Posted on election morning, November 4, 2008 at 05:13:26, on opednews.com…that is, before we knew how anyone except a couple villages in New Hampshire had voted

The Republicans stole Florida to get Bush in 2000 and have been stealing elections on a much larger scale ever since. Will it happen again, even with Obama ahead in the last polls by the commanding margin of about 7.5% nationally?

The truth is, there’s no way to really know what will happen in the vote-counting, and this is the most frightening thing about it. Nonetheless, in the last two presidential elections, the pre-election polls were actually pretty close to the official result. It was the exit polls that tipped us off to the fact that something was rotten in the state of Amerika. (That’s why all the pro-establishment pundits, pollsters, and meta-pollsters are falling over themselves now to say how unreliable exit polls are and how worthless they are for detecting fraud. Funny how accurate they were until just a few years ago.)

In 2000, only one state was (as far as we know) stolen, so not surprisingly the pre-election polls were pretty close. (Actually, they underestimated Gore’s support.) In 2004, on the other hand, votes were stolen across the country—about 8 million of them according to Steve Freeman. But in the 2002 midterms, the first one under the W/Rove regime of when-we-say-win-by-any-means-we-mean-it, the Republican generously outperformed the polls. The pollsters set to work recalibrating their polls to fit the new reality. Remember, they’re not in business to predict the true, voters’-intent vote which no one ever knows. Pollsters’ job is to predict the official election outcomes we’re all taught to believe in, so they can be patted on the head and told what good prognosticators they are.

The upshot is that all the leading pollsters have, to a varying extent and by varying methods, cooked their polls a bit in the Republican direction in order to offset the fraud. I’m sure they don’t know they’re offsetting fraud; the pollsters, with their naive faith in the Establishment, just think they’re correcting some failure in the polling methods to adequately measure the people’s will.

The fact is, the 2004 pre-election polls on average showed Bush ahead by pretty danged close to his official margin of 2.5% of the popular vote. Vote-flipping, vote-suppression, and discarded ballots were already factored into poll design without the pollsters realizing it. In addition, there was a last-minute swing in Kerry’s direction. This didn’t show up in the official count either. The fraud was massive enough to offset both the polling biases and the late surge. In 2006, the polls did better:

“In 2006, Gallup found the Democrats with an 11-point lead among registered voters, and a 7-point lead among likely voters, right before the election. The Democrats won 54.1% of all votes cast nationally for Congress, and a 31-seat advantage.” –Gallup website

In other words, according to Gallup the Democrats led by 11% among registered voters and by 7% among “likely voters”; officially, they won by about 8%. Discounting some voters, disproportionately Democrats, as not “likely voters” is one of the most effective and flexible methods of tilting polls to reflect the reality of Republican theft.

This time around, the pollsters probably have their fraud-adjustments well refined; but the world is changing around them. Turnout is surging, making hash of previous likely-voter models. People are worried about whether they’ll be a Bradley effect, voters telling pollsters they’re for Obama so as not to seem racist and then voting for McCain. On the other hand, some who have analyzed the primaries postulate a reverse Bradley effect in the South, where shamefaced rednecks can’t bear to admit that they’re going to vote for the, you know, Obama. The battle between electoral fraudsters and the election integrity movement is raging on more fronts than the Russian Civil War.

In other words, it’s a big, unpredictable mess.

I find recent news encouraging. The long-predicted tightening in the polls has not materialized. Obama is better-funded than McCain with a far better ground organization, is leading in far more swing states than he needs to win, and has more enthusiasm from his supporters. The election integrity movement itself is far bigger, more visible, and more mainstream than it was four years ago.

