This whole e-voting thing was suspect from the get go, but the more things that come out, and the more people who notice them, the more realistic this problem is becoming. For example, in 2000 Bush got about 2.9 million votes in Florida, where there are 3.4 million registered Republicans. About 85%. Not bad. In 2004, he got about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans statewide. In some counties, his votes tripled the number of registered Republicans. Of course, those numbers are very different than the exit polls.

Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states – Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually inconceivable.

“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”

If Bush’s totals weren’t artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

This gets sketchier when you dig in deeper and see that some counties that have up to 88% registered Democrats produced landslides for Bush, when the counties right next to them with identical demographics went for Kerry. Exit polls said both counties should have gone for Kerry. The difference? The counties that went for Bush used the optical scanners made by Diebold.

Are you scratching your head yet? You should be.

AFS has been doing an amazing job covering it. Go check it out there.