I can't help wondering about something when I put two pieces of information together.
First is the last minute change on polling offered by John Zogby about what was going to happen in NH that turned out to be remarkably accurate.
The second is the analysis seen on this board of the difference between paper ballots and machines of the margin between Kerry and Dean, a difference that seemd to be independent of the geographic differences when controlled for town size by only looking at jurisdictions of less than 20,000 people.
I add to this several additional pieces of information.
- exit polling shows that most people had made up their mind by the weekend, thus seeming to contradict any last minute movement such as that announced by Zogby
- the exit polling was far closer to the paper ballot differential than to the differential shown on the machines, particularly the machines made by Diebold
- there were press reports that Kerry's sister dragged him out of his hdqtrs to do street visibility and outreach at 6 PM, something that would have been totally unnnecessary if there were any real confidence in what Zogby had predicted, a predicition that was being contradicted by the independent exit polling
- the one strange set of exit polls offered on this board totally out of kilter with other sources that were showing a close race, but that strange set turning out to be somewhat more accurate in the size of Kerry's margin, if nothing else.
So now comes the speculation on my part -- I think the Diebold machines, and maybe the other machines, were rigged. I think Zogby found out about it, which is why he changed his polling prediction, and --- and please note this --- I don't think Kerry had anything to do with it.
Diebold is a Republican company. Zogby first started getting national recognition for his political polling when his primary outlet was the Washington Times, which leads me to believe that he might have very good contacts within certain kinds of Republican circles. And if one looks at many of the Republican talking heads, they have seriously gone after Dean in a way they have not gone after Kerry.
Remember, a year ago the Rove people would have assumed they would be running against Kerry. They knew how to do it, and they had their material gathered and ready to be used for attacks. But then Dean arose, and he was something they did not quite know how to deal with. Early on things that should have "destroyed" him only seemed to make him stronger, such as the supposed disastrous appearance on MTP. Further, Dean had opted out, which made him even more dangerous. A chance to bring him down