Thoughts on election fraud

A week plus after November 2, and I still have a lot of unwelcome questions rattling around in my brain. A lot of the discussion on the web relating to election fraud focuses on low-level discrepancies in vote counts. But rather than getting too bogged down in election data, we need to keep sight of the big picture. This post by TocqueDeville on Kos defines our country's election problem:

Unverifiable ballots and ballot tabulation is a violation of the most basic principle of democracy. Proprietary software secretly tabulating our votes is the absolute equivalent to letting some guy named Ed go off into a closed room by himself and count our votes in private. That we're even having to have this conversation is incomprehensible to me...

...So before you guys and gals get too mad at each other over whether this or that is provable, please keep in mind that the very fact that we're even having to argue about it is the evidence of the real fraud in this election: that we just don't know.

We just don't know. The exit poll discrepancies aren't proof of anything; they are merely red flags. Our problem is that we have no way to answer these questions definitively.

UPDATE: Sheldon Drobny, Op-Ed News weighs in on the exit poll issue on the Zogby website,

Votergate 2004; We Don't Need Paper to Prove Fraud, But We Do Need Money and Leadership, NOW.

UPDATE II: If you're still with me, here's a good website gathering all post-election info.
UPDATE III: Now I know I'm not crazy.