This was following November 2000 where Carson had won w/ 39% of popular vote to establish a 3-party system. Of the remaining 61% this means the Republican/Democrat parties couldn't have gotten above 38%, and if one of them did get that high the other would be at best 23%.
This is pretty much where modern history has to diverge: you could have Clinton be president until then but no presidency by George W. Bush as Carson was explicitly president for both of his terms.
Although there's no mention of accusations of Carson/Preservers rigging the 2000 election, I expect that's something the Nightlords would've tried to engineer for both terms.
A lot of the ideas thrown around in recent months IRL can of course give ideas (machine tampering, excluding poll watchers, biased media coverage) plus obviously there are added supernatural means that the Nightlords could've used that wouldn't apply IRL
It actually seems strange that in 2004 (when Nightlords had been in control for FOUR years) that "a number of" news groups could claim the election was rigged. Surely the nightlords would've been able to cement control of news agencies during the first term?
That makes me think it'd just be "controlled opposition", like the Nightlords would actually permit those news agencies to make the "rigged" accusations, because the public would EXPECT to see that with a 76% result: it'd be creepy if nobody was making that accusation.
So by controlling the narrative, the Nightlords put that idea out there, but shape it's presentation so it doesn't get out of hand. Sort of like "Nightbane: The Animated Series" being a kids cartoon show produced so that people who try to reveal NB are real are just seen as LARPing kooks.
The interesting thing about the supernatural element is that Nightlords wouldn't even need to go so far as to exclude poll watchers from the other parties to tamper with votes...
All they would need to do is use abilities on the poll watchers via having their minions sit in as poll watchers themselves:
1) pg 176 a Night Prince can create minor visual (soundless ) images for 2 PPE/minute : 10 cubic feet per level at 100ft ... now what is the VOLUME of a piece of paper? Pretty thin, right? A single prince could probably change what people see written on all ballots (the candidate it's for, if the signatures match) counted in a large room for a pretty decent period of time: the minimum 100ppe will take them 50 minutes. At that point you might need to rotate in a fresh Prince to continue. This only helps with manual counts though: illusion would not work on a machine so you need a different approach there.
2) pg 177's "Gift of Magic" for priests makes spells level 1-4 accessible.
- Pg 129's Befuddle could be used to disorient poll watchers so they don't notice shenanigans.
Pg 129's "Concealment" could be used to hide ballots.
Pg 129's "Fear" could be used to make the poll watchers just have a panic attack and exit voluntarily (so you didn't kick them out)
Pg 132's "Telekinesis" could be used to cause distractions, throw ballots into the garbage, throw a switch on a voting machine, etc
Pg 132's "Charismatic Aura" could be used to distract or influence poll watchers (Priests can cast this on other non-priests)
Pg 133's "Trance" is Befuddle on steroids for making poll watchers zone out so you can do what you like and not have it be remembered. They're present but not watching.
Then of course there's just the standard operating procedure of nightlords of just replacing people of importance: you could send Dopplegangers to replace poll watchers (and poll COUNTERS of course), Hound Masters to pretend to be some generic guy, Ashmedai / Namtar or those Skin Walker guys from the world books.
Nightbane awakened on Dark Day (in May 2000 .. six months before Carson was elected the first time: he would've taken office in Jan 2001) so it could actually be pretty interesting to play them leading up to the election and see if they recognize the importance of the gerrymandering that would inevitably happen...
They will probably fail to stop Carson in either election (unless canon isn't writ in stone and you allow divergence from dated events in books) but actually gaming that out would really convey how powerful the Nightlords are in manipulating human society.
Carella wrote this in the mid-90s so stuff like the elction of Bush (much less Obama) was an unknown, as would be 11 September 2001. It makes me wonder about whether to adapt major events like this in-game or not. Should the WTC still be up (undestroyed) in "Nightbane Earth" ? What about other settings like Heroes Unlimited or Beyond the Supernatural?
Differences like that (towers still up) could help establish how alien these worlds are from our own. OTOH maybe stuff like that still happens , but perhaps with difference explanations surrounding it. Like maybe plane hijackers could have had super-powers (or been Nightlord minions) or maybe there was some behind-the-scenes battle to try and stop disasters like this but some super-villain sabotaged a superhero's effort to intervene?
