Cheat the Vote! Part IV: Endgame

Time's running out for Karl Rove, and Kerry seems to be pulling ahead in the polls. It's time to kick this fraud up a notch!

In Palm Beach, where nobody ever learns their lesson, Theresa LePore -- who you might remember for designing "butterfly ballots" that confuse old Jews into voting for anti-Semites -- has announced that electronic voting machines there have not yet been tested. Because of a server crash. Yeah, that's not ominous.

This should not be a partisan issue, but for some reason it is. Computer voting machines are illegal under Florida's state constitution, which stipulates that a manual recount must be done in certain circumstances. (Manual recounts can be done when these machines are used, ya see.) Even though the machines are clearly faulty, illegal, and very easily manipulated, Florida's Republican officials have practically insisted on it. Look for all of this to blow up in everyone's face on Wonder Tuesday*.

Ah, but that's not all! Somehow, a pile of Xeroxed fliers found their way into the trashcan of a Tennessee Democrat whose office shares space with the Kerry/Edwards campaign. From there, they mysteriously found their way into the hands of Republicans, who are clearly totally innocent in this whole thing.

The fliers, by the way, are not only crass, but totally unoriginal -- someone just took that image that says "Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics," changed the first part to "Voting for President Bush," and pasted Bush's head onto the retarded kid. I mean, come on. That image has been around for at least three years now. You'd think we could come up with something a little more original.

Beyond the point. It turns out Karl Rove is actually reusing an old trick that worked pretty well for him the last time. Step one: put out a flier that maligns your candidate in an unfair or disgusting way. Step two: ? Step three: profit. After all, who's going to think you actually tried to start a smear campaign against your own candidate?

Yep, there's a lot of evil in the world. With less than three weeks of vote cheating left, expect the dial to be turned up to "11" shortly.

* Originally, this text incorrectly used the term Super Tuesday.