Pirate Joe’s Election 2006 Predictions: 31 October 2006


    It’s prognosticating time again. Just a week before the election, pundits and Democrats are predicting a big Democratic victory. Karl Rove, on the other hand remains supremely confident that Republicans will retain majorities in both houses. As far as I can see, he has good reasons to feel secure and confident.

    Although there has perhaps never been a epoch where Democrats have had more major and valid issues to blame on the Republicans, don’t think for one minute that will ultimately translate into a big Democratic victory next Tuesday. There are two reasons why I do not believe it will.  

    The first reason has to do with the fact that a big Democratic victory would also be a big contradiction of Pirate Joe’s Seventh Law. I will base my proof on the presidential election of 1972. For those of you that weren’t there or don’t remember, that election pitted incumbent Richard M. Nixon against George McGovern. Nixon, in the first four years of his presidency, had done virtually nothing to end the Vietnam War, a big public priority at that time, even bigger than the public discontent over Iraq today. This, after Nixon ran as the “peace candidate” in 1968 with a “secret plan to end the war”, as he put it. Typical Nixon; everything was a “secret”. Poor Dick. He probably just forgot what it was, and since it was a secret, there was nobody that could remind him. Anyway, his successful campaign strategy was to hang the albatross of the Vietnam War around the neck of the Democrats, whose two previous presidents had escalated it.

    By the time the 1972 election season rolled around, Nixon had coined the phrase “peace with honour”, and it had become a regular part of his rhetoric as the war raged on. Public restiveness was high, as this country witnessed ever more and ever larger anti-war demonstrations, many of which garnered millions of protesters at a time. At a point in time just 2 ½  years before the actual end of the war, there is no way one could suppose that a majority of Americans supported the war, and as November approached, the choice was quite clear: let more die as Nixon searched in vain for “peace with honour” or elect George McGovern who promised to end it.

    So McGovern won by a landslide, right? Wrong. O.K. , McGovern won by a razor-thin margin ?.... lost by a razor-thin margin? No and no. George McGovern lost the election by a landslide. That’s LANDSLIDE. A mere 2 ½ years later, congress, ( knowing full well that anyone who voted to continue the war had a date with death next election day), voted not to appropriate funds for the war, bringing it to an immediate end. In today’s lingo, we ultimately “cut and ran”. The American voting public could have taken the clear choice offered to them, thereby ending the war 2 ½ years earlier and saving thousands of lives. But they did not. One other obvious conclusion: a lot of folks who were against the war voted for Nixon! What does Pirate Joe’s Seventh Law state, you ask? Just three words: People Are Stupid.

    The second (reason) has to do with those new digital voting machines (which will make subverting an election as easy as pie). Hate to tell you this, folks but digital voting machines are nothing more than computers. We all have computers, right? So we all know about viruses, spyware, malware, identity theft, hackers, crackers and the like. So what’s to stop the people who write the computer code for these machines from burying some insidious routines deep within the operating system that will respond to certain commands, such as adjusting totals automatically? Nothing. You don’t believe that’s possible? Really..... It wasn’t that long ago that IBM startled the world with an announcement that the then new Windows XP operating environment contained hidden code that would effect communication back to Microsoft about what you were doing with your computer. As I recall, Microsoft scraped the ground with it’s corporate shoes, and said something to the effect of: “aw shucks, it was just something we forgot to take out of our test versions” Oh, and just this week, an article on Time.com informs us that these machines have already been hacked. Oops.

    The fact is that trying to hack one of the mechanical voting machines New York State uses would be next to impossible.... First, the butchering of the machine would be obvious. Second, since it’s mechanical, it cannot make decisions (and) there is no way to adjust it “on the fly”. You would have to guess at how much rigging was “just right”, knowing that a bad guess could lead to some mighty suspicious results. Third, you would have to do it to most of the machines in the state, i.e. thousands of them, not to mention having to un-do it all after the election. A rather impossible task.

    The nightmare scenario in digital voting is a computer in a single room, somewhere, automatically adjusting totals all across the nation. That room doesn’t even have to be in the U.S.A.  

    Frankly, I believe that the first reason will be the one that will turn the task. My prediction? Democrats will win seats in both houses, but not enough to take a majority in either. Republicans will emerge a little bruised, but otherwise, O.K. Karl Rove says that while the polls are pointing to a big Democratic victory, he has the best information, and it says Republicans will win. I’m sure he has his reasons.

    Sleep tight, Karl. You have many days yet left in the sun.

    Gosh, I sure do hope I’m wrong.

                                                                                                                   -30-