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April 12, 2007
Rove’s Voting Projects

After the Bushies conquered the White House with the help of some friendly Supreme Court judges, Karl Rove’s main project was to cement a permanent GOP majority. Not, mind you, by implementing a sustainable policy that would get longterm agreement of the majority of voters, but by manipulating the voting system.

To achieve this, several coordinated lines of advance were taken.

A media hoax was created by emphasizing wherever possible that significant systematic voter fraud existed by alleging double vote attempts or votes by illegible voters. Indeed there has been and is no significant fraud by these means.

A Republican National Lawyers Association, which includes lots of government lawyers, was created specifically to challenge voting eligibility of people sympathetic to the Democratic party.

As the voting system is supervised by the Justice Department, a major effort went into purging the department’s civil rights group. Positions at the justice department were filled with party superloyals like Miss (holy) Goodling.

When illegal gerrymanderings by Republicans were challenged by career staff in the voting rights unit, the political leadership overruled these (only to be later overruled by courts.) At the same time no real infringements on voting rights were prosecuted.

US Attorney positions were filled with loyal party people. When at the time of the 2006 election some of these were not loyal enough to push fraudulent accusations of voting fraud, they were replaced with superloyals right out of the Attorney General’s office.

All of this is now coming to light. And even if dogs have eaten some of Karl Rove’s emails from the GOP email servers, I am confident that some will have survived and will explain and prove these allegations.

But all of the above mentioned efforts are "negative." They are essentially about supressing voter turnout for Democrats. What about "active" manipulation of elections?

I have to confess I never really looked into fraud allegations connected to voting machines because I thought they were overblown. But given the effort Rove did put into the "negative" side of the manipulation, I am now leaning to believe that there are cases of significant "active" manipulation too.

When and how will Waxman and others in Congress look into that direction?

Posted by b on April 12, 2007 at 14:42 UTC | Permalink
Comments

Think of it this way, b: if they were truly powerful–as powerful as we tend to suppose (myself included, in my spells of steady-state paranoia)–would these folks resort to shenanigans of this sort? I see some rich, malignant inmates trying to take over the asylum–a truly absurd undertaking. Or more precisely, I have to suppose that their knowledge of Washington’s ways are a little naive.
Rove is a middle-aged man from Texas, who learned how to do things in Texas–not the best school for the smoothest and most lethal of power-plays. And he’s never grown out of Texas. Five or ten years on Wall Street, for example, would have made a real difference. Because those Wall Street guys are good: they never forget to don their surgical gloves before picking up their pistols.

Posted by: alabama | Apr 12 2007 16:09 utc | 1

Re: active manipulation
I find National Election Data Archive studies convincing. Of extra interest is their conclusion that 2004 Ohio exit poll discrepancies are consistent with outcome-altering vote miscounts (pdf). Now, statistics is not my speciality so maybe they are pulling my leg, but as far as I can tell their methodology is sound.

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Apr 12 2007 16:45 utc | 2

@askod – that’s where I have a probability problem …
Statistics is about probability. I always believed that Rove is pobably manipulating things. But now proof is coming in.
The Ohio exit-polls point to probable fraud, maybe even likely fraud. The question is for proven fraud. Only proof will lead to the needed public scandal, outrage and cleanup.

Posted by: b | Apr 12 2007 17:05 utc | 3

Looks like Sen Leahy agrees with me. On the emails: “They are there, they know they are there” and he will “supena them to death”
Hope so …

