Were Florida Optical Scanners OK?

Cornell professor Walter Mebane and Harvard professor Jasjeet Sekhon respond to Thom Hartmann's story (below), "Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked':

Jasjeet Sekhon , Jonathan Wand
and I have looked into the
allegation of vote fraud involving optical scan voting machines in the
2004 presidential election voting in Florida. Based on the data shown
below, we conclude that allegation is baseless. Instead, the pattern
in which counties that have high Democratic registration had high
percentage increases in the vote for Bush reflects the fact that all
those counties have trended strongly Republican over the past twelve
years. The counties are mostly in the Florida Panhandle. Given the
voting history and registration trends, these counties seem to have
many old-style southern Democrats who have not bothered to change
their registration."