Sometimes it pays to be paranoid - four predictions for next week

1. Kerry will become President-elect Kerry by a far greater margin of votes than the polls indicate. Considering that polls have almost always predicted nail-bitingly close presidential elections when the elections themselves prove otherwise, this is an easy call. Kerry has the media mo and anyone who hasn't lived under a rock for the last couple of months knows the evidence of voter discontent even now already adds up to a solid Kerry win.

2. The Republicant Party will be collectively screaming "election fraud" at the top of their voice, and it will be the New Big Story for the next several weeks.

3. Substantial proof of voter fraud will be discovered, throwing Kerry's election into doubt, and if Rove has his way, into the courts.

The reason for 3 is this - the Republicants have their own private polls and over the last couple of weeks they have come to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are going to lose badly on Nov. 2, no matter how they rig the election or try to intimidate voters. Their only Hail Mary tactic at this point is the classic Rove strategy when he cant win a fair election ...

Raise the noise to drown out the signal, and throw it to the courts.

Evidence of how Republicant operatives are raising the noise right now is in this article:

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-votefraud27oct27,0,1877750.story

"In Ohio, the Republican Party is challenging about 25,000 new registrations. David Beckwith, a GOP spokesman in Ohio, said there were a number of "Democratic front groups" holding registration drives in the region and that "the fraud accusations have been worse than in 40 years."

He said multiple Democratic registration forms were signed "in the same hand," Democratic signatures were traded for "cash or crack cocaine," and a woman's husband, dead for 20 years, was registered in the Cleveland area.

"This has been sloppy and haphazard," Beckwith said."

I'll bet you lunch that those duplicate Democratic registration forms are being filled out by Republicants. This is plausible strategy because all of the media noise about a nail-bitingly close election is designed to encourage desperation in Democrats about Republicant voter fraud, which will serve to insinuate next week that there are many Democrats out there that were motivated to commit a little fraud themselves to secure a Kerry win.

Whether it's true or not isn't important. What Republicans want to do (and I believe are trying to do right now) is to commit voter fraud it such a way that it implicates Democrats. What the Republicants want to do is to throw enough doubt on it to keep Kerry's legitimacy questionable enough to substantiate a prolonged legal investigation. The longer the investigation lasts, the more time the likes of Rove, Baker, and their little minions think they have to finesse their operation.

Rove has done this before:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green

"... The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots."

Which brings me to Prediction 4.

4. Rove and the Republicant strategy will lose. They still don't want to believe how vigilant and battle-ready the Democrats are this time, and Rove has always been dependent upon Democratic complicity for his schemes to work. I suspect the Kerry campaign is purposefully understating the number of lawyers and the size of the legal staff they have to combat this in the courts, but the fact that they have announced this repeatedly in the media is a signal to Rove that the "throw it to the courts" strategy as futile. The Republicants stand to have a lot of light thrown on their workings as a result of a legal battle.

Rove and the Republicants might just prove me wrong and be good losers this time, but given the level of their hubris, their desperation and their track record, I doubt they will.

You can fucking bank on that shit.

However Kerry's margin of victory will be more than enough to dispel any doubts. Cries of legitimacy can only go so far from the party of the guy who lost by 500K+ votes

Great analysis. I think, though, that the percentage Kerry will win by will be too much to spin away as fraud, and this plan of taking the election to court will backfire on them, leaving a final sour memory of Bush as a bad loser who had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of office.

Beckwith prove this, retract this or sue him for libel. This is outrageous.

A "Democrats are crack dealers" kind of insinuation.