Posted by: b | Apr 12 2007 17:14 utc | 4

I have to confess I never really looked into fraud allegations connected to voting machines because I thought they were overblown.
that is always what you were supposed to believe. conyers was seriously on this case and held congressional meetings after ohio 04(in some basement, they wouldn’t even give him a decent room). there is no way you can spend even one day looking at the evidence and not come away convinced the elections were seriously tampered.
billmon quoted LBJ (i think it was LB) about waiting for the results to come in before calling the last count. it is no coincidence both florida and ohio came in the last (by a large margin) w/the results. it is also not a coincidence these states were chosen to be tampered with as were the other states, all states whose exit polls were not consistent w/the results. this has been going on for a long long time, starting w/purging dems from the senate. anyone looking back at election like max clelland can clearly see manipulation. there are excellent resources for exposure starting w/blackbox voting and votersunite.org. dive into bradblog, an excellent resource.
during 04 kerry hardly needed any of ohio’s electoral votes to win, bush however needed almost all of them. ohio provided just enough to barely squeeze the outcome they wanted. as you can see from the charts provided from the waxman hearings rove is very methodical in determining exactly how many votes he needs to extract just enough to get a win, by hook or by crook. they thieve the results they need and they do it in many many states. there was not a big hullabaloo at the last election because dems were ‘allowed’ to win (tho only by that one senate vote, that can be taken away, lieberman). my theory is they could not afford to expose their thievery during 06 because they were already setting their sites on 08. w/70% expected win for he dems i find the results for the senate inadequet. obviously they could not allow enough votes in the senate for a filibuster or any 60/40 result. this has been a slow gradual grab of the government w/a complict media.
after 04 i spent hours and hours obsessed w/ohio and scouring the news where their was a virtual blackout of reports of what had happened and the conyers hearings. kennedys rollingstone article is the first real extensive mainstream msm that called it for what it was. i wouldn’t really know where advise anyone start their research but certainly nebraska and chuck hagel is an interesting story.
what i find so intriguing about these latest revelations is.. we all know that the screaming about dems voter fraud coming prior to 04 was to mask or ‘balance’ accusations of republican fraud. nonetheless the new approach of carefully replacing the DA’s for the coming assault they expect because of the shock of the public when the republicans win against all odds after 08 shows how rove plants his seeds seasons in advance for the future crop.
conchita and i exchanged thousands of emails in the months after 04 and we weren’t alone. there are thousands of very determined voter activists obseessed with the knowingness our elections are stolen. always the thugs say, you can’t prove it. well, maybe this gets us just a little closer. that our civil rights division has been dedicated to highlighting dem voter fraud while totally ignoring the usual cases the department was created for is just a drop in the bucket.
people keep saying americans voted for them twice. we didn’t. of this i have not an ounce of doubt, and anyone looking at it w/an ounce of scepticism would come to the same conclusion.
remember, one of the first thing that the rethugs did when taking over the house was to pass hava (help america vote act) that insured every state would have federal funds to have these kinds of paperless voting machines.

Posted by: annie | Apr 12 2007 17:21 utc | 5

Eric Lipton and Ian Urbina write in the New York Times: “Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
“Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.
“Most of those charged have been Democrats, voting records show. Many of those charged by the Justice Department appear to have mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, a review of court records and interviews with prosecutors and defense lawyers show. . . .
“Voter fraud is a highly polarized issue, with Republicans asserting frequent abuses and Democrats contending that the problem has been greatly exaggerated to promote voter identification laws that could inhibit the turnout by poor voters.”

mistakenly filled out registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules
out of 120 cases found across the entire nation they have convicted 86 people for this?? and of course nothing for the widespread abuses from republicans that must involve poll workers and secretaries of state (ohio’s and florida’s bith being the state chairman of the bush campaigns!)
2 of ohio’s poll workers were just convicted of election tampering in 04. an entire country board was just dismissed for the same reason. national headlines? nah.

Posted by: annie | Apr 12 2007 17:47 utc | 6

b, this is a really good movie. i recommend.

Posted by: annie | Apr 12 2007 18:38 utc | 7

Remember that Kerry in ’04 professional wrestling brought up paper trail lacking voting machines once, in Florida in March, with a fight fight fight temporary message. No mention in ‘debates’ , no asking w to say why no paper trail is better (I did week after “long voting line day’ hear boston fox news say better because less fuss), no mentioning that middle class principles say – don’t buy a machine from someone who doesn’t want to sell you the part that tells you who it’s working for, someone who claims printers for these machines will fail but elswhere guarantees his atm’s & cash registers, whose salesmen are instructed not to push these high profit additions,
and whose ownership pledges results to the Party, as the owners of us all pledge fealty to those above them. Have put cartoons on subject, including accidentally reproduced voting one, at changed name of furry logick
Am very bad with computers, will try to fix text behind Beeloser Bar Blab soon, but site has almost all current designs up.

Posted by: plushtown | Apr 12 2007 19:27 utc | 8

Annie, that’s the reason I was banned from dkos…lol For bringing that article up…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 12 2007 21:37 utc | 9

dkos is mired in political correctness. i couldn’t believe the way the dem party hid behind the greens in the recount that wasn’t. painting us all w/a tin hat brush. what a disgrace to freedom.

Posted by: annie | Apr 12 2007 21:42 utc | 10

*** ALERT b- & Truth ****
Wayne Madsen has scoop on who has info on Karl Rove’s dog that ate the emails. What can you infer from that?

Posted by: jj | Apr 13 2007 7:44 utc | 11

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