If you hear the two names “Diebold” (the voting machine company) and “Broward” (the county in Florida) together in a news story, then you know it’s going to be about election fraud.

And so it is–even a week before election day.

Diebold, of course, is run by a fervent Republican and Bush supporter who promised to deliver Ohio for Bush (and he probably did), whose voting machine company is not only incredibly reluctant to leave paper trails, but their machines are dead easy to hack and are infamous for “mistakes” in tabulation which “coincidentally” always favor Republicans.

Broward County was one of the two in Florida in 2000 which illegally allowed Republican Party operatives to take home invalid Republican absentee ballot forms and, again illegally, alter them to qualify. In 2004, the county went gung-ho in following an order to invalidate voter registrations over technicalities (PDF file) which would weigh against legitimate voters who were less literate (e.g., immigrants), which disproportionately disqualified Democrats.

So, seeing both these names in a news story today, what could possibly be going wrong?

Well, it seems that Diebold machines in Broward County are mysteriously switching votes from one candidate to another candidate. And again, coincidentally, it is switching votes for Democrats into votes for Republicans. What a shock!

Debra A. Reed voted with her boss on Wednesday at African-American Research Library and Cultural Center near Fort Lauderdale. Her vote went smoothly, but boss Gary Rudolf called her over to look at what was happening on his machine. He touched the screen for gubernatorial candidate Jim Davis, a Democrat, but the review screen repeatedly registered the Republican, Charlie Crist.

It took the man three attempts, with the help of a poll worker, to get the vote correct.

But this was not an isolated incident:

Mauricio Raponi wanted to vote for Democrats across the board at the Lemon City Library in Miami on Thursday. But each time he hit the button next to the candidate, the Republican choice showed up. Raponi, 53, persevered until the machine worked. Then he alerted a poll worker.

All the incidents reported were, coincidentally, people trying to vote Democratic and instead being recorded as voting Republican. And frankly, I would not trust that even the final “corrected” vote was recorded in the machine’s records accurately, just because the confirmation screen said so.

And what was the lame-ass explanation? According to Broward Supervisor of Elections spokeswoman Mary Cooney, the “screens on heavily used machines to slip out of sync,” leading to the wrong vote being recorded.

How the hell can a screen “slip out of sync”? These machines rely on the same technology used on ATMs, which are used in similarly heavy fashion; have you ever heard of the screens on ATM machines “slipping out of sync”? Have you ever asked for $40 and gotten $80 instead? Not to mention that, even if your machines are of such crappy quality that “slipping” occurs, you would naturally space the virtual buttons apart widely enough so that a vote for one candidate would never register as for another–that it would, instead, not register at all, or register as an error, immediately alerting the voter, and not waiting for the voter to hopefully catch the slip-up at the end of the process. Bad engineering on top of bad engineering–unless, of course, it is deliberate engineering.

But not to worry: the easy-to-follow “15-step process is outlined in the poll-workers manual.”

Also, Cooney said that it’s all OK because “It is resolved right there at the early-voting site.”

Yeah, all the slip-ups that are noticed and corrected. The others, however, go on record as votes for Republicans by Democrats.

Coincidentally.