The Columbus Dispatch is reporting today that Diebold has finally admitted that their machines are capable of losing votes. Seems a lot like that Robin Williams movie where he becomes president just because the voting machine software is screwed up.

Unfortunately, in the real world I don't see the winner being big enough to call for a re-election.

Diemos wrote:Not to start a fight, but Bush lost the election, and was still made president...go figure.

It all comes down to how our Constitutional Republic works. The popular vote decides who the 538 people will be that really decides who will be elected. What mattered wasn't who was more popular, but who had more electoral votes. To quote wikipedia (yeah, bad source but easy to access):

In the American system of presidential elections, the electoral vote determines the winner, and Bush won this count, although Gore received the most votes (called the "popular vote"). This was the fourth time in American history that a candidate won the presidency without receiving at least a plurality of the popular vote; it also happened in the elections of 1824, 1876 and 1888.

Unfortunately, the founding fathers didn't plan for states passing laws requiring the electoral college to follow the popular vote. Nor did they plan on us having to vote for the lesser of two evils (to me the presidential election has become little more than a battle of the losers, where we pick which scumbag politician is the least despicable of the ones running).

Without a large base of well educated, well informed voters taking an active interest in their government, A democratic republic becomes a "tyranny of the masses" where group decisions free everyone of personal responsibility for decisions, allowing "us" to make decisions to do things that almost every one of us think is wrong.