The electoral integrity situation in Florida and Ohio, where the last two presidential elections were stolen, while bad, is overall better than it was in previous elections. Ohio has a Democratic governor and a Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, who is at least somewhat committed to electoral integrity. She’s been quite disappointing in a lot of ways, but she’s certainly no Blackwell. Florida has Republican Governor Crist, who in a display of decency uncharacteristic of his party helped get rid of DRE’s and expanded early voting hours, contrary to wishes of most of his co-partisans. The Democrats also gained control of the Secretary of State offices in Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, and New Mexico. Most of the Democrats, once in office, behave inconsistently at best and at worst are defenders of unverifiable and hackable voting machines that have been proven over and over to be easily manipulated to steal votes; but these Democrats are not the hardcore leading edge of the assault on election integrity that Blackwell and his ilk are, nor do they behave in nearly as partisan a way.

Perhaps most important of all, the right-wing Republican hegemony that seemed to be inclining this country directly on an unimpeded slippery slope to fascism as recently as early 2005 has unmistakably been broken. It’s not just that Democrats control Congress—weak though Congressional Democrats are, that is something of a help. But political leadership is largely an expression of the prevailing behind-the-scenes institutional power balance within the country. It’s there where the change is greatest.

Four years ago and eight years ago, almost the entire power establishment was solidly, adamantly behind the Republicans—the military-industrial complex, the national security state, the corporate media, the corporations in general. There were some cracks in the monolith, but their presence was portrayed as almost scandalous, not just by the openly right-wing dirt brigade but by the center-right, pro-establishment talking heads which the righties decry as the “liberal media.” George Soros got so much attention precisely because the establishment found it unthinkable that a billionaire was so publicly, vociferously opposed to the Great Commander-in-Thief. True, many in the CIA wanted Bush out, for reasons of their own, and this made the playing field a bit more competitive. But in the main, the drumbeat for W was overpowering, exemplified by the treatment of the Swift Boat pseudo-scandal. Although Bush’s approval ratings at the time were no more than average, expressing more than mild opposition to him was assumed by the corporate media to be something approaching sacrilege against America.

We all remember this climate. It is by no means altogether gone. Yet those dark clouds seem more like tattered shreds today—still threatening, but having lost the unified presence with which they once loomed over us. Defectors from the Republican cause are streaming, not trickling, from the most unlikely places—the military, big capital, even the GOP itself. The corporate media is still Republican-tilted but now far from monolithic. Olbermann is a big phenomenon, now joined by Maddow. Republicans can still spew BS with remarkable ease, but they can no longer count on it going uncontested.

Don’t get me wrong—much of the power establishment is still in the tank for the Republicans. But not enough of it is to allow them to be sure they can get away with bloody murder. They can try it. They might fail. If they succeed, they might later go to jail. It’s a very different environment.

The key difference, though, is the public. Gone is the attitude of only a few years past that tolerated bloody murder as long as it was done by bigshots and carried out in a stylistic manner. The public is mad as hell now, and not primarily at “political correctness” or terrorists or street thugs. It’s mad at the people in power, and they know it. That’s why the more far-seeing among them want to see at least a modest shift to the left in public policy—not necessarily for the “good of the country,” as they would say, but for their own survival.

In this new environment, stealing elections, like all other forms of tyranny, is a lot harder to do. The Republicans will steal a lot of votes. They will undoubtedly retain seats in Congress that do not belong to them. They did it in 2006, too—but it wasn’t enough to keep them from losing their shirts.

If I had to guess about the real vote, that is, the one that reflects the intent of all eligible voters, I’d suggest Obama is probably ahead by 12-15%. The more Dem-friendly polls—the ones that include cell phones and adjust less to the red-slanted environment—are not far short of that. That means something like 15-20 million votes. If I’m anywhere close to right, then barring some sudden, genuine shift in the final few days, McCain will need to steal far more votes than Bush did even in ’04. And yet, despite the increasing inroads of HAVA, the continued pervasiveness of hackable electronic voting machines, and the Democratic Party’s refusal to do much about it, the overall environment seems better, on the whole, than it was four years ago. Horrible, but better.

