Ok, well, actually, we can't break into Rove's head and we don't know why he's personally confident. Many speculate that the veneer of hope masks unalloyed fear.
...
Let's define our term, first. "Optimism" doesn't mean that these Republicans are convinced that they'll pick up seats.
...
What optimism means is that these Republicans believe that there are enough reasons to believe that Republicans can hang on to enough seats in the House and enough in the Senate to barely miss the guillotine.

Victory for the GOP in November?
by Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman
commondreams.org
October 18, 2006

... In the two years since the fraudulent defeat of John Kerry, we've unearthed an unholy arsenal by which that election was stolen. They include: outright intimidation, wrongful elimination of registered voters, theft, selective deployment of (often faulty) voting machines, absentee ballots without Kerry's name on them, absentee ballots pre-punched for Bush, absentee ballots never mailed, touch screens that lit up for Bush when Kerry was chosen, lines for black voters five hours long while white voters a mile away voted in fifteen minutes, tens of thousands of provisional ballots pitched summarily in the trash, alleged ex-felons illegally told they could not vote, Hispanic precincts with no Spanish-speaking poll workers, deliberate misinformation on official web sites...and that's not even the tip of an iceberg whose bottom we may never see. ...

... As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has reported in Rolling Stone Magazine, in Georgia 2002, U.S. Senate incumbent Max Cleland went into Election Day with a very substantial lead in the polls. He proceeded to allegedly lose by a substantial margin. Church-state operatives like Ralph Reed attributed this astonishing turn-around to an alleged last-minute mass turnout of evangelical voters.

Similar things were said about Florida and Ohio 2004. ...

...The miraculous pro-Bush margins give new meaning to the phrase "ghost in the machine." While the Democratic vote count was slashed and trashed in urban precincts, the rural voting stations, through the miracle of untrackable electronics, materialized just the right number of GOP votes to keep the Men of God in the White House (where it's recently reported they dare to mock those earthly evangelicals who allegedly gave them their margin of victory). ...

...unless there are armies of trained, dedicated citizens prepared to monitor this upcoming election, electronic and otherwise, ... the GOP will once again emerge with total control of the checks and the balances ...

How exactly will the fraud be perpotrated.  While I love the Bushies and Rove even they are not smart enough to know which districts to target and how and when they will need to manipulate the votes to pull off a majority come Nov. 8th.

That's the great thing about conspiracy theories.   Let's wait till the outcome then backtrack through the facts to give us the theory that best suits our beliefs.

Come on guys.  If they win it will be becasue more people voted repulican.  If they lose it will be because they didn't.

Can democrats lose elections or is it impossible unless there is voter fruad.

Hacking Democracy: New Documentary Exposes Vulnerability of Electronic Voting Machines

The mid-term elections are one week away - will your vote be counted? A new HBO documentary exposes the vulnerability of electronic voting machines. The film follows investigative journalist Bev Harris as she investigates the security and accuracy of electronic voting systems. Harris joins in our firehouse studio.

Will a Shocking New GOP Court Victory and Karl Rove's Attack on Ohio in 2006 Doom the Democrats Nationwide?

On Sunday in Ohio, a judge put on hold a decision that suspended the state's new voter identification law. We speak with political science professor Bob Fitrakis and independent journalist Harvey Wasserman who say this law imposes a series of draconian requirements for voter ID that are more difficult to fulfill by the poor, homeless and elderly - all constituents who tend to vote

U.S. Investigates Voting Machines' Venezuela Ties

The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez.

...

But the role of the young Venezuelan engineers who founded Smartmatic has become less visible in public documents as the company has been restructured into an elaborate web of offshore companies and foreign trusts.

"The government should know who owns our voting machines; that is a national security concern," said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who asked the Bush administration in May to review the Sequoia takeover.

Princeton report slams Diebold touch-screen systems:
Researchers created vote-stealing code
Computerworld
September 14, 2006

A recently released report by researchers at Princeton University alleges more security flaws in Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s touch-screen voting systems.

The school's Center for Information Technology Policy, which studies computer technology's effect on society, posted the report online yesterday. Computer science researchers at the university said they were able to create vote-stealing code that can be installed in a minute on Diebold hardware and change vote counts undetected, according to a statement from Princeton.

"We have created and analyzed the code in the spirit of helping to guide public officials so that they can make wise decisions about how to secure elections," Edward Felton, the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, said in the statement. "We found that the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces."

The devices are also susceptible to computer viruses "that can spread themselves automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and postelection activity," he claimed.