According to Wired, the GAO is going to investigate how the vote was counted and during the election, particularly in hotly contested states like Ohio and Florida. This comes on the heels of many discoveries across the country of machines that were “incorrectly programmed” to give the advantage to Bush, and other irregularities. This is great news, but unfortunately, the GAO has no authority to take any action if it does discover problems. But it shows that the GAO is taking criticisms about the election seriously.
What has always bothered me is that the touch-screen voting machines we used in Florida and other states have no paper trail. Considering that the company that made the voting machines also makes ATMs (my ATM, in fact), they should have been able to spit out some sort of paper record of each person’s vote that the person could dispute if it was incorrect. It’s not as if they were unfamiliar with the technology! But for some reason, which eludes me, they didn’t do that. The only reason I could think of would be to fix the election by programming the machine to give a certain candidate more votes. And considering that the president of the company that makes the machines is a Bush zealot, this may not be such a far-fetched idea. When Zogby’s exit polls in certain states were unusually far off from the final results in those states, one must question whether an accurate count was made of people’s actual votes.
Let’s hope the GAO can stay independent and find out the truth about what happened in this election, though I’m not holding my breath. And I certainly will not dare fantasize that a democrat will be in the White House in January.
