Did Mark Sanford legitimately win his South Carolin Congressional race? Or did he have help?

This was posted on the Brad Blog yesterday:  

Tonight, South Carolina's same 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems that declared the unknown, unemployed, never-once-campaigned-anywhere Alvin Green to have somehow defeated four-term state legislator and circuit court judge Vic Rawl to win the 2010 Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, declared Mark Sanford the winner over Elizabeth Colbert Busch by a 9 point landslide... 

The unverified and unverifiable computer-reported results tonight led PPP's Tom Jensen to tweet: "I feel bad about our SC-1 polling, I'd feel worse if there had been any indication from any other polling that Sanford landslide was coming". 

Neither Jensen nor PPP should feel bad. There was no more indication that a "landslide was coming", than there is proof tonight that it actually came. 

We explained last month, in detail, why the votes cast in this race on SC's oft-failed, easily-manipulated ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting system would be 100% unverifiable. As Vic Rawl, a Colbert Busch supporter and the man who inexplicably "lost" to Alvin Green told us at the time, no matter what the results would be tonight, no matter how inexplicable they might be, "the fact is, there's not a darn thing that anybody can do about it." 

While it's completely possible that PPP's pre-election numbers were entirely wrong, or that the disgraced Sanford legitimately, somehow, achieved an 18 point turnaround in just two weeks, the voters of SC will never know one way or another if he did or didn't. Once again, we have another 100% unverifiable faith-based election in the world's once-greatest democracy.

Now look I am well aware that anybody who questions the outcome of an election seems like a sore loser looking for a conspiracy theory to explain how THEIR candidate lost. And I don't want to be THAT guy.

However many of you know, because we covered it extensively during the last election, that the voting machines are completely unreliable and that in states where the Republican party is in charge Democrats cannot win unless they receive a large majority of the vote.

So did this happen in South Carolina? I don't know for certain, but there was something interesting that happened which first sent up red flags for me and which has made me question Sanford's victory ever since.

You see I had discovered that HuffPo was tracking the incoming results on a page which constantly refreshed every nine seconds, so I had left that page open on my computer in order to check back occasionally and see the progress of the vote tally.

For most of the morning the numbers were about 54% for Colbert Busch and I think about 47% for Sanford.

I got busy about halfway through my day and did not check the results for a two hour span of time. But when I checked again I was shocked to see that the numbers had completely reversed. In other words they were EXACTLY as I had seen them earlier but but they were on opposite sides of my screen.

Now I have reported before that there is software that was developed by the conservatives in charge of programming the voting machines which can flip the votes so long as the difference remains only 10%.

As you can see this election meets that criteria.

So did the South Carlina Republicans decide that as damaged as Sanford was he was still THEIR guy and help him to steal this election? Sadly we will never know.

But do you know what I think?

Though unable to steal the election for Mitt Romney, Florida Republicans DID manage to cost the President 11,000 votes.

Florida Governor Rick Scott.

Courtesy of the Orlando Sentinel:  

As many as 49,000 people across Central Florida were discouraged from voting because of long lines on Election Day, according to a researcher at Ohio State University who analyzed election data compiled by the Orlando Sentinel. About 30,000 of those discouraged voters — most of them in Orange and Osceola counties — likely would have backed Democratic President Barack Obama, according to Theodore Allen, an associate professor of industrial engineering at OSU. About 19,000 voters would have likely backed Republican Mitt Romney, Allen said. This suggests that Obama's margin over Romney in Florida could have been roughly 11,000 votes higher than it was, based just on Central Florida results. Obama carried the state by 74,309 votes out of more than 8.4 million cast.

Keep this in mind when you hear Republicans spouting off about patriotism or wanting to take this country back to "traditional values." One of those traditional values was the idea that everybody's vote counted and that American's right to vote was sacrosanct. (Well except for the female vote and the black vote of course. Those took a little longer to seem important to the white males running the place. And clearly to some they are still not terribly important.)

You know maybe it is just me, but I would NEVER be able to hold my head high if my candidate only won an election by cheating.

I guess that is yet another thing that separates me from the Republicans. Apparently THEY have no problem with it at all.