Was KKKarl's disbelief evidence of attempted fraud?

[NashvilleLefty]

I'll admit, I was "concerned" that they would try to steal this election like they did in 2004. And it appeared they were trying. There were suspicious software "updates" added to Ohio's tabulation at the last minute that raised a lot of questions. There were multiple attempts at voter suppression that were widely documented.

BUT, Dems were ready for them. I don't think they were prepared for so many Dems to fight back, demanding that closed polling places be re-opened etc., etc.

Re-redistricting did seem to work for them in House races, although obviously not as well as they would have liked.

But all eyes were on Ohio. It was THE battleground. And for "concerned citizens" like me it appeared that "the fix was in". Then, it was called for Obama. KKKarl Rove FREAKED! He didn't freak out in a a natural way IMHO, but he freaked in a way like "no, it can't be because we had it guaranteed!"

His reaction was definitely over the top. It's obvious he had unusual confidence that Romney would "win" Ohio. Sure, he probably (Hopefully!) saw his career go down the tubes, but it was more so because of his unusual reaction than because he was "wrong". If he had reacted differently, he could easily have resurrected his career. His reaction went waaaay beyond someone in simple disbelief over malleable results.

We have proven that an informed, engaged electorate CAN overcome lies; we CAN overcome fraud (kudos to the voters who didn't trust what they were told and demanded to be allowed to express their right to vote! Kudos to the people who stood for hours in line to express their right!), we CAN overcome Citizen's United (although we shouldn't have to).

The only dark spot in such a wonderful night was that Batshit Bachmann managed to squeak by. Then I found out that she outspent her opponent by 12 to 1 - 12 to 1! - and still only barely managed to win. It was such a wonderful night, I'm going to count that as a win, too. After all, Comedy needs someone!

And to all the high-dollar contributors to the campaigns that lost - wouldn't it just be cheaper to pay the taxes that help the economy and eventually make you richer in the long run, even with the higher taxes?

But Barack had a good point - our job doesn't stop when we vote. We need to be vigilant 365. Don't forget, we have more House Elections in 2014, and that's how they snuck-up and took the House last time. We need to take the House back in 2014!

We can do it!

EDIT: kan't spel

[marions ghost]

1. The Magic 8 Ball says

YES

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. the Rove moment, I admit, reminded me very much of when Dubya refused to believe

FL going to Gore, saying some bullshit like "my brother tells me I will win FL" (I don't remember the exact words, but they really smelled).

[NashvilleLefty]

7. I have to admit, in memory of 2000

it really did my heart good to see FL "not even f*cking matter"! Just hanging there flaccid and impotent, still uncounted and nobody cared.

[Turborama]

25. LOL me too! Glad to see Rick Scott's nefarious plans were for nought. Is FL still unknown, btw?

It didn't matter for the 270, but it would officially be a landslide if we did get it.

[SoCalDemGrrl]

55. Love it- your "flaccid" adjective says it all! Brilliant!!!

[Kahuna]

10. Exactly!I thought the same thing. They felt sure that husted

would pull it off for them. But husted finally realized that he could only get away with it if Obama lost and that wasn't likely to happen. Plus, twitter was all over his butt last weekend.

[dflprincess]

21. I was with four other people and I think we all flashed to that moment in 2000

then we calmed down and figured with the way things were going Ohio no longer mattered as much.

[HooptieWagon]

3. Yes.

They had some pretty bad internal polling that gave them leads in FL, VA, CO, and elsewhere. So they really needed Ohio, and thought they could steal it.

[cprise]

32. I agree... How could Rove be legitimately surprised about

...Ohio going to Obama when when polls showed it was so close? He seemed to be expecting a 'fix'.

[elleng]

4. I thought so when I heard about it,

only saw him a few minutes ago.

Really thought we'd still be waiting and fighting about OH (and FL.) Pleased Dems had so many boots on the ground to defeat their 'games,' but what's with FL?

[HooptieWagon]

35. Its a procedural holdup.

Less than .5% MOV triggers an automatic recount. Obama has just a little over that, but theres 10s of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots to count, which are done by hand. Those ballots are all in Miami-Dade, though, so once they're counted MOV will be above .5% and the results will be certified. Do not worry.

[elleng]

51. Thanks. Been out of town for election work,

and not able to read everything. Did work on election matters, actually advised those who did provisional ballots, so aware of that process.

So we'll have EV of 332??? CAN'T WAIT!!!

[Barack_America]

5. If Romney's internal polling had OH as the biggest tossup, as has been reported...

...then why was Rove so certain that Romney should have won it? Why was he so insistent that there were "Romney votes out there" that could have overcome Cuyhoga?

[HooptieWagon]

36. Their polling was bad.

They seriously underestimated minority and youth voting. Their bad polls showed them winning FL, Mn, and the other swing states except Ohio. They thought they only needed to flip a small percentage of Ohio (remember the last minute software patch?) but the GOTV caught them off guard and they underestimated the amount of vote flipping needed to steal it.

[Barack_America]

39. They know that now.

But at the time, why was Rove so certain of Ohio?

