Sigh. I thought CodePoetry would know better than to believe the most X-Files kind of stuff:

Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

I'm so surprised. Look at me, I'm surprised. This is me surprised.

Let's say it together, now: electronic voting is a bad, bad, terrible thing, at least, as currently implemented. One state server on a private network with SSH connections to the voting machines with at least 4,096-bit-long keys and linking every vote to a registered voter record -- and it prints a receipt internally and delivers one to you, just like an ATM -- that's the way to go. Anything else just won't cut it.

While I admire being on guard against electoral monkey business, there are two serious problems with hanging your hat on this theory.

1. Bush won in several places where there are more registered Democrats than Republicans. I live in Oklahoma, where 53% of voters are registered Democrats, but the state voted solidly for Bush, and no one expected anything different.
2. Once again, and hopefully for the last time, optical scan ballots are paper ballots. Oklahoma uses them too. You just mark the ballot in a special way (either filling in an oval with the #2 pencil, or in Oklahoma, drawing a line with a pen they provide you). They are easily recounted by hand, and they provide all the paper trail anyone needs. Even if this story is true, the assertion is that someone hacked the tabulating PC, not that anyone tampered with the ballots themselves.

If we expect people to take allegations of voter fraud seriously, they have to be based on solid evidence and be believable. This thing is neither.