Krugman frets about the voting machines. And he is far from the first. While there are legitimate issues to be considered, a cynical person might suspect that much of 2004 is going to be spent by the Left laying a foundation of skepticism about such machines that would allow them to declare a 2004 Bush victory "illegitimate." After all, why let go of such a cherished phrase?

Look how he talks about Georgia. Dropping little suspicious bits here and there. Sure, it was probably a legitimate win, BUT...

To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly.

...Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software — which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary — on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.")

Rob-Georgia.zip? What does THAT mean? Robbing Georgia? Aha! FIX!

Actually, the owner of the folder was a programmer named Rob Behler. But Krugman isn't going to tell you that, because that would interfere with the conclusion he wants you to jump to.

See how easy it is? Like the Monsters on Maple Street. How hard would it be to get people to really distrust electronic voting machines? If that's what you really wanted them to think?

Had the Democrats won in Georgia, would he have said these same things about the machines?

Never mind that it is almost completely due to the Democrats bitching about more conventional voting mechanisms (that their incompetent constituents were unable to deal with) that has led us down this "alternative voting methods" path. Kind of like Ted Kennedy complaining about the HMOs that he himself invented.

The State of California will have paper trail voting machines--in 2005. Big help. The Democrats are probably already hiring their squadrons of lawyers for the election.

If Krugman is really worried, tell ya what. Let's just go back to simple paper ballots, or the other simple systems that worked just fine for decades before Democrats decided that screwing with the results in a courtroom was easier than actually winning elections. Here in California they tried to squelch the recall in the courts with the reason being that the punch ballots would not be "legitimate." Oddly, all the politician elected in 2002 with those ballots did not consider their own election illegitimate, including Gray Davis.

As a small aside, note that the issue with those Democratic memos (what Krugman refers to as "sensitive Democratic computer files") has now entirely become how they were released, and the contents--brimfull buckets of Democratic Party sleaze--have been almost completely swept under the rug.