Did John Kerry actually win the presidency? If you’ve spent any time online this week, you’ve no doubt heard this argument: The election was stolen. Corrupt officials, rigged voting machines, a sleepy media and a Democratic Party that’s been less than fully aggressive in its efforts to counter Republican dirty tricks came together to subvert the true will of the people.

According to proponents of this theory, proof of electoral fraud abounds. The journalist Greg Palast argues that in Ohio, there were probably enough “spoiled” punch-card ballots — ballots tossed out by counting machines — to make up Bush’s margin over Kerry. Keith Olbermann points out that in some voting precincts in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, there were more votes cast than registered voters — for instance, in the Fairview Park area, 13,342 registered voters cast 18,472 ballots. Isn’t that odd? Then there’s the analysis by a former high school math teacher named Kathy Dopp, which seems to show that in counties using optical-scan voting systems in Florida, people registered as Democrats voted for Bush at an usually high rate. Did they really mean to do that, or did the voting machines corrupt their votes?

There are dozens of other points of concern. In Broward County, Florida, the counting software has been counting votes backwards. In Franklin County, Ohio, Bush was somehow given 4,000 more votes than he’d actually won. Citing vague security concerns, officials in Warren County, Ohio, locked down the vote-counting building on election night, preventing the media from observing the count. And what about those exit polls? Could it be that they were correct in their prediction of a Kerry win? To judge from the tone of the e-mail pouring into our in boxes here at Salon, not to mention the panicky posts on lefty sites like Democratic Underground, it’s clear that many online find these arguments quite convincing. For many, it’s difficult to believe that the election the nation held last week was completely on the level.

In fact, it probably wasn’t; Election Day 2004, like all national elections, saw its share of glitches, ineptitude, fraud and intimidation. The Election Incident Reporting System, a national database of election irregularities compiled by volunteers working with various voting-rights groups, lists 30,000 such incidents for 2004. They range from the tragic (a voter who “didn’t know how to read”) to the alarming (“Two African-American voters were arrested at the polling place before they had the opportunity to vote”).

There’s little question that the American election process is a mess, and needs to be cleaned up. But even if this particular election wasn’t perfect, it was still most likely good enough for us to have faith in the results. Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny. For instance, there’s an easy explanation for the odd results in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Olbermann insists there were 93,000 more votes than voters. According to Kimberly Bartlett, a spokeswoman for the county, the reporting software the county uses to display the unofficial summary of election results on its Web site is simply buggy. For some reason, the software combines absentee ballots from several voting precincts into one precinct, and therefore makes it appear as if there were more votes cast in a particular area than there were registered voters there. But this bug does not affect the final election results, because the more detailed “canvass” of all the votes cast in the county shows the correct count, Bartlett told Salon. For example, this canvass indicates that in Fairview Park, where Olbermann says there were 18,472 ballots cast by 13,342 registered voters, there were actually only 8,421 votes cast in the presidential race — fewer than the number of registered voters.

Other theories pointing to a Kerry win are similarly brittle. It is extremely unlikely that there are enough spoiled punch-card ballots in Ohio to hand Kerry a victory there, as Palast asserts. Meanwhile, there are reasonable-sounding sociological and demographic explanations for the high number of registered-Democrat Bush voters in some counties in Florida. There is, in other words, simply no compelling proof that there were enough irregularities in enough areas affecting enough voters to cast doubt on Bush’s commanding popular vote count lead, or even his thinner margins in key swing states such as Ohio or Florida.

“Given my current state of knowledge, it seems unlikely there will be enough bogus votes found to reverse the election,” says David Dill, the Stanford computer scientist who’s been leading the charge against paperless electronic voting machines for the past two years. At the same time, though, Dill adds that he’s making “a highly qualified statement,” and that he does not want to “declare the election over and done with.” Odd things did occur last Tuesday, and even if the results aren’t overturned, “it’s extremely important that we seize this opportunity to review everything we can about this election,” Dill says. “Having people comb through these results will give us more confidence in the legitimacy of this election. We shouldn’t gain that confidence by resorting to the head-in-the-sand method we usually employ in the United States.”

The 2000 presidential election prompted officials across the nation — including those in Ohio — to abandon antiquated punch-card voting systems in favor of newer voting technology. But late in 2003, after activists uncovered alarming security holes in the paperless touch-screen electronic voting systems being purchased by many jurisdictions, officials in Ohio slowed their touch-screen plans. As a result, most voters in the state cast their ballots on punch-card systems this year, which, as Greg Palast points out, was a cause for concern among officials there even before Tuesday. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, once declared that “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”

The main reason Blackwell and other elections experts worry about punch-card systems is that they lead to a high number of “residual ballots” — ballots that are cast but, for various reasons, are not counted. Ballots can be tossed out because voters choose too many candidates in a certain race (they cast an “overvote”), or because counting machines simply misread a ballot as an overvote. Votes can also be misread because the systems are confused by hanging or dimpled chads — selections that haven’t been punched through all the way. In 2000, according to a report by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, voting systems in Ohio experienced a spoilage rate of 1.96 percent, meaning that for every 1,000 ballots cast then, about 20 were thrown out.

Since there were about 5.5 million votes cast in Ohio this year, Palast estimates that at a 1.96 percent error rate, there might be as many 110,000 uncounted ballots in the state. On Nov. 4, however, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that there are only about 93,000 spoiled ballots in Ohio. There were also about 155,000 provisional ballots cast in the state — votes cast as a last resort by people whose names could not be found on registration rolls when they went to the polls. Bush is currently leading Kerry by about 136,000 votes in Ohio. For Kerry to win, then, Ohio would have to have a way to count all 248,000 outstanding discarded and provisional votes — which isn’t going to happen — and then 77 percent of those ballots would have to go to Kerry.

Such an outcome is all but impossible. For one thing, an overwhelming number of provisional ballots will simply not count. According to Ohio’s election rules — which were deemed legal by federal courts prior to the election — only provisional ballots that have been cast in a voter’s home precinct will be added to the count. Nobody expects many provisional votes to pass that test.

But let’s say that Kerry stands to gain 50,000 votes from the provisional count, and that Bush doesn’t get any provisional votes — a fantastical scenario, but bear with us. If that occurred, Kerry would need to get virtually every single vote from the discarded ballots in order to approach Bush’s margin. Considering that Bush won 4 out of 10 votes even in Ohio’s most heavily Democratic counties, such margins just aren’t possible.