But if the Republicans need to steal even more votes than before, won’t they just do it? Won’t they steal as many votes as they’re behind by plus a few more? I think this assumption rests on a dubious premise. If the Republicans could steal any arbitrary number of votes they wanted to, they could have given W a landslide in 2004, whittling down “blue America” to a few states the corporate media would have spent the last four years making fun of as weird and out of touch. (This is, in fact, exactly what happened after the 1980-88 presidential elections: never underestimate the propaganda value of an electoral landslide, at least when won by a Republican.) Then it would have been far more convincing when Bush claimed a sweeping mandate, and there wouldn’t have been all the talk about a divided America.

More urgently, why didn’t the GOP retain control of Congress in 2006? I have read the landmark paper “Landslide Denied,” which demonstrates pretty well that massive numbers of votes were stolen in that election and that the Democrats probably legitimately won it by a much bigger margin. But that paper has one weak argument: that for technical reasons the Republican vote-fixers had to set up the fraud too far in advance of the election, when the Democrats’ advantage in the polls was smaller; the fixers therefore did not give themselves enough bogus votes to win when events shifted against them later. This does not make sense for several reasons. First off, unlike a presidential election which is, mandates aside, all or nothing, in Congress every vote counts and effects the ideological balance and which legislation can be passed. Why not simply go all out, steal all you can, and try for a bigger majority? Secondly, Rove and crew are very smart schmucks, and they certainly know that polls a month or so before an election are not that reliable, that things may well change in the “wrong” direction before Election Day. Again, why not just steal the most votes possible (or the most votes that could be stolen “safely,” without much danger of detection), even if it’s more than you think you need, including in races where you currently have a modest lead? Finally, why couldn’t they at least in some localities have built in mechanisms by which they could alter the amount of fraud at the last minute—e.g., vote-counting machines that start behaving differently after receiving some specially marked ballot? This allows the whole thing to be set up in advance and still be manipulated at the last minute (e.g., if you need to rein in the fraud because somebody is onto you).

My own conclusion is quite different: the Republicans lost 2006 because, while they have the ability to steal many votes, they either could not or dared not steal enough votes to win. It looks like McCain’s position is similar to Republicans in Congress in 2006, except that the turnout is far higher, making it much harder.

Is McCain in a position to steal, not the roughly 10 million votes by which Obama’s ahead in polls, but the 15-20 million by which he may be ahead in the true, fraud-free vote? We’ll soon find out. But if McCain were really about to do this, it would be a lot better for him if there was a huge PR/psy-op effort going on now to persuade us that he has a good chance to win.

Well, actually, there is such an effort; it’s just that it hasn’t been very successful. McCain surrogates leak out what they claim their internal polls say, showing the race is getting close, and this gets reported as if it were news; Drudge plays up a single day of Zogby tracking polls that show McCain ahead as if it were World War III; Fox and the usual suspects keep talking about how the race is “tightening,” or about to tighten, every step of the way. But all this is just par for the course when a party with significant media allies is way behind.

The fact is, the vast majority of media coverage has been portraying Obama as well ahead and very likely to win. This makes it much more difficult to steal the election. It’s not just getting the vote count they want; it’s what happens afterwards. Though I consider it well established that Bush stole the 2004 election from Kerry, his “victory” was considered plausible, even expected, by most people at the time, including many, many Democrats. That would not be true if McCain comes on top today.

That’s exactly why FOX called Florida for Bush on election night in 2000: to create an expectation on the part of voters that the election is going a particular way, so that, once it’s finally stolen, the less well-informed or less clear-thinking voters in the middle can say, “Well, it was going that way all along.” This impression lingered, even though it had been established and admitted by all that their projection was based on an electronic “error” and should never have happened is the first place.

Gone is the sheeplike mentality of the “left” of 2000, where some people decried Gore as not worth voting or fighting for, while others threw up their hands and sighed, “What can we do?” In 2008, the liberals are reawakened and have refound their strength; a new militancy is in the air; and even middle of the road Americans are very, very angry at the status quo. In this environment, stealing an election is not only harder to do; if successful it would be far more dangerous. Many of the powers-that-be in our society realize this. McCain cannot count on the unqualified support in “the proper quarters” that Bush used to have, so crucial for any large-scale criminal operation.

Change may well be a-coming.