Close election inspires conspiracy theories

John Kerry barely had time to concede the presidential race before the conspiracy theory was circulating.

Democratic Underground, a Web site founded in January 2001 “to protest the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush,” immediately questioned how Bush ended up with “a mysterious 5 percent advantage,” despite early exit polling that showed Kerry with the lead.

In a posting on Salon.com, Mark Crispin Miller, the media critic and professor of communications at New York University, wrote, “First of all, this election was definitely rigged. It’s a statistical impossibility that Bush got 8 million more votes than he got last time.”

This year’s most likely culprit of the larceny, according to critics: electronic voting machines.

In a campaign year rife with conspiracies, it’s no surprise that post-election theories are popping up, experts say. After all, who didn’t gossip about Bush’s peculiar jacket bulge during the first debate? Or speculated about an “October surprise,” an 11th-hour event – such as the sudden capture of Osama bin Laden – orchestrated to sway the race?

“In the midst of a partisan political campaign, pre-election conspiracies abound because both sides are paranoid about what’s going to happen,” said Mark Fenster, a University of Florida law professor and author of the book “Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture.” “Post-election theories work much the same way.

“It’s a long-standing tradition of American politics,” Fenster said. “It’s not a pathological paranoia, it’s just the conditions of being in a very close race.”

Chads aren’t the problem this year. This time, post-election theories on why Kerry lost run the gamut from Karl Rove, Bush’s chief strategist and powerful Svengali, stealing the race to thousands of ballots left unrecorded in Ohio.

But the main blame revolves around voting machines. To suspicious minds, the electronic machines could have been rigged with a coding to throw the election to Bush. Or votes could have been easily altered by someone working in an elections office.

Such suspicions have persisted since before the election, when critics called attention to major flaws with electronic voting machines, which were first used 26 years ago. Critics, such as Aviel Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University professor of computer science, pointed out that the machines can be tampered with easily and do not provide a paper trail to prove to voters that their votes were counted properly.

Fueling the conspiracy was a vow made by a certain Walden O’Dell in August last year that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president.” No big deal except that O’Dell is the CEO of Diebold, the maker of electronic voting systems used in a number of states, including Ohio.

Partisan support like that has led Web sites such as www.newstarget.com to ask questions such as this: “If this was such a record turnaround, with long lines all over the country, where did all the votes go?”

But don’t file a lawsuit just yet, experts say.

“There are people on Earth who claim they were abducted by aliens and had surgery performed on them on spaceships,” said Michael I. Shamos, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied electronic voting systems for more than 20 years. “They have no evidence of it, but they believe it. If you laugh at those who believe aliens live among us then you really ought to howl at those who believe there is massive tampering with voting machines.

“There is no evidence of it,” Shamos said.

Rubin, the political science professor at Hopkins who is one of the best-known critics of the machines – and who has been inundated with e-mails since the election, said theorists should let this one go.

“I don’t think there is any evidence that the election was rigged,” Rubin said. “What I think is that we’re heading down a dangerous path with these machines where there’s no way to disprove theories like that because there’s no paper trail available. We’re using a technology that’s unverifiable.

“If you’re using machines that can be rigged, then yes, it can happen,” Rubin said. “But did it happen? I doubt it. The exit polls were still within the statistical norms of the results.”