Last week's Scoop exposes - see... Story Of The Week: Inside A U.S. Election Program - on security problems with Election Voting machines in the United States – have been far and way Scoop's top rating stories ever.

According to Red Sheriff's audited internet traffic statistics Bev Harris's " Inside A U.S. Election Vote Counting Program " has been read 60,247 times on Scoop.co.nz since publication, meanwhile Scoop's own C.D. Sludge has had 41,465 views of his, "Sludge Report #154 – Bigger Than Watergate!".

Both stories have been published on numerous other websites verbatim - as requested by Scoop's editors - and so it would seem reasonable to assume that each of the stories have reached an audience of well over 100,000 people.

One indication of how much the stories have been republished can be seen by searching Google for "bigger than watergate sludge", a query which at the time of publication was returning 534 results. The same query of Usenet Newsgroups returns 49 results.

Probably the best evidence of intense public interest in this story Scoop came via the response to the story in the blogoshere, where literally hundreds of bloggers decided to post links to the stories.

The images below show the peak rankings achieved in three of the most popular blog watching link ranking sites. Below each image you will find links to the lists of blog citations.

Popdex

Day Pop

Blogdex

- Technorati – 116 Links To Inside A Voting Program
- Technorati – 82 Links To Sludge #154

However though the stories have clearly hit a nerve online, the "mainstream" news media, both online and offline remain well behind play so far. With the exception of the UK's Inquirer - which took up the offer to republish the story in full – Google News is so far showing only two links to the story.

Finally, according to Scoop's own logs the following have been the top 910 referring pages to Bev Harris's "Inside A U.S. Vote Counting Program