Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked?

I'm fascinated by the various claims of conspiracy and fraud in this month's election. I don't know how much stock to put in them - my hunch is, "not much" - but perhaps the simplest, most logical explanation as to why the exit polls were so off (and only off in such a way as to favor Bush) is that there was foul play.

The piece I've linked to discusses the strange way in which non-touch screen precincts in Florida with 70+% of their registered voters being Democrats happened to give astonishingly large tallies to Bush. Rather than hacking individual counting machines, the speculation is that the results were tampered with on the "central tabulators" - the Windows-based PCs that all the voting machines phone home to in order to report their results.

Most persuasively, the article sites a program in which a technically-inclined grandmother demonstrates live for Howard Dean how easy it is to manipulate the master database of votes on a Diebold tabulator... without leaving a trace, and in less than two minutes:

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.) And they had left no tracks whatsoever, Harris said, noting that it would be nearly impossible for the election software – or a County election official - to know that the vote database had been altered.

*puts on tin foil hat*