[HooptieWagon]

40. Cause he thought flipping 3% of vote was enough to eke out a win.

Turned out that wasn't enough

[Barack_America]

43. Yeah. I think we're on the same page.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

6. KKKarl took a LOT of money from some very rich, powerful people

to fund his superpac. I wonder what guarantees he made to those people? I wonder whether he didn't have something all set up with Husted, the Ohio secretary of state, who either screwed it up or chickened out because he knew all eyes were on Ohio and he didn't want to go to prison. KKKarl sure looked shocked and in denial when FOX called Ohio for Obama. Maybe it was just because he'd been watching the wrong polls. Or maybe there was something else going on. Either way, he failed to deliver Ohio after taking piles of money from the likes of Sheldon Adelson, who may or may not have underworld connections.

I wonder if KKKarl might find a horse's head in his bed some morning?

[Firebirds01]

18. the "additional software" to voting machines

were in swing counties. Wow isnt that odd....stuff being installed in only swing state voting machines?!?!

Anyway blah blah blah....Husted got caught by the Columbus Free Press and didnt want to go to jail so he called off the fix. It was caught, that's the difference between now and 2004 and now and a President Romney.

[Sedona]

23. Rafalka?

[hifiguy]

42. People have wound up wearing cement overshoes

for a hell of a lot smaller swindles than Rove's. He should avoid small planes, or then again, maybe he shouldn't.

[ProudProgressiveNow]

45. +1 nt

[Coyotl]

8. The Romney camp was pulling his strings

and they were in total denial still.

[Lucy Goosey]

9. He thought he had OH bought and paid for...

...that's what I've been thinking, anyway.

[LisaL]

11. It was bizarre. Cuyahoga was still not counted, which is the most democratic county of OH.

So why did he expect Romney was going to get more votes?

[nc4bo]

27. Wasn't one of Romney camps MOs was to pick off Obama voters? Convince them

Romney was the man for the job.

He or KKKarl had ads that specifically targeted dissatisfied '08 Obama voters playing like crazy in the swing states, I bet Ohio had a face full of them too.

[LisaL]

49. They had to know they weren't going to get many Obama voters in Cuyahoga.

It is very consistently democratic (Gore, Kerry won it by a large margin) and has a large number of African-Americans.

[The Wielding Truth]

12. Rove along with his party are an embarrassment. It's a shame they can't live in reality.

[Lisa0825]

13. Does anyone have a link to the KKKarl freak out? Nevermind - think I found it!

[renate]

56. thanks for that link!

It's been taken down, but I found another:

It would be interesting to know whether the acceleration of Romney votes, and the difference of 991 votes, that Rove is trying to persuade us of ever actually happened, or if those were just numbers that they floated but decided they couldn't actually get away with.

[d_r]

14. maybe they *did* do the computer thing to steal it

and the actual results were so much in favor of the President that it wasn't enough - maybe the "real" results weren't as close as the ones we got.

[HooptieWagon]

38. Exactly!

The vote flipping is critical. If too high, its obvious and you get caught. Too low, and you lose the election. This time, they underestimated the voter turnout, so they didn't program a big enough flip.

[felix_numinous]

57. Wow your explanation makes a lot of sense nt

[ProudProgressiveNow]

46. +1

[erinlough]

15. How could Romney and his family

have no idea they might lose unless they had an inside bet that the whole thing was bought and paid for? A reporter who traveled with the Romney campaign said this morning that the family was so sure it was a shoe-in that they were in shock at the loss. How could that be? Unless, they thought they had bought it and it was a lock. I think there was more promised to them than delivered.

[sammytko]

17. They live in a bubble of yes men and women.

[jeff47]

22. +infinity (nt)

[sammytko]

16. But I think at the time he was complaining, BO was about to win Colorado an d Nevada and

Didn't even need Ohio, so rove was whining for nothing.

[RomneyLies]

19. .

[stevenleser]

37. I don't think it's tinfoil hat, see my 34, for instance...

If only Miami Dade county and a small republican county are left in Florida, and without those counties its even, and the state is called for a Democrat, if a highly influential Republican ala a Rove says, "Wait, I think its too early...", I think you have to get suspicious. Its not too early. The only way it could turn out is if a fix is in.

The networks are pretty conservative these days about calling races. It gets to a point where a or a number of large Democratic county(ies) is(are) going to be coming in and of all the other votes the Republican would need to get nearly 100%. Thats the point they call 'em. Thats when they called Ohio.

You have to be thinking this way with elections nowadays. With all the voter suppression and other funny business going on, its far from the realm of the tinfoil hats anymore.

[demhottie]

20. Was KKKarl's disbelief evidence of attempted fraud? YES

There should be a federal wire tap in place on him.

I want to see a conviction.

[demhottie]

24. He's like the kid who brings a cheat sheet to the test

Then yells at the teacher for giving the wrong exam

[crazylikafox]

58. bingo

[cleduc]

26. When I compared Nate's projection to the actual margins

here's what I got:

St Nate Actual
CO 2.5 3.7
FL 0.0 0.5
IA 3.2 5.6
NH 3.5 5.4
NC -1.7 -2.2
NV 4.5 6.6
NM 9.4 9.9
OH 3.6 1.9
PA 5.9 5.1
VA 2.0 3.1
WI 5.5 6.7

Nate's projections are often on the conservative side.

