IT DOESN'T QUITE ADD UP: It is possible the extraordinary discrepencies between exit polls and actual votes, and the mysterious patterns of those figures seemingly tied to those places where some form of electronic voting was taking place is little more than a bizarre coincidence. Certainly, it would seem to be worth investigating - if only to give election 2004 a clean bill of health. What is surprising, though, is that the conservatives believe that, yes, all this strangeness does prove there's been a conspiracy. But against them - they think it proves that the exit polls had been rigged to try and stop Bush, rather than the more obvious conclusion that the polls - conducted on machines running bloody Windows - have got a dubious element to them. But would someone really have hacked in and changed the election votes, like in that episode of Grange Hill where the brainy kid altered his scores?

Lets see:

On the CNBC TV show "Topic A With Tina Brown," several months ago, Howard Dean had filled in for Tina Brown as guest host. His guest was Bev Harris, the Seattle grandmother who started www.blackboxvoting.org from her living room. Bev pointed out that regardless of how votes were tabulated (other than hand counts, only done in odd places like small towns in Vermont), the real "counting" is done by computers. Be they Diebold Opti-Scan machines, which read paper ballots filled in by pencil or ink in the voter's hand, or the scanners that read punch cards, or the machines that simply record a touch of the screen, in all cases the final tally is sent to a "central tabulator" machine.

That central tabulator computer is a Windows-based PC.

"In a voting system," Harris explained to Dean on national television, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once?"

And you know what's really odd? There was a website which had a clip of this - votergate.tv. Someone hacked in and deleted the files.

Maybe Bush did win without the help of some hackers. But then surely he'd be happy to demonstrate this by inviting an indpendent inquiry?

Election night, I'd been doing live election coverage for WDEV, one of the radio stations that carries my syndicated show, and, just after midnight, during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.