Rove vs. Reality, Part 2

Posted by Mary Mancini on October 25, 2006 under Uncategorized |

Yesterday, during the White House’s “Radio Day,” Mr. Karl Rove predicted the Republicans would retain control of Congress, discounting polls and the legimate momentum that points to a Democratic takeover. “You heard it here first,” Rove declared in his interview with Fox News Radio.

In the manufactured reality of Bush administration, Rove could very well be right. Fox news was the first to call the election for President Bush in both 2000 and 2004 and the rest of the cable stations and networks repeated the news without question. In 2004, exit polling data, which is never wrong, told us that John Kerry would be the next POTUS but Fox News, once again, declared George Bush the winner and CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS all fell in line. (This year they tried to outlaw exit polling).

It’s not surprising that Mr. Rove would say that he expects victory because all he has to do is utter the words and his radio & TV mouthpieces will legitimize his predictions. He can say that he has better polling information then the rest of us and when we wake up on November 8 and the Republicans have retained both the house and the senate we will call Karl Rove a political genius and, without question, accept the GOP victory. Despite all the polling information, despite the convetional wisdom, despite the momentum of the Democratic base, we’ll soothe our discomfort by repeating their talking points: the Republicans mobilized their base; the evangelicals came out for them; they have a better ‘get out the vote” machine than we do.

Well, the Republicans do have a machine and it’s called Diebold. The confidence of Mr. Rove that the Republicans will win in two weeks is backed up by the federally-mandated troubled machines with their hacked vote-flipping software. The machines are in place and ready to do GOP bidding. There’s no paper trail. We don’t have access to the software. There is no recount mechanism built into the system.

Electronic voting machine trouble has already started this year. In the hotly contested Virginia Senate race, the machines cut off Democratic candidate Jim Webb’s name and the problem can’t be fixed by election day. Oopsie.

But the machines are not the most disturbing part of the Republican plan. They have also implemented a systematic vote-supressing mechanism. In Ohio in 2004 the mechanism included the manufacture of “humiliating and frustrating waits” in strategic areas (urban and university precincts). This election cycle they’re “defending strict new voter ID laws from legal challenges in states where their candidates are at risk of losing their seats…” (Arizona, Georgia, Missouri, Florida, Indiana), mailing letters that erroneously tell voters they must show a photo ID to vote (Georgia), systematically purging voter rolls using a tactic writer Greg Palast described as “caging lists” and rejecting voter registrations in mass quantities.

Palast predicted all of this in his last book, Armed Madhouse (p. 240), although he thought they’d wait until 2008. Perhaps 2006 is just a practice run.