KERRY WILL LOSE THE ELECTION!

Other than the now-routine acts of purging blacks from the voter roles in states such as Florida, THIS is the reason why Kerry will lose the vote count to Bush in November. Note that I said vote COUNT. Snippet:

In the dank back room of an East Village bar, Teresa Hommel, assisted by a laptop and projector, fervently warned a gathering of Democrats last week that the Republican Party could steal the November election. Then she demonstrated how. Using a computer simulation she herself programmed, called the "Fraudulent Voting Machine," Hommel tried to show how the software in electronic voting machines, which will be used by as many as a third of American voters in the November election, could be manipulated to produce phony results. The program, which is available on Hommel's website, wheresthepaper.org, is simple enough: A user chooses, and then verifies, a vote either for candidate John Doe or candidate Mary Smith. No matter how the user votes, Mary Smith always wins. "Anything in a computer can be changed," said Hommel, who has worked with computers for over 30 years. She's devoted the past year solely to the voting issue. She talks about voter-verified paper audits of the new machines—a primary demand of many advocates—with an enthusiasm that borders on zeal. "The [electronic machines] are being sold as a panacea, on the basis that you can trust them," she said. "The people selling them are lying." There are a number of reasons why the new machines, Direct Recording Electronic Voting Systems (known as DREs), are viewed so suspiciously, by so many. There is the legacy of the contested Florida results during the 2000 presidential election, and the comments of Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold Inc., a manufacturer of DREs. In a fundraising letter he sent to Ohio Republicans last August, O'Dell wrote that he was committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." But as concern with the security of the upcoming election grows, the window in which changes can be made is slamming shut. Aides to several members of Congress admitted that legislation that would require the electronic machines to produce a paper audit trail will probably go nowhere during the current session. This means that a security regimen will be a voluntary, unfunded project, undertaken by state election officials rather than mandated by the federal government....

It's not the votes that count, it's the count that counts. Kerry will have to get an historic landslide of votes to even have a chance of winning the vote count. It will only take electronic voting fraud in a single state, such as California, to turn the election and give Bush another illegitimate 4 years to wreak further havoc on this planet.

My only question is, why do most of us consider this impending electronic voting fiasco less important than get-out-the-vote drives, or the worthless polls that pundits are constantly quoting, or the intra-Democratic Party bickering, or F-9/11, etc? Democrats won't be pulling their heads out of their asses until November 3, when their I-told-you-so Republican neighbor taps them on the shoulder and points out the newspaper headline:

BUSH REELECTED!!