The three states where Nate projected high for Obama were:
PA, OH & NC
Pollster and Votematic were in the same boat on those three.

This Daily Kos poster really analyzed the early vote in NC
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/05/1156476/-NC-Pre-EDAY-Analysis-All-the-Data-About-NC-Screams-Tossup-Except-Conventional-Wisdom-GOTV
It was a bit of a surprise NC shifted as much as it did to the ultimate margin it arrived at.

I'm not into conspiracy theories and making accusations based upon a convenient stringing together of loose facts. But I have never seen an election with more reports of one party trying to suppress or game the vote than this one. To me, it was staggering and by far the biggest reason I lacked confidence in Nate's forecast.

As the standard bearer of democracy for the world, US elections should be beyond reproach. Clearly, there is ample evidence to suspect with the various and numerous shady tactics throughout the battleground states, this election was not beyond reproach. If I could, those are the three states that I would look more closely at or audit if possible.

Something needs to be done.

[Digit]

28. That is eye-opening

We need to work harder to defeat these treasonous bastards.

[KharmaTrain]

29. Stagecraft...

Turdblossom was the conduit of millions of dollars from lots of high rollers. He milked them early and often promising that Obama would lose, the rushpublicans would control both houses and Willard would be open for business. You don't toss around millions without expecting something in return. Unfortunately "the math" just didn't work out...again. He ended up over-spending in many markets (getting nice commissions along the way) and then dumping money in states and markets where there was little chance to make an impact. Then came the moment of reckoning. Surely all the big check writers were tuned in to see how their ROI was doing and things weren't quite what they were expecting. Karl surely knew the numbers weren't good but he was gonna do one more play on the con...try to set up an escape so that the day after he can cry foul or blame the media or both when those high rollers began to call.

[krawhitham]

30. They were hoping it would be with in OH's 18 EV so they could pull the trigger on the patch

Since OH made no difference they never used the patch

[Honeycombe8]

31. Maybe. But for Ohio & other states, the results were close to the polls. nt

[jeff47]

33. No - Karl was realizing his career was over.

His track record since 2006 is awful. This time around, he got giant piles of money in order to win races. And he lost every race he touched.

He's not going to get big piles of money in 2014. It's understandable that he'd freak out over losing his livelihood.

[ProudProgressiveNow]

47. +1 nt

[stevenleser]

34. The moment he started doubting Fox' own analysts, that is EXACTLY what I thought...

how can Rove doubt what the analysts are saying unless he knows something is going to take place or has taken place that is going to do something highly unusual to the tally that is going to throw off the normally nearly 100% accurate predictions based on what counties are still left uncounted added to the current count.

[LisaL]

48. He had to know Cuyahoga was not going to go for Romney.

It's large and consistently one of them bluest counties in OH.
So where did he expect Romney was going to get these magical votes?

[SaveAmerica]

41. I think it was the loud protest w/law against the temp fix of

the tabulator machine. If that hadn't been brought to light with a call to a lawyer and blogs/FB/Twitter getting the word out it might have been different.

Also, did you see Brad Friedman (Brad Blog) last night when he tweeted about the Ohio Board of Election results page going offline about 11:00 or so last night? He said as it went down that it was just like in '04 when (as it went down that night) Kerry was in the lead. When it finally came back up, suddenly bush was in the lead. When it finally came back up last night, it went back to normal.

I think he was trying to get away with it, but it was just too much of a stretch and obvious.

[LisaL]

50. Yea, flipping Cuyahoga county would be completely unbelievable.

[Unknown Beatle]

44. Rove's problem

was that he thought it was going to come down to Ohio just like in 2004. So he argued that it's still too early to call Ohio expecting the fix to kick in, giving the election to Romney. Fortunately for us, Ohio didn't matter, otherwise, I suspect there would have been delays in counting Ohio votes with the all to real possibility of theft.

[slutticus]

52. Yes

But last time he did that the voted did flip.

[starroute]

53. Remember this Rove golden oldie from 2006?

Rove was wrong then too, of course, but he was just as sure of himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove_in_the_George_W._Bush_administration#2006_Congressional_elections_and_beyond

On October 24, 2006, two weeks before the Congressional election, in an interview with National Public Radio's Robert Siegel, Rove insisted that his insider polling data forecast Republican retention of both houses:

SIEGEL: I'm looking at all the same polls that you are looking at.

ROVE: No, you are not. I'm looking at 68 polls a week for candidates for the US House and US Senate, and Governor and you may be looking at 4-5 public polls a week that talk attitudes nationally.

SIEGEL: I don't want to have you to call races...

ROVE: I'm looking at all of these Robert and adding them up. I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I'm entitled to the math.

In the election the Democrats won both houses of Congress.

[SoCalDemGrrl]

54. Absolutely!! They had the fix in but didnt anticipate the HUGE turnout so KKKARL

was caught off guard and stumped as to how to react. His demeanor was telling.