I devised The Diebold Variations on a caffeinated whim 46 months ago, and was sufficiently pleased with them that I created a quick-and-dirty web page to share the conceit with a few friends. A couple of months later they came to the attention of Arianna Huffington, who plugged them in her blog, resulting in a surge of about 25,000 visits that June. Since then interest has risen and declined with the election cycles, but the general trend has been downward, with an average of 300 visits/month for most of the past year. This left me unprepared for a spike of just over 41,000 visits in the course of the twenty-four hours comprising last Wednesday. Criminentlies! Another increment of my fifteen minutes of fame! The good people at dotmac have already objected to my profligate use of their bandwidth.
I'm a little puzzled that the New Hampshire primary, fercrissake, appears to have been the occasion of the present kerfuffle. I'm actually an agnostic on the subject of e-vote fraud, having undertaken the project principally as a designer, and not as anyone who has meditated at length on, much less mastered, the technical impedimenta. Those of you craving red-meat analyses of the geek stuff should depart these precincts and head for Bev Harris' admirable Black Box Voting site. I do believe that instruments for committing vote fraud without undue effort either in the perpetration or the concealment ought not be left lying around where Karl Rove might find them, but when election fraud is the first conclusion arrived at by the losing side it creeps me out just a little bit.
