They're planning on cheating to win. Lately Bush, Cheney and Rove have been tellingly smug about their ability to "rally their base" at the last minute and pull out a Republican victory in both houses next Tuesday. Predictably, the media has been echoing the same possibility. This smells of 2004 all over again, and I don't buy it.
I say, the reason the Bush gang can be so smug is not because they will rally their so-called base. They won't have to. They are so smug because they already know victory is in the bag. We believe a Republican victory is already pre-programmed into those non-paper-trail evoting machines put out by Diebold and others.
All Bush & Company need is a plausible-sounding justification for how they will pull out a victory in the 11th hour, when all the polls have been showing that the American people intend to vote them out of office. The Bushies rely on the media to repeat their justification to get the likelihood of a Republican victory to take hold of the American consciousness, and, as always, the media obliges.
I hereby make this prediction: Regardless of which Democrat is "leading" in which poll prior to the election, most races nationwide will "record" the Republican as the "winner," and all the pundits will be singing the "Well, they did rally their base at the last minute, just as they predicted they would" song by Wednesday morning. All this will happen, not because the Republicans will have actually won, but because the machines were programmed to deliver the win to the Republican.
How did we get these machines? Turns out a Republican-controlled Congress (with a lot of help from Democrats) passed an election-reform law after the 2000 debacle that mandated evoting machines across the country. This was done by the leadership, we are convinced, with a wink and a nod to the machine manufacturers to design hackability into them, and to not have a paper trail. Some election reform! Now they can cheat all elections all the time with impunity.
But Americans aren't stupid enough to buy this. Americans #1 concern in this election has been the hackability of these machines to enable stolen elections.
I have a question: Can a citizen sue their election board if they were forced to cast a vote on an unverifiable machine with no paper trail, for breach of their constitutional right to have their vote count? If the election board cannot prove that the machine is unhackable and the voter's entry may not have been counted (and they cannot), wouldn't the citizen automatically win the suit (not necessarily, given the state of our courts, of course).
Can a plan be developed in these final days before the election that will give citizens recourse under this scenario? Please develop leadership on this issue: The best ground game in the world won't pull out this election for a Democrat majority if cheating is already programmed into these machines.
And may we remind you: A Democratic majority is just the beginning of the end for you, too, if you don't begin following the will of the people over the will of Big Business.
