Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried

This is pretty persuasive to me that no election conspiracy has been found... yet.

"...For its part, the Kerry campaign has been trying to tamp down the conspiracy theories and to tell supporters that their mission now is to ensure that every vote is counted, not that the election be overturned.

"We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset," said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, "I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering."

A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the final results of the election.

"The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."

Whether that will ever convince everyone is an open question.

"I'd give my right arm for Internet rumors of a stolen election to be true," said David Wade, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, "but blogging it doesn't make it so. We can change the future; we can't rewrite the past."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/12/politics/12theory.html?th

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=981650

Note: the NYTimes changed the headline, but it is the same article.