Reply #36: you know how terrorist cells function, yes?

[kk897]

The same principles could be applied to "fixing" the vote, and no more than a handful of people would be in the know about any particular action. A broad spectrum of strategies could be applied, from supression to intimidation to misinformation to bending a punch card here or there to assigning the number and type of machines to particular precincts...

In fact, I can easily envision a way in which the machine counts could be fixed and NO ONE at the county level would even realize it.

The county people submit their true tallies (which had previously been skewed by the pre-election tactics anyway), and by the time they appear on the official SoS website, well, they're a little different. But they're not going to kick about it, since mistakes happen all the time. These mistakes, like the 4K in Gahanna---eh, they happen. We'll catch them eventually, say the county people. There can't be any systematic fraud here, that just doesn't happen here, the convince themselves. I, for one, can't account for 281 votes in Union County. Eh, probably just a clerical error (I was too sick to take part in the recount, BTW). And only a handful would be involved in the actual dirty work.

That's probably why a three percent recount was, while symbolically important, probably not actually important. And just to be sure, there was almost no county that chose to choose the precincts at random.

I believe Blackwell was complicit, and when the recounts threatened to undermine his authoriteye, he put it around that the recount effort was a waste of taxpayers' money, the employees' time, that it was sour grapes, etc., etc., etc. He made it clear that the counties could do whatever they wanted, basically, and he created the air of hostility in which the recount would take place. At that point, the county people didn't have to know there had been any fixing...they just wanted to do anything they could to piss off the Glibs.

Meanwhile, those ballots sat for weeks...

Say, why does Blackwell refuse to testify under oath about the election? Hey, if it works for GWB, why not JKB?