Ohio recount likely. Did Bush steal the election? Can it be proven?

Northwest Indiana News: nwitimes.com:
"'I would like to welcome you to the Ukraine,' said Susan Truitt, referring to the country where a new presidential runoff election was ordered after observers said the first one was rigged.
"On Friday, a federal judge in Columbus ruled that a recount may proceed if two minority party candidates who sued for it can pay for it. Green and Libertarian party officials say they can.
"A recount would likely not begin before Dec. 13, when Ohio's 20 electoral votes are officially counted."

The administration should welcome the impending Ohio recount, in fact the Bush campaign should have offered to pay for it. There is some really crazy talk going around the net accusing Bush of stealing the election and a full recount in Ohio might help to dampen some of the hysteria.

For example, one "libertarian" net acquaintance sent me a screed charging that the Bush campaign had used $29 million to bribe a few thousands of voting machine technicians for all the leading companies in the industry to steal the election. It went on to say that some of these folks, none of whom are named, are now talking about the plot because they did not get paid.

This would make it one of the largest criminal conspiracies in the history of the world based on the number of people in the know. It is also nuts. Forget that it's illegal and immoral and that you could never trust that many people not to talk, the idea that Bush ran out of money to pay them off is crazy all by itself since Bush ended the race with an eight-figure surplus of funds.

To bolster the charge that Ohio's vote, specifically, was stolen, that essay mentioned Warren County where (gasp!) Bush got 72% of the vote, far more than his statewide vote. Warren had also shut the press out of the Board of Elections office during the count citing a special terror threat. Now the terror angle was probably a smokescreen as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, but was the Warren vote tampered with?

Bush this year ran about six percentage points behind the re-election campaign of Sen. George Voinovich in Warren County. Bush also trailed the GOP vote in the contested US House and state House races in the county by 2-3 points. All of the county-wide offices (commissioners, sheriff, etc.) were uncontested - no Democrat bothered to run. Looking back to the 2002, 2000, and 1998 elections, Republicans in Warren routinely received vote percentages raising from the high 60s to high 70s. If somebody has been fiddling with the votes there, they must have been doing so just as effectively in earlier years when the count was done in full view of the press.