As I was trying to get to sleep this morning, I wondered about the wild differences between the Exit Polling numbers, which strongly favored Kerry, versus the Final Results which narrowly favored Bush.

Given the statement in August of 2003 by Walden O’dell, the CEO of Deibold Inc., the Ohio-based company and the nation’s #1 maker of Electronic Voting Machines there is reason to be suspicious.

He wrote in a fund-raising letter to Ohio Republicans last year that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

As I lay in bed, trying to make sense of what still makes little sense, I had hoped to look today into how much the Exit Poll results varied from the Final Results in states and districts where there was Electronic Voting versus the difference in states where paper ballots etc. were in use.

Looks like Raw Story has begun to do exactly that. UPDATE: Here is a graphic representation of the information that the Raw Story article details.

Their early investigation shows that in states where E-voting with no paper trails were used, there was an enormous difference — always in favor of Bush — between the Exit Polls and the Final Results. Whereas in the states with paper ballots or E-voting machines that provided a printed paper trail, the Exit Polling was within .01% of the Final Results. Look at those numbers yourself.

Perhaps the mainstream media will discover a sense of civic duty and look further into that. For some reason, I’m not holding my breath, and it’ll probably fall to folks like us to do their heavy lifting for them.

Look also at the bizarre numbers that Oliver Willis discovered amongst the vote tabulations as they were coming out of Ohio’s website last night. He supplies pictures, so it should be simple for you wingnuts to understand.

And on Nov. 1, the day before the election, BlackBoxVoting.org — a site which has been warning for some time of such concerns – issued an urgent release which began:

I am pleased to see that that group has now filed “Freedom of Information Act” petitions for the audit logs of Electronic Voting machines in many states, given that they found some three hours of missing data from such audit logs six weeks ago on a central computer in Washington during their primary elections there.

Finally, I wonder if anyone will follow up with Karl Rove’s statement to Sean Hannity on Sept. 29th when he said “We’ve got a couple of surprises that we intend to spring.”

Now that the election is over and won, perhaps Mr. Rove could elucidate on what those “surprises” actually were.

Anyone in the media willing to take your job seriously enough to ask him?