The old reverso votefraud trick

The Democrats are headed for a big unpleasant surprise in the 2006 elections. Their apparent success in the most recent elections was just a trick. With various Republican scandals, and Bush's ridiculously low poll results, Republican victories due to more election fraud would have produced outrage, and forced Democrats to get off their sorry asses and do something about trashing the crooked voting machines. With the Democrat 'victories', they now will shut up and allow the Republicans to fix the 2006 elections, the ones the Republicans really care about. It is even possible that Rove told Diebold and his other vote machine pals to fix the most recent results to ensure Democrat wins, just to make sure that no one messes with the precious machines before 2006.

How do we know what happened? These recent elections were completely irrelevant to the continued Republican raping of the American treasury, and did not in the least concern Republican organized criminals in Washington. Well, except for one telling exception. There were five ballot initiatives held in Ohio, four of which were to reform that state's obviously corrupt voting system (you know, the one that gave Bush the Electoral College votes he needed to win the last crooked election). The poll numbers before the election showed that the reform would win comfortably, or, at the very least, that the issue was still open and dependent on undecided voters. In spite of this, all the election reform initiatives were defeated, with dramatic discrepancies from the pre-election poll results (the only non-election-related initiative passed matching the poll results almost exactly). Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman describe (or here) the gory details of the striking flip-flop in the voting (which they characterize in two of the four cases as 'statistically staggering'), and Brad Friedman sets the results out in a table (or here) so you can see the discrepancies. What a coincidence. The only results that Rove cared about in the whole country are the ones where the results didn't match the polls, and the ones where the electorate provided the results that Rove wanted. Jeb or Dick will need those Electoral College votes in 2008. Another coincidence? Diebold computer voting machines were used in almost half the voting stations to create obtain the results.

Now we won't hear anything about the problems with the voting machines until late next year, after the Democrats get trounced, and the Republicans will be able to drag out reform so the crooked machines will still be in use in 2008. Karl Rove, busy with other matters (!), still had enough time to be ten steps ahead of the Democrats. It's like watching a cat play with a dying mouse.