Diary: Election Rigged for the GOP, Or Just More Bush Admin Denial

After George W. Bush won the 2004 U.S. election, tales of vote fraud began circulating. University of Pennsylvania organizational-dynamics professor Steven J. Freeman has said that Bush's final-day tallies were significantly higher than exit-poll results in 10 of the 11 battleground states. Freeman says there is a 250,000,000:1 chance of those discrepancies occurring simultaneously in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

Much attention focused on touch-screen electronic-voting machines, which don't require paper ballots, making it impossible to physically verify Voter's intention and election results. In 2004, when touch-screen voting machines were widely deployed for the first time in a national election, questions about the security and reliability of the machines--and therefore, the 2004 election results--abounded. Edward Felten, Ari Feldman, and Alex Halderman of the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, in a report titled "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine" detail simple methods to compromise the security of electronic-voting machines to steal an election.

Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday that voters "know something is wrong" in Washington and urged Democrats to create change in the November elections. "I have never seen the American people so serious," said Clinton. "I think I know why. People know things are out of whack. The rhythm of our public life and our common life in America has been disturbed."

The Republican establishment "know something is wrong" too and are in widespread panic about the coming Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill are bracing for losses of 25 House seats or more.

Incongruously, there are two in the Republican establishment whose confidence about GOP prospects hit even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat: President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove. Party operatives say Rove is predicting that, at worst, Republicans will lose only 8 to 10 seats -- shy of the 15-seat threshold that would cede control to Democrats. In the Senate, Rove and Bush believe, a Democratic victory would require the opposition to "run the table," as one official put it, to pick up the necessary six seats -- a prospect the White House seems to regard as nearly inconceivable. "They aren't even planning for if they lose," says a GOP insider who informally counsels the West Wing.

The official White House line of supreme self-assurance comes from the top down. Bush has publicly and privately banished any talk of losing the GOP majorities. The question is whether this is a case of "justified confidence" -- based on Bush's and Rove's inside knowledge of the electronic-voting machine technology at their command -- or just another "State of Denial."