Kieran at Crooked Timber is the latest to point to a UC-Berkeley study that represents the new Great Kerry-Really-Won Hope for the left; there’s apparent county-level evidence that Florida counties that used electronic voting had a greater increase in Bush support from 2000 than counties that used optical-mark scanning. Rick Hasen has dug up some skeptical responses from voting experts, while Patrick Ruffini notes the bivariate relationship counters the authors’ thesis.

Of course, Diebold and the other e-voting manufacturers could have forestalled all of this silliness from the start by including a paper trail in their equipment.

Update: Andrew Gelman says only two counties are driving the results: the adjacent Southeast Florida counties of Palm Beach and Broward, both of which have relatively large Jewish populations (and thus might have been disproportionately more likely to vote Democratic in 2000 for the Gore-Lieberman ticket than for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards ticket).

Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh helpfully rounds up all the vote fraud allegations in one place, while Slashdot’s CmdrTaco continues to parody DemocraticUnderground. (Oh, you mean he’s serious? Never mind.)

I’ll just join the bandwagon by complaining that I had to stand in line for 30 minutes in a fire station that was open to the elements at both ends to cast my votes, zero of which turned out to be pivotal. I blame Diebold; they had nothing to do with the electronic voting machines in Hinds County, but I think they’re vicariously to blame somehow anyway.

One suspects that if people were more willing to give out-partisans the benefit of the doubt, contemporary political discourse would be far less painful. So, here’s some free advice for partisans on both sides of the aisle:

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.

(Sometimes attributed to Isaac Asimov; a variant is known as Hanlon’s Razor. I might add “poor memory” to the list.)

This particular post inspired by this and this, but equally applies to discussions of Kerry’s exact locations in Southeast Asia on particular dates during his service there, or other campaign “gotchas” you may wish to ponder.

On the other hand, sometimes you have to go with malice because nothing else fits the facts…

Update: Diebold scaremongering would be another example that fits firmly in the “ignorance or stupidity” category, by the way.

Stephen Taylor, the proprietor of the real PoliBlog™, points out the folly of leaping from punchcards to touchscreens—particularly by county election administrators whose general track-record of competence was pretty poor to begin with.

Plus, as an added bonus, it would have spared us the conspiracy-mongering claims that Diebold cares who wins the election.

Alex Knapp is not at all impressed with the spread of touchscreen voting and thinks it will ultimately create more problems than it solves; I generally agree, especially given the less expensive and superior alternative: optical mark recognition (OMR) machines, which are essentially glorified Scantron machines that read ink circles instead of pencil marks. Put an OMR scanner or two in each precinct, and the only other equipment you need are some pens and the proper machine-readable paper ballots. Not to mention that the audit trail is trivial: all you need to do is hang on to the ballots after they’re scanned.

Tom at Crooked Timber has a good piece on Diebold’s shenanigans with its electronic voting machines. Partsanship aside, I inherently distrust any voting machine that doesn’t keep a paper trail—whether we’re talking about those big old lever-based things that Mayor Daley loved so much or modern touchscreens.