Well, as everybody in the nation is well aware, George W. Bush has been in office for 7 years.  His first election, which was won with the electoral college (despite getting less popular votes than Gore), has raised doubts about the legitimacy of his election, especially concerning Florida.  Now, I'm sure everybody remembers people in Florida getting worked up over voting for Buchanan instead of Gore, and all that hoopla, and Gore did seem like a sore loser with recount after recount being ordered by him.  But now, it all seems very understandable.  Gore, with all the votes in, probably did get screwed.  How can I say that?  Well, it's rather simple:  Palm Beach County.

http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/politics/FL2000.htm

  Taking a look at this website, as well as other statistical measures of the Buchanan vs. Gore vote in Florida, Buchanan, a conservative third party candidate, had his largest success in Palm Beach County, which is known for leaning to the left.  In fact, Buchanan had three times as many votes in Palm Beach County as he did in any other county in Florida.  This leads the observer to question why he had such success in Palm Beach County.  Looking at the punch hole ballot however, casts some light on this issue.  Another interesting support for this argument is found in the above website in the statement, "It appears that over 19,000 Palm Beach voters saw that they had made that mistake and then punched the correct third hole for Al Gore, also. These ballots were rejected by the vote counting machine as double-voted ballots."  In plain English, that means that 19,000 ballots had a vote for Gore and for Buchanan.  Considering which one got the popular vote, it's likely that the great majority (90% plus) of those ballots were intended as votes for Gore, and not for Buchanan.


  In the meantime, we have disenfranchised voters from New York who could not vote for their candidate of choice, Ron Paul, because they were told he had dropped out of the race:  http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_gigi_bow_080207_a_new_york_state_of_.htm

  That's not the only problem though.  Apparently voting machines can be hacked or otherwise compromised with something as simple as a magnet.  For more advanced techniques, it might require a little bit of doing, but do you think that would stop somebody who had a vested interest in one of the two major parties gaining the white house in November?  http://www.russiatoday.ru/news/news/20152

  However, as far as the electronic machines go, there is currently a bill in Congress that would offer money to voting districts across the nation that had equipped their machines to leave a paper trail or convert to paper ballots for the November election.  With the concerns about electronic machines and paper trails and the unreliability of these machines, this might be a bill worth supporting.  Take a look here:  http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hM24D2P_dBmIDGu_u_mPKthDHpGQD8U841PG0

  With all this going, apparently many Californian counties switched to paper ballots in a hurry before Super Tuesday:  http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2008/02/04/news/top_stories/17_55_082_3_08.txt

  But until notified otherwise, stay tuned.  It's quite possible for electronic votes to be miscounted and otherwise manipulated as well.