Why McCain could easily win this

The projections that are putting battleground states towards Obama shouldn't be trusted for one important reasons: A huge percentage of people who are telling pollsters that they're going to vote for Obama don't realize that they will be turned down at the polls? Why? Because they've been purged. Greg Palast and Robert Kennedy have a report coming up in the Rolling Stone about the widespread nature of voter purges, and let me just say, they're saying it's worse than your worst nightmares.

According to an investigative report out today in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast, after a year-long investigation, reveal a systematic program of "GOP vote tampering" on a massive scale.

- Republican Secretaries of State of swing-state Colorado have quietly purged one in six names from their voter rolls.

Over several months, the GOP politicos in Colorado stonewalled every attempt by Rolling Stone to get an answer to the massive purge - ten times the average state's rate of removal.

- While Obama dreams of riding to the White House on a wave of new voters, more then 2.7 million have had their registrations REJECTED under new procedures signed into law by George Bush.

Kennedy, a voting rights lawyer, charges this is a resurgence of 'Jim Crow' tactics to wrongly block Black and Hispanic voters.

- A fired US prosecutor levels new charges - accusing leaders of his own party, Republicans, with criminal acts in an attempt to block legal voters as "fraudulent."

- Digging through government records, the Kennedy-Palast team discovered that, in 2004, a GOP scheme called "caging” ultimately took away the rights of 1.1 million voters. The Rolling Stone duo predict that, this November 4, it will be far worse.

Their investigation suggests it could be 10 million voters. These are almost all going to be minorities, most will be Democrats. Even New Mexico has been affected, and they have a Democratic governor. Ohio is running the cleanest election in its history, no doubt, but can they make up for all the other swing states we're going to lose due to fraud?

I propose that the ACORN frenzy has a more important purpose besides just trying to make Obama look dirty. It's there as a ethical fetish for the huge numbers of Republicans that will be called on to fight citizens trying to exercise their legal right to vote. Every person intimidated, every name fraudulently purged from the rolls---you need to be able to sleep at night after a long day of dismantling our democracy. If you can tell yourself, "They do it, too," then you feel better. If you can convince yourself that some black or Hispanic voters are voting twice (not happening, by the way), they you can feel justified forcing some not to vote at all.

This one is far from in the bag, people. Obama's lead is automatically shrunk by the number of people who think they can vote but can't. That's not a pittance.

My only consolation is that Palast and Kennedy are often unduly alarmist. But even if they're only 50% right, we're quite possibly fucked. Many of the states in blue on this map will probably break Republican unless every single Obama voter who hasn't been purged and votes. Right off the top of my head, I'm seeing Missouri and Colorado are lost for sure, even though Obama has a huge lead in Colorado. He doesn't if 15% of the voters can't vote. Using the "Create Your Scenario" map at Yahoo to change over states that are blue now but will likely go red because of fraud, I'm getting a map that reduces the election to Ohio or Virginia.

Swing states I'm assuming will go red, due to on the ground antics and bad polling data:

*Colorado

*Nevada

*Missouri

*North Dakota

*North Carolina

*Florida (we'd have to get 70% for real before the banana Republicans down there let us have it)

*West Virginia

Thank god New Mexico is so far in for Obama. But with my calculations, if Ohio and Virginia go, we're out and McCain wins. And I'm not convinced that Ohio (49 to 46 today) is going to make it for us. The good news is that Virginia is looking stronger and stronger every day, and there are other downticket races to compel turnout. If we get Virginia and lose Ohio, we squeak out with a mere 274 electoral votes. Don't be fooled by those maps showing Obama with 352 votes or anything like that. Most of those swing states have been quietly worked over by Republicans who are out to dismantle the basic concept of "one citizen, one vote".

As I was writing this, the Democrat headquarters called me and asked me to phone bank. They caught me at a good time---no resistance here. Please, people, don't rest on your laurels. This one's going to be a squeaker.