Chilling article by Victoria Collier in the November Harper's: How To Rig An Election.
It's chilling not because there's a lot of new information in it, but because Collier's quick tour of modern Republican "shenanigans"—many involving electronic voting—drives home the point that their project to turn the country red by rigging elections is well organized, well funded, and proceeding on several fronts with the help of numerous shady characters. (Experts even have a name for the persistent tilting of vote totals toward Republicans: the "red shift".)
"Ah," but you say, "What about 2006 and 2008?" Collier's answer is that there is plenty of reason to suspect extensive red-shifting even in these elections, but "…these efforts simply failed to overcome eleventh-hour events so negative that they drastically undercut the projected wins for the G.O.P." In 2006, it was the Mark Foley Congressional page underage-gay sex scandal; in 2008 the collapse of Lehman Brothers did the trick.
But maybe the biggest threat of all to clean elections is the way that Democrats and left-leaning media are letting the criminals get away with it, without so much as a peep of protest. Collier cites NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, who has documented widespread G.O.P. election fraud in his books Fooled Again and Loser Take All. According to Miller, the left is profoundly uneasy with the whole subject: perhaps afraid of being dismissed as conspiracy theorists, they "just can't go there." Former Vermont state senator Ben Ptashnik adds "Very few leaders are willing to fight it, which is probably why Kerry backed off in 2004. But the evidence is piling up. Democrats have to get their heads out of the sand and realize we're looking at our worst nightmare: Karl Rove's projected forty-year G.O.P. dynasty."
Look, if the Republicans can create a huge uproar over a nonexistent problem of "voter fraud", shouldn't we Dems be able to kick up a bit of a fuss about actual election theft? Time for a Kos campaign to get the media on this story!