One potential explanation for confidence of Bush/Rove

By Lee Russ

Saturday, October 21, 2006 at 05:09 PM

The Brad Blog has the transcript of a major broadcast network  interview, which was never aired, with former U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) chair Rev. DeForest Soaries.

Relevant excerpts of the Reverend's comments (epmhasis added):

...we know more today about how to build a machine to take pictures of rocks on Mars than we know about how to build a machine to safeguard the American right to vote.

There is no prototype. There are no standards. There is no scientific research that would guarantee any election district that there's a machine that can be used to answer these very serious questions. And so, my sense is that the politicians in Washington have concluded that the system can't be all that bad because, after all, it produced them. And as long as an elected official is an elected official, then whatever machine was used, whatever device was used to elect him or her, seems to be adequate. But there's an erosion of voting rights implicit in our inability to trust the technology that we use and if we were another country being analyzed by America, we would conclude that this country is ripe for stealing elections and for fraud.
...
 I was basically deceived by the leaders of the House, the Senate and the White House. And I decided that it just made more sense to spend my time watching my sons play basketball than to participate in this charade.

"While we're spending a billion dollars a week in Iraq, we're told at EAC, by both the White House and the Congress, here is how much we're going to give you. You tell us what you're going to do with it. They never asked us the question, what would it really take to lead election reform in this country. How much money should the country really spend not only on buying new equipment, but on doing the proper research before using that equipment and how much will it cost over the long haul to keep that equipment up to date and to repair such equipment. Those questions were not asked. So in my view, it was a just a charade that I would chose not to participate in.

So....is that why we see the unreasonable confidence in Bush/Rove, who smilingly insist that the Republicans will keep the congress?  I wish I could say I didn't think that was possible, but I can't.

Between now and the day after the election, we will see how much of that public confidence was based on:

a.  Knowledge that the game is fixed.

b.  Knowledge that they had a nasty October surprise ready to spring.

c.  The false happy face required in order to keep the base and the troops motivated to keep the damage to a minimum.