Flipping on the TV this Sunday morning, I couldn't find any good football games on, nor any good movies or music. So I broke down and clicked to CNN, just of out masoch...er, random curiosity, and found Late Edition.
I happened upon a discussion about the possibility of a contested election that Wolf was moderating, with GOP lawyer C. Boyden Gray and former White House counsel (under Clinton, I believe), Jack Quinn.
Something Quinn said really clicked in my mind, and I think I got a better glimpse of the overall GOP strategy to steal this election. Details below.
Quinn said that, and I am writing from memory, that "the GOP expects to wake up on November 3 behind, and is laying the groundwork to challenge the votes that provided Kerry the margin of victory".
Gray did not contradict that - instead he focused on the OH precinct issue, using that as an example of how Dems were already trying to game the system unfairly.
Both of these crystallized the situation for me. The GOP knows that the influx of new voters in these swing states means they're staring at a defeat. I'm sure internal polling reveals that in a free and fair election, they lose OH and FL and thus the whole enchilada.
But instead of relying on attempts to screw voters before or on Nov 2, it seems to me that BC04 is really staking their victory on a challenge to those voters after the ballots have been cast. Using their spin that the Democrats flooded polls with 'ringers' or other folks who shouldn't have voted - and that these efforts led to Kerry stealing the presidency - they'll build public support for their myriad court efforts to undo the Kerry victory in the courts.
This is not to say that there aren't active voter-suppression efforts afoot by the GOP - there certainly are, as we are well aware. But If we look at the OH situation, I think it bears out quite well this overall plan.
What exactly would this look like? A thought exercise, if you will:
It's the evening of Nov 2. Americans are glued to their TV sets watching the election returns. As the numbers trickle in, reporters across the country remark at the massive, unprecedented (in modern times) voter turnout. Scenes from Miami and Cleveland resemble those of South Africa in 1994 - long, winding lines of energized voters.
Killing more time until numbers come in, the networks also report on the many incidents of supposed voting irregularities, from the computer in Duval County that crashed for an hour, to the Dems in Columbus, OH who went to their polling place to find police and GOP thugs challenging their credentials to be able to vote. The news tries to stick to their evenhanded bullshit - giving credence to both Dem charges of GOP fraud as well as GOP claims that the Dems flooded the polls with unregistered or illegally registered voters.
Then, as the night goes on, the returns come in, states are called. It's clear that Kerry has the lead, but several states remain up in the air - WI, OH, FL, NV. Sometime around 11PM Pacific - 2AM Eastern - OH announces that in fact Kerry has won that state by 75,000 votes. Not long after comes word from Florida that Kerry has won that too by well over 150,000.
America wakes up on November 3 to a Kerry victory - Kerry has 316 EV, Bush 222. In addition to the two mentioned above, Kerry also won WI and NV.
And then the GOP starts in with their coordinated attack. They point out examples of voters not being registered in a certain precinct in Columbus having voted instead in this one. They bring up other such examples from all over OH, FL, NV, WI, maybe others. Several examples are probably actually GOP plants - folks the GOP sent out to misvote for Kerry somewhere just for this after-the-election purpose.
Using these, the GOP announces they will be filing suit in OH and FL and others in order to protect the integrity of elections from the usual Democratic corruption. They send their people out into the media to conjure up memories of Cook County IL in 1960, as an example of Democratic treachery. They energize their base, already convinced that liberals want to take over the country, to go out and press the case that the GOP was robbed.
Then the GOP goes into federal courts, where they've got lots of friendly judges. And all the while they know that if they lose in the lower courts, they've always got the master vote-stealer of them all, who earned his stripes suppressing black and latino votes in Phoenix - Rehnquist and the SCOTUS.
Maybe I've got the tinfoil on too tightly. But what scares me most is that we've seen this tactic before. In union elections. This is a standard tactic for management to win a vote over whether or not a union will be organized - allow the vote to actually happen (at the NLRB's insistence) but contest the hell out of it after it is over, throwing out enough votes to bring you a victory. It has happened to many a union organizing effort.
I call this the "reverse Florida" because it puts the GOP in the position of Al Gore in 2000. But the GOP's position this time would be much stronger than Gore's - not just because of incumbency, but because of the way the federal courts are stacked.
This strategy, however, has a major flaw - if the Democrats can get organized and convince Americans that these GOP suits are the ultimate effort of a corrupt administration to cling to power at all costs, then Americans will be repulsed in horror at the naked fraudulence of the GOP approach.
But that only works if we have won the PR war. If we get defined as election-stealers before they do, then the GOP has a huge advantage in the media and the court of public opinion.
Either way I think we may have been misreading the GOP's plans. And in any case, the response is a twin response - massive GOTV in all swing states, not just FL and OH, and a massive PR blitz beginning now, lasting until the election, explaining how Dems are following the rules and the GOP are the ones suppressing things. If we allow the Dems to be defined as the ones committing fraud, we will be in a bad spot come Nov 3.
This week we need to expend every effort not just to get voters to the polls, but to publicize the examples of GOP fraud that we have found while also defending against GOP claims against us. We have to do it now, before it's too late. Otherwise they may snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.