Here’s a fairly definitive analysis of voting machines and polling patterns (pdf format) by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project that pretty clearly debunks the ‘Diebold Vote Fraud’ rumor (hat tip to The Opinionated Bastard who’s probably from Dabney – where I’m told all the Ayn Rand fans live).

Summary:

# A series of claims have been made in recent days alleging that discrepancies between exit poll results and the presidential vote in certain states provides evidence of malfeasance in those states. These claims seem to be concentrated on states using electronic voting systems.

# Exit polls predicted a significantly greater vote for Kerry nationwide than the official returns confirmed, but there is not any apparent systematic bias when we take this same analysis to the state level.

# Analysis of deviations between the exit polls and the official returns show no particular patterns for states using electronic voting; nor does this analysis reveal any patterns for states using other forms of voting systems.

# We conclude that there is no evidence, based on exit polls, that electronic voting machines were used to steal the 2004 election for President Bush.

Read the whole thing, as they say.