Worse Than Watergate or It Isn’t Too Late for the GOP to Steal Another Election

The polls are clear. Americans trust Obama, and they do not like Mitt Romney, the man who never met a job he wasn’t ready to ship overseas, the man who is not concerned with senior citizens and disabled veterans, the man whose campaign emblem is the Etch-A-Sketch. Right now, Democrats are feeling pretty confident. But before you decide that your vote won’t be needed this fall, please consider some recent elections.


In 1980, Carter was way ahead of Reagan, until the debates. The press liked the way the aging actor played his part. The press declared Reagan the “winner”, and his poll numbers shot up. If the press decides to declare Romney the “winner” of the debates, the public may decide that he is not so bad after all.

In 2000, the Supreme Court took the vote out of our hands. Recall that Gore won the election. He won in Florida. But the SCOTUS stepped in to stop the vote. You may be less worried about the Gang of Five this time around, because Roberts did not strike down the Health Care law. I am not convinced that he is on our side. The Health Care Law is very popular with the Insurance Industry and the Medical Industrial Complex. Roberts’ decision may have been a matter of special interests trumping Tea Party ideology. There is no way to know for sure that he will not step in to block a recount in Ohio. This election could determine the makeup of his court.

Voter suppression made the Florida 2000 results close. Brother Jeb and Secretary of State Harris hired a firm to create a phony felons list, in which lawful Florida voters were stripped from the rolls, because their names were similar to names of felons in other states. In 2004, Ohio Secretary of State Blackwell went even farther. Democratic precincts were not given enough polling machines. Democrats were illegally stripped from voting rolls. The nation’s news organizations conspired to suppress incriminating exit polls.

This time around, voter suppression has been taken to a new level. Minorities, disabled voters and seniors who may fear Romney-Ryan’s plan to eliminate Medicare and Social Security are being targeted with Voter ID laws, aka “Poll taxes” which have been enacted in a number of states, including the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Republicans have selected Democrats all across the nation for “challenges”. In Texas, the living are being told they are dead, because their names are similar to the names of dead folks, or they were born on the same day as someone who has died. In Ohio, election officials have attempted to cut back on Democratic precinct voting hours while providing expanded hours in Republican precincts. In Florida, new laws make it almost impossible to conduct voter registration drives---while the GOP hires consultants to fill out phony voter registration forms.

Republicans have boasted---openly---that these tactics are designed to help them steal the election. You can bet that the RNC coordinated the various voter suppression plans, making it all one great big conspiracy to violate the voting rights act. But, no matter have egregious the violations, if two or three national news organizations, say Fox and CBS “declare” Romney the winner, the press will then pressure the administration to accept defeat gracefully, the way they pressured Gore and Kerry.

Don’t count on the courts to block the implication of these Voting Rights Act violating laws. The Supreme Court can step in and declare that all of them are allowed to go into effect “just this one time.”

Oh, and the electronic voting systems that were put in place under Bush-Cheney-Rove are still as hackable as ever. And the last I heard, “sleep overs” are still allowed. Meaning your touch screen vote will only count if Democratic turnout is so large that the exit polls confirm a Democratic landslide, with no room for “margin of error” fudging.

Despite the poll numbers, I put this one at at a hair short of a dead heat, because of the Republican Party’s massive election fraud conspiracy. The crimes we see committed this time will make CREEP in 1972---aka Watergate---seem like petty larceny. If you want to see any GOP operatives go to jail for their crimes, you had better make sure that the Democrats still control the DOJ next year.

And the only way to do that is to get out the vote.