Hey, Diogenes! Over here!

And on cable TV, no less. Apparently, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC did a rather impressive piece on problems with the election. I didn't see the broadcast, so I'm relying on an account from a reader at BuzzFlash.

Olbermann covered the points I mentioned the other day, such as heavily Democratic counties in Florida going for Bush and the fact that the problems with touchscreen voting appeared in those areas where there was no printout, making a recount difficult if not impossible. But he went beyond that in several ways, including showing that this is the first time those Florida counties have gone Republican. (I had heard previously that the trend of people registered as Democrats voting for Republicans had existed in 2000 but not to near the same extent as in 2004. And as I noted before, the trend only seemed to exist in certain counties, those served by optical-scan voting machines connected to central tabulators.)

Among other points:

- He interviewed a reporter from a newspaper in Cincinnati, who told him that for the first time, reporters were prevented from witnessing the voting in some of the major minority areas of the city due to an order from the Department for the Security of the Fatherland, which claimed that these areas were under an increased threat of terrorism.

- In some counties in Ohio, the press has been barred from inspecting the figures from voting, something it has always been allowed to before.

- Interestingly, there were 90,000 more votes cast in Ohio than there are registered voters. Let Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell explain that one.

There were also a few other oddities, such as the fact that the same Florida voters who supported Bush also supported by an even bigger margin a measure to raise the state minimum wage to $1.00 above the federal level. Certainly that's possible and could reflect being concerned about both the economy (where voters favored Kerry) and security (where voters favored Bush), but still.

There was also the matter of absentee ballots in Florida being taken away by the Secretary of State's office, preventing local officials from counting them.

But as I've said before, the frustration with all this is that while there's enough to be suggestive, there's not enough to know. And even more, while I think a prima facie case has been made for fraud, manipulation, and intimidation, there's not enough to know if the level was great enough to affect the outcome. In Ohio, for example, the margin was something like, if I recall correctly, 136,000.

Even so, No Stolen Elections!, the folks who organized a pledge of street action on November 3 in the event of widespread fraud, are urging people to call Blackwell's office at 614-466-2585 to demand

- every single provisional vote be counted,
- the release of information about the number of "spoiled" ballots, where a vote can be thrown out because of a random mark somewhere on the ballot, and
- a handcount of "spoiled" punch cards to count as many as possible.

They are also calling on people to demand of their Congressional representatives that they join with Reps. John Conyers, Rush Holt, Jerrold Nadler, Robert Scott, Mel Watt, and Robert Wexler in demanding a General Accounting Office investigation of the thousands of complaints regarding the 2004 election. Call 202-224-3121 or 800-839-5276, the Congressional switchboard, and ask for your representative's office. If you don't know who that is, the League of Women Voters can help you here. (I don't know if it's been updated post-election, but since incumbents rarely lose, there's a good chance it's right.)