So whaddya think? Was the vote fixed?

Color me a conspiracy theorist, but I say the vote was tampered with in certain places. The reach of power in this country is broad and deep. I think it is entirely credible that not only were eligible voters disenfranchised but that the actual votes were manipulated-- especially in the case of electronic voting machines.

Scuttlebutt over mistmatches between exit polls and results are commonplace; of course, they're often anecdotal or misquoted-- or even fabricated. In a cynical society such as ours, there will always be complainers, whether legitimate or spurious.

Nevertheless, I'd like to see any one of the counties in question in Florida-- the ones where vast differences between registrations and/or exit polls and the final results were reliably reported as greatest-- volunteer for a sort of informal "system check." Willing voters (given the bizarre statistics in some of those counties, there should be more than a few volunteers) should organize for a recount of their own. Without "election officials" to assist or interfere, they should create a simple system to allow willing participants to "report" the vote they made on election day. It would be a kind of poll, I suppose, which, in the end, may have little significance, but it's an opportunity to get the scoop from the horse's mouth, as it were-- from the voters themselves. DID they actually vote the way the election officials SAID they voted? Only they can tell us.

I suggest a technologically simple system: perhaps every participant could be given a penny to drop into an appropriate jar: one jar for Bush, one for Kerry. Then run the coins through a coin counter (available in some grocery stores these days) and a tally could thereby be reached quickly and easily.

How would you prevent multiple vote-casting? I don't know. I don't know how to create the system, but I think the experiment would be very enlightening.

What do you think?