Nightmare Scenario: ‘Dead Heat’ and ‘Dirty Tricks’

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We really should have taken some time off this past summer, cause it looks like we may not get a good break anytime soon. It may be a much busier November, December and even January than we’d like.

Rachel Maddow highlights what we regard as our personal nightmare scenario: “Almost every legitimately contested, legitimately interesting race in the country — is tied, right now, with less than three weeks to go”…

Ugh.

“With this many top of the ticket races tied, turnout will be everything,” Maddow explains. “So now’s the part where we watch for the ways that people will try to stop voters from turning out or from having their votes counted, by hook or by crook. … Right now, big picture, three weeks out: this is a tie game. Close enough to be fascinating, but also close enough to be stolen”…

Of course, with all due respect to Maddow, while “now” is certainly important, it is not the only time where we ought to “watch for the ways that people will try to stop voters from turning out or from having their votes counted.” We ought to be doing that in the rest of the year and the year prior — outside of the dead heat of the election moment — when it’s a lot easier to do something about those who work to stop voters from turning out and to have votes counted (in a way that all voters can know they’ve been counted accurately). That, as you good readers know, is what we do, or at least try to, all year around, here at The BRAD BLOG.

Either way, it should also be noted that, in the video segment above, Maddow is only looking at the “dead heats” in the U.S. Senate and Governors races. There also about a gazillion other elections — U.S. House, state and local — all happening this year as well, and all of which matter as well. Not to mention the fact that voting rights for every single voter — whether or not any particular race is a dead heat or not — matters very much as well.

In any event, once again…ugh.

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Nightmare Scenario: ‘Dead Heat’ and ‘Dirty Tricks’

9 Comments

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9 Responses

  1. 2)
    Hoosey Whatsis said on 10/17/2014 @ 3:08pm PT: [Permalink]

    I don’t want to get all “tinfoil hat” conspiracy-theorist but I can’t help wondering how pollsters might be involved in election-rigging.

    Rasmussen has just released a poll showing Grimes trailing McConnell, 44 to 52 percent.

    And yet, rated for accuracy during the 2012 election Rasmussen was 24th out of 28.

    I’m not clever enough to know what to make of this (if anything), I’d just hate for Karl Rove to suffer ANOTHER shock like he did on election night, 2012 …

  2. 3)
    Adam said on 10/17/2014 @ 3:53pm PT: [Permalink]

    Has there ever been an objective study on the rate of close elections before vs after the advent of electronically tabulated elections? I get the impression that there have been more of them.

  3. 4)
    David Lasagna said on 10/17/2014 @ 8:41pm PT: [Permalink]

    Maybe I wasn’t watching carefully enough but it seemed that the guy she was talking to didn’t get the part about the voter fraud talk being offered as a reason for anything being complete bullshit.

    Isn’t there a single person on her staff who’s hip to the jive and knows about our guy? Or could do a little looking and find out? Crikey.

  4. 5)
    Randy D said on 10/20/2014 @ 9:10am PT: [Permalink]

    Kudos to Maddow for being one of the few to cover voter suppression efforts and voter roll skullduggery. It’s worth noting that even she is not willing to even raise the possibility of ELECTION FRAUD going hand and hand with these other efforts. These close races, with Republican Secretaries of State watching the henhouse, are the perfect storm for election fraud.

    I predict 11/3 will be full of stories about how the “polls were wrong” (and/or how exit poll data is disappeared so it can’t contradict the reported results).

  5. 6)
    Nunyabiz1 said on 10/21/2014 @ 9:23am PT: [Permalink]

    One thing guaranteed is that Tpublicans WILL commit outright Election Fraud in order to STEAL every race they possibly can.

  6. 8)
    CambridgeKnitter said on 10/22/2014 @ 7:27pm PT: [Permalink]

    Re the Think Progress story. Sigh. It repeats the bogus pimp claim. I sent the reporter a message requesting that he fix it. It would be good if he heard from a bunch of people about that.

  7. 9)
    Nunyabiz1 said on 10/23/2014 @ 8:36am PT: [Permalink]

    Why isn’t O’Keefe in prison?

    If a democrat did this they would be locked up and key tossed

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