Tuesday, Bloody Tuesday

I've been thinking about this some more, and the more I think about it, the more certain I am that there was something rotten, not only in the state of Ohio, but in many other states as well.

If you wanted to steal the election for the Republicans, how would you do it? Well, first off, you wouldn't start by going for something like a 65%/35% popular split. There have been more than enough signs in the heavens and two-headed calves born recently for the pundits to swallow that one.

Nor would you want to take the election with a popular majority of less than 250,000 (preferably greater than 500,000). A 1%-2% popular margin would do it well.

Nor do you want to take every swing state and make it look like a landslide for the Thing From Texas. This would go against every prediction that's been made over the past few months. So you let the Democrats win the unimportant, pissant little states, with 4 or 5 EC votes, and you save the plums for yourself, these being Florida and Ohio (also the ones, of course, with the biggest media ballyhoo). Again, to win these states, you can't let Kerry win the surrounding states by more than a few per cent. One, it eats into the popular national margin, and two, it looks really weird when the key swing states come through as Bush states.

For the same reason, Ohio and Florida can't be seen to be won overwhelmingly -- Ohio's not Utah, after all, and in Florida you've got Democratic lawyers crawling up your ashcroft. As I said yesterday. pointing at the sun while pissing on your shoes is a good tactic, and I think in this case, Florida successfully drew the attention of the Democratic activists (not to denigrate the great work done by the Gators and others -- we were all fooled here).

I first got the gut feeling when all the northern "battleground" states started falling into the Kerry column, not by much, but by slim margins of 1-2%. And then Ohio, similar demographically to those other states (but with perhaps slightly more reason to vote Kerry, due to the job losses), reverses the trend of that region. So what was different about Ohio and Florida? Unverifiable voting machines, basically.

When in doubt, apply Occam's Razor. What is more likely? That all the pre-election polls, predictions, exit polls, omens and gut ground feeling were wrong? Or that the Bush Gang cheated again (they've done it before in 2000 and 2002)? On the subject of exit polls, I heard that CNN reversed their published exit poll findings, from a Kerry to a Bush lead, with no word of explanation, halfway through the process. Exit polls are generally regarded as reliable indicators of whether fraud took place and a 2% - 4% swing halfway through the day is not simply a matter of gender demographics.

Greg Palast has estimated that even before the election, George W Bush's gang had taken a million votes through fraud. I'm on the train now, so can't give you a link, but you can get there through http://www.buzzflash.com - just hunt through the headlines. Have any international observers come up with reports yet?

Of course, nothing can alter the fact that millions (probably over 45%) of American voters prefer an ant-intellectual ex-alcoholic psychopath to an educated cultured thinker, but then that's the nature of the beast. Maybe I don't want to believe that 52% of Americans are that out of touch with reality (my own form of reality denial), but I honestly don't believe these results.

And so I don't think the Democrats have to indulge too much in breast-beating and "where did we go wrong" self-torture. Mistakes were made, for sure, but the Bush team made many more "traditional election" mistakes. What they knew, and we didn't, was that the election was a farce -- Bush was going to be the next president. If Kerry had responded swiftly and smartly to the Swift Boat liars, or if he had torn off GWB's back-mounted "box" in the second debate and waved it in front of the cameras, or exposed Dick Cheney's lust for underage female armadillos, he'd still have lost. Because that was the way it was going to be from the start.

Thank you, Diebold, etc. for wrecking the world. Now we have four more years of a madman controlling a rogue state, raping the global environment, and listening to his "divine" inner voices telling him in which country he can next kill hundreds of thousands of people. I hope that the makers and implementers of these untested, unverifiable voting systems rot in hell for eternity.