconnect the modems now.
[…]
It appears that such an attack may already have taken place, in a primary election 6 weeks ago in King County, Washington — a large jurisdiction with over one million registered voters. Documents, including internal audit logs for the central vote-counting computer, along with modem “trouble slips” consistent with hacker activity, show that the system may have been hacked on Sept. 14, 2004. Three hours is now missing from the vote-counting computer’s “audit log,” an automatically generated record, similar to the black box in an airplane, which registers certain kinds of events.

I’m not going to tinfoil hat yet, but I’d expect more of this, and the election was only 3 days ago.