Recently, the hacktivist group Anonymous claimed it stopped Karl Rove from hacking voting machines in Ohio.
Many Obama supporters, including myself, have been debating Anonymous' claim quite hotly. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to Karl Rove planning an election rigging scheme in advance... and been thwarted. Let's look at it.
1) Many republicans, including the governor of Ohio, predicted a Romney win in Ohio despite all polls pointing towards a substantial Obama margin of victory. It was not so much the prediction as the very eerie confidence with which they predicted this victory for Romney that disconcerted Democrats at the time.
2) Mitt Romney's Project ORCA was a failure and showed all the signs of suffering an orchestrated cyberattack from the outside (slowdowns, crashes, etc.) on Election Day.
3) Karl Rove suffered an infamous meltdown on TV continuously insisting that the results coming out of Ohio were incomplete despite all evidence to the contrary. It was unbecoming of a man of Rove's intelligence and seemed to indicate that he had been genuinely expecting a result different from all the numerous polls already out of Ohio that favored the president.
4) Mitt Romney hadn't prepared a concession speech Despite all the evidence to the contrary Romney clearly expected to win the election. What did he know that we didn't?
5)Romney owned the voting machines in Ohio... most of which were given an unapproved software patch right before Election Day. In other words, the machines were ripe for unauthorized hackery and vote-rigging.
Looking at all this compelling evidence, and enjoying Rove's dismay on Fox News during election night, does make Anonymous' claim quite believable. Still, when I saw Karl Rove on Fox News on November 6th, 2012, I didn't see a man who was astounded as to how his illegal election scheme had suddenly fallen apart.
I saw myself on Election Night 2004.
Back in 2004 I had made a pact: I would make sure George W. Bush was removed from office or I would leave the country. I had naively voted for Nader in 2000. Life had been good then and it had lulled us all into a false sense of security. There was nothing worse a president could do for a country than get a blow job in the Oval Office. The economy was good, the world was (mostly) at peace and honestly none of us saw that ever changing.
We all know what happened next. The 9/11 attacks shattered us as a nation. Bush started a war in Iraq while being unmindful of how many deaths of civilians would be involved in this endeavor. After falsifying security information, Bush allowed almost 4500 American soldiers and over 120,000 Iraqi civilians because he lived in an action movie and his vice president, Dick Cheney was (and is) a vicious war profiteer. This was all done, of course, using false intelligence as an excuse to go to war with no regard for the human cost.
I knew that the Democratic candidate would be elected in 2004 though. We as a nation were a good, moral people after all. We didn't know George W. Bush in 2000 and we didn't even really elect him then anyway (The majority of Americans voted for Gore) Americans were good people! This country was my country and I was proud of it. We would take Bush out in 2004. Our nightmare would be done.
So imagine my horror when Bush was decisively re-elected on November 2nd, 2004. Not only had the country not rejected Bush, the country had rejected ME! My fellow citizens, by an overwhelming popular majority of 3 million and a hefty slice of the electoral college to boot, had said: "We approve of civilian death of Iraq. We approve of unnecessary war... and if you stand in his way we'll probably approve of Bush bombing you and your loved ones as well." This was the message my fellow citizens had sent to me. i was so disgusted that I left the country and went to volunteer abroad in Asia.
Still, looking at 2004 eight years later I can see how much John Kerry was losing long before the election. Kerry was a terrible candidate. He was often glum and tired. His rallies left you feeling more depressed than gung-ho. He allowed the Bush administration to run right over him with negative ads and (most egregiously) did not respond to the lies of the "Swift Boat" campaign. He remained silent, making it look like the "Swift Boaters" were telling the truth.
In contrast, during Obama's campaign in 2008, Bush launched the same "flip-flopper" criticism at Obama. "I just don't know where he stands on the issues." Obama's campaign fired back on the very same day: "We're not taking policy advice from the architect of the worst foreign policy decisions in a decade." Bam! That was when I knew Obama was going to win.
There were other strikes against Kerry. He had voted for the Iraq War and thus felt honor-bound to not use his full strength against Bush on this issue. When we had spent two months canvassing for Kerry in 105-degree Florida summer heat... only to turn on our TV sets and hear Kerry say that if he had known then what he knew now about what the Iraq war would yield, he would STILL have voted for it.... well. We just put our heads in our hands. Two months of grueling labor down the drain because Kerry had fucked up in one interview. Even John Stewart yelled out from his desk at that time: "You don't want to win, do you??"
Looking back at the polls at the time, it was clear that Bush was the odds-on favorite. The reasons are as follows:
1) Out of fifteen General Election polls, Bush led in eleven polls with two tied and two for Kerry.
2) In Ohio, the state that Rove apparently hacked, Bush led in eight out of nine polls right before the election. Only CNN/Gallup (which was having a hard time in 2004) predicted an Ohio win for Kerry, showing Kerry winning the state by a 4- point margin. CNN/Gallup also predicted that Bush would take Pennsylvania by 4 points (Kerry ended up taking the state that election) and that Kerry would take Florida (Bush ended up with Florida on November 2nd).
3) Florida looked like a tighter race (Kerry won three polls, Bush won four and two polls were tied) but Florida is infamous for (only technically legally) rigging elections to favor Republicans. Only a few precincts in 2004 allowed early voting and minorities were already so disenchanted over being blatantly disenfranchised in 2000 that they simply didn't turn out at all to vote. Also, needles to say, Kerry didn't exactly weave a spell over Democratic voting blocks. Women broke for Kerry by an anemic 3%. Meanwhile Bush took 11% of African-Americans, 44% of Latinos and 44% of Asians. These are MASSIVE percentages for a Republican candidate! Romney would have KILLED to have those percentages during this past election!
4) Bush won the popular vote by over 3 million votes. When you win the popular vote, you win the electoral college. It's been that way for over a hundred years, and no, I'm not including the 2000 election. Gore won the electoral college narrowly in the race, just as he won the popular vote narrowly. Had it not been for the infamous "Butterfly Ballot" in Palm Beach County Gore would have comfortably won Florida and taken his rightful place in the White House.
5) The social factors in 2004 were very amenable towards a Bush victory. The mega- churches were at full strength then and they threw all their considerable muscle and influence behind George W. Bush. Mel Gibson's "The Passion" was breaking box office records and instilling American Christians with renewed fervor towards whatever the neo-conservatives were calling Christianity back then. That all went towards Bush's electoral voter piggy bank. I still remember running into bright-faced teenage canvassers for George W. Bush while canvassing the same neighborhoods in central Florida. They seemed so much more energized than we were.
Yet I didn't see these facts in 2004. I still thought John Kerry was winning. All the General Election polls were within the margin of error. All the state polls were biased. We were WINNING! Why didn't everyone else see it that way?
That was Karl Rove's universe in 2012. All the polls were skewed. All the media reports had a liberal bias. Look at the crosstabs! Look at historical precedent where independent voters always broke for the challenger instead of the incumbent! Romney was WINNING! Why didn't everyone else see it that way? Don't call Ohio yet! Hamilton County hasn't got all its votes in yet. Delaware County hasn't reported yet either... the game is still on! Karl Rove on November 6th, 2012 was me on November 2nd, 2004.... except he had a horde of angry investors to contend with on top of his own disappointment.
So do I think Karl Rove hacked the voting machines back in 2004? No, I don't think that happened. I want to believe it happened. I want to believe that my fellow Americans knew in their hearts what was good and moral and were only thwarted by one hacker ... but I can't. There will always be a stray poll here or a power outage there or an exit poll floating about that will feed the conspiracy. But no, the reality is far more dispiriting: The majority of Americans just didn't care that George W. Bush was sacrificing innocent lives for the sake of oil interests.
But now, I hope, the American electorate has grown a conscience. It just isn't the sexy new candidate the Democrats offered in 2008 and 2012. It's the Americans themselves. It's the voters who now have more news sources and higher access to the internet than ever before. The voters are smarter now than ever before. Let's hope that they will keep the future for the Democrats.