Rep Maxine Waters (D-cal) has been a frequent critic of President Bush. Two years ago she wrote an op-ed piece that began:

President Bush must stop strangling our nation by implementing short-sighted, ineffectual programs that benefit his friends and are intended to get him re-elected in 2004.

Now it turns out that what she meant is that Bush should implement short-sighted ineffectual programs that benifit her friends. At least that is the implication after you find out that her daughter and son have made $1,000,000 working for her political allies.

As reported last week by Keith Olbermann, the Green party thought that they had found their smoking gun. Olbermann's account reads like this:

Ms. Eaton’s story has been circulating around the Internet for days, and was presented to Conyers at the first stop of his “Voting Forum” road tour in Columbus on Monday, to his apparent shock and awe. Her affidavit contends that last Friday, in advance of the recount, a representative of the manufacturer of the vote-counting software used in her county’s vote November 2, made several adjustments to the Hocking County tabulator.

The employee of Triad Governmental Systems then asked, according to Ms. Eaton’s statement, which of Hocking’s voting precincts would be selected as the “sample” for the small hand-count required in each of Ohio’s 88 counties. She claims that when informed, the Triad man, as the Times’ Tom Zeller put it, “made further adjustments to the machine.”

The Times quotes Conyers as saying “This is pretty outrageous. We want to pursue it as vigorously as we can.” But the reporter also reached the president of the Triad company, Brett Rapp, who calmly welcomed any investigation, and added that, in correspondent Zeller’s words, “preparing the machines for a recount was standard procedure and was done in all 41 counties where Triad handles votes,” insomuch as the company not only supplies the tabulating software, but is also contractually obligated to maintain it. Mr. Rapp did acknowledge to the newspaper that it would be atypical for an employee to have asked about a specific voting precinct.

But... Wired has a full account of what happened. Unlike Olbermann, they bothered to read the affidavit and talk with the election employee in question.

It turns out that:

1. Since the recount was for the presidential election only, every machine involved needed to be switched to ignore the other races. This is standard procedure.
2. The computer in question was a 14-year-old PC that was broken because the battery that holds its configuration had died. Modern PCs self-detect this but on one 14 years old, you have to enter disk configuration by hand.
3. The technician asked which precinct was involved in the recount so that he could make sure that the officials, who had never done a recount before, knew what they were recounting.
4. Tests were run by both the technician and the election officials after the work to be certain that the count was coming out correctly.

It sure sounds a lot less ominous when you put it that way.

BTW, what happened to Olbermann? He updated his blog three times on December 15 about this story then stopped writing? He had been updating his blog daily, even while on vacation. Could it be that his election fraud story is falling apart and he doesn't want to talk about it any longer?