In the aftermath of the election we were hearing all kinds of speculation about possible voter fraud, and much of what was alleged sounded pretty compelling – if it was accurate, anyway. You had reports of counties that were 85% Dem voting overwhelmingly for Dubya, for instance, and it seemed that all these anomalous counties were the ones using the new electronic voting systems that experts had been warning us about for quite awhile.

The problem with all this is that while it certainly sounded sufficiently suspicious, it was entirely too anecdotal to make policy on. What I said then was that we needed some hardcore statistical analysis to determine just how likely or unlikely these reported results were in the absence of some external intervention – that is, how likely is it that what we were seeing was the result of chance vs. cheating. Of course, I wasn’t in any position to do such a study, but I hoped that somebody out there was. Then this hit the wires:

BERKELEY, Calif., Nov. 18 /PRNewswire/ — Today the University of California’s Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study – the sole method available to monitor the accuracy of e- voting – reporting irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election. The study shows an unexplained discrepancy between votes for President Bush in counties where electronic voting machines were used versus counties using traditional voting methods – what the team says can be deemed a “smoke alarm.” Discrepancies this large or larger rarely arise by chance – the probability is less than 0.1 percent. The research team formally disclosed results of the study at a press conference today at the UC Berkeley Survey Research Center, where they called on Florida voting officials to investigate.

Read summary document.

My initial reaction to the suggestion that the election was hacked was simple – while I can certainly believe there are folks in the GOP power structure who would do such a thing, I’m also a believer in Occam’s Razor, and based on what I know about the American public I was quite capable of believing that Bush got more votes than Kerry without any need to cheat.

Now, in light of this Cal study, I think we have what we need to call for a full-scale investigation, to be conducted by an independent special investigator, into what we’ll refer to as “disturbingly improbable departures from electoral plausibility.” Further, it may be time for John Kerry to stop hiding behind the skirts of Nader and the Greens and start raising some hell of his own. Whatever happened in Florida – and statistically speaking, the chance that it occurred naturally is less than .1% – may well have happened in Ohio, too, and this is just too important to let go.

Ahh, some more sour grapes on the part of an academic intellectual liberal elite, out of touch with the real world and the real values of the majority of Americans, right? Bullshit. The integrity of our electoral process is a non-partisan issue, and this isn’t the first time we’ve had rumors that an election was rigged (Republicans have always thought they got jobbed by Kennedy and Daley in 1960, and they could be right – Daley was probably at least as crooked as people have accused Karl Rove of being).

Whether it’s a Dem rigging or a Republican rigging, this ought to be something that Red America and Blue America can agree on, because if your boy can steal one today, your worst political nightmare can steal the next one right back, and if you’ve dismissed the idea that an election is stealable out of hand, where are you going to find the moral credibility to mount a challenge when you’re on the wrong end of the shaft? Dubya can carry on about the capital he earned all he wants, but the margin of this victory was miniscule – pretend it was a landslide at your own risk. In 2k8, the Democrats merely need to hold serve in the Blue States and swing the slightest fraction in a couple battleground states to win the White House back.

I can hear the self-righteous outrage now, with Red America squealing like a pack of stuck pigs after Hillary Clinton wins a cliffhanger in 2k8 due to some odd-looking results in the Arkansas outback. Can’t happen? Please – if Hil runs you can bet the farm that Jim Carville is going to be running the show, and if there is a smarter, meaner, dirtier fixer in politics than Karl Rove, it’s Carville.

So let’s be clear – you don’t care about the integrity of the system now, we don’t want to hear from you then, either.