While I have more or less accepted the reported results of the election and do not hold out much more than an iota of hope that anything could change, I nevertheless stand by my earlier statement that we should not simply throw up our hands and let things go. There is still much to look at.

Case in point: Some precincts in Ohio are reporting erroneous vote count results. Commenter Sam alerted me to the story, and the San Francisco Chronicle carries a full account:

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. Bush’s total should have been recorded as 365.

That machine was apparently the only of its kind in Ohio, but irregularities abound elsewhere. 1,100 e-voting “glitches” were found in Florida, with a majority of them just ‘happening’ to take votes away from Kerry and give them to Bush. In each state, we have to examine things to death–especially in Ohio, where the margin is slimmest. We should not simply or meekly accept the idea that this is a one-shot error. There are thousands of precincts in Ohio, and all of them must be checked for this type of discrepancy before the tally is made official.

For those of you who would say that the election is officially over: it’s not. The vote must be certified starting in mid-November and lasting until December 13th. Until then, Bush declaration of victory or not, Kerry concession or not, the vote is not official. That means that if miscounts are found and reported, the corrected count can be adjusted–and if, say, 100 Ohio precincts out of the thousands reporting have a 4000-vote surplus for Bush, the state would, by law, be required to go for Kerry, who would become president.

Like I said, it’s a way-off unlikely possibility, but it should be checked into. Every precinct, and not just in Ohio, but in all of the six states that used electronic voting machines this time around. Fortunately, there are advocates out there unwilling to give up yet: Black Box Voting (www.blackboxvoting.org) is making a huge FOI inquiry to gain access to voting machine records.

We may not pull this one out of a hat, but we damned well better scrutinize the results as well as we can.