Was there ever anything more entertaining than Karl Rove's hissy fit on election night, 2012, when Fox News called Ohio and the election for Obama? How delightful to see his usually smirky, self-satisfied, fat face trembling with distress as he insisted it was too soon to call! He's a man who should be proved wrong in public, as often as possible.
I see frequent reference to his meltdown in political commentary, but no one seems aware that his smug confidence in Romney's Ohio victory may have reflected knowledge that the fix was in rather than faith in bad poll data. No one mentions what I consider to be a HUGE story--he may have rigged the electronic voting machines in Ohio in 2012 just as he'd done in 2004 to help Bush defeat Kerry. In the many articles covering this, I can't find a definite answer, so we may never know for sure, but this article outlines exactly why it is not a ridiculous notion.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/
The author concludes that Rove probably did not do a fix for Bush in 2004 because there were plenty of indications that Bush would win leading up to that election, so the outcome wasn't surprising. I'm not at all convinced by that. Just because Bush was expected to win and may have won fairly doesn't prove Rove didn't slip a card or two up his sleeve just to make sure.
This article:
http://thedailybanter.com/2012/09/the-daily-banter-exclusive-did-karl-rove-rig-the-2004-election-and-is-he-doing-it-again/
describes the suspicion surrounding the 2004 election events in Ohio. It involves a tech service company funded by Rove associates hired by the state of Ohio to provide a "failsafe voting server" for the unlikely event of a "network problem." The SmarTech server, as it was called, would not be utilized unless some kind of problem with the standard voting system caused a failure, and shortly after Florida was declared for Bush, making Ohio the deciding state in the overall election, their system crashed and was switched over to SmarTech. The state had been reporting results decidedly in Kerry's favor, but after the switch, there were "serious anomalies that saw an increase in votes favorable to Bush," who went on to win Ohio and the election. If this was, in fact, observed by someone, I don't know why an investigation wasn't done at the time or why nobody heard about it. And knowing about it makes Rove's reaction to Ohio in 2012 interesting for reasons beyond simple shadenfreude.
And yes, that meltdown on election night 2012 was bizarre. It does make more sense as a reaction to something he thought could not happen than to simply having his heart broken by disappointment. He insisted the result was called too soon, but what made him think so, when in hindsight it clearly was not?
Ann Romney said she and Mitt were contacted at hourly intervals by Rove, and when it seemed they'd lost, Rove assured them it wasn't over and it would be alright, hang in there. He had such a contagious demeanor that they really did regain hope and believed they'd win right up until the moment the election was called for Obama. Even she seemed confused by Rove's utter certainty. At the time she felt inspired to share his confidence, because if anyone would know how to read the voting trends, it was Karl Rove. Looking back, she still seemed to wonder why he missed it so badly.
Now this is Karl Rove's profession, he's a king maker. He knows about polls and voting patterns; he seems less likely than the average Fox pundit to put undue faith in a Romney win that polls had been predicting would not happen. He's not likely to have fooled himself with the "skewed polls" rhetoric, at least not to the point of shock and tantrum when the results came in.
How do you explain Anonymous's warning and their claim to have thwarted his efforts? It was totally made up?
I don't know if Rove had a role in Bush's 2000 election, but many of us believe Bush stole that election through similar strategy--tamper with the results in a strategic state and make sure the final tally says we win. So if all this speculation is true, election rigging would have been a well-established backup plan by 2012 for elections close enough to hinge on one or two states.
Here's the rest of the evidence, and I do find it compelling:
1) Many Republicans, including the governor of Ohio, predicted Romney would win there despite Obama's strong poll majority. It wasn't the prediction so much as a "very eerie confidence" in victory that made it remarkable.
2) Romney's ORCA failed with crashes and slowdowns on Election Day, which could have indicated a cyberattack.
3) Romney did not prepare a concession speech, which seems bizarre for a candidate who was not predicted by polls to win.
4) Romney owned the voting machines in Ohio, which were given an unexpected software patch the night before the election.
I'm surprised and disappointed this didn't circulate out into mainstream awareness. I only learned of it six months or so later when I read deep into the comments of a political article and came across a reference to Karl Rove's unsuccessful attempt to rig Ohio for Romney, then used google to find the whole story.
I am admittedly biased, but when I think about what Republicans have done this year, wherever they have power, to interfere with fair elections and ensure their party's advantage, I notice they do seem to prefer using gerrymandering and voting laws to give themselves an edge. In Texas, Rick Perry even went to federal court to defend his state's redistricting and said it was done to improve his party's chances of winning and not to disenfranchise minority voters. (As though there could be any other reason to disenfranchise minority voters than to improve your party's chances--if minorities were voting for you, you'd hardly go trying to minimize their votes.) So I believe Republicans made a choice long ago, to use tricks and gimmicks to win elections rather than try to make themselves appealing to more voters and win fairly.
If Karl Rove rigged the elections, I hope he was hotly embarrassed to have failed this time. It's unfortunate he won't see the kind of consequences he deserves for it. Our elections are the last little bit of power we have as voters, and already they fail us in so many ways, we must at least keep them from becoming a complete sham.
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