Well, I actually don't think it IS a tinfoil hat theory, but a lot of people hearing it for the first time might think so. It has to do with a curious anomaly Washington Post reporter Dan Keating noticed while he was participating in the post-election media examination of the Florida overvote and undervote ballots. He said of the state's Gore-Bush overvote ballots -- that is, the ballots that the machines registered as containing a vote for Gore AND a vote for Bush -- that ALL of them were in punch-card counties. Think about this, now. This means that NOBODY in the counties in which you voted by filling in an oval with a felt-tip pen accidentally voted for both Bush AND Gore, while SEVERAL THOUSAND people in the counties in which you punched holes in cards made this mistake!
What can possibly explain this anomaly? I have thought and thought about it, and I can come up with no possible explanation other than willful, deliberate ballot tampering. If you were a crooked Republican who had access to the ballots on election night, how could you alter enough ballots at the last minute on election night, when you were able to see in a close election just how many it would take to the throw the election to your guy? To tamper with the optical scan ballots, you would have to sit down and fix them one at a time, and it would require a prohibitive amount of time to alter enough ballots to throw the election. But with the punch-card ballots, you could stack them up two or three dozen at a time and mass-punch them through the "Bush" hole. This would not affect the Bush votes, while turning the Gore votes into -- guess what? -- Bush-Gore overvotes.
I can't take credit for this theory. I read it in two places in the few months after the election. Sharmann Braff wrote a piece about it that is still posted on Democrats.com at
http://www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=1220 and Jackson Thoreau mentioned it in his online e-book about the Florida election theft at
http://www.geocities.com/jacksonthor/ebook.html.I have a fantasy about some Republican who participated in this ballot tampering and whose conscience is bothering him/her about it, making a deathbed confession, the story hitting the media, and the whole Florida 2000 scheme really starting to come unraveled. Because there really is something that stinks to high heaven about that election, and anybody who can't smell that stench is severely olfactorily challenged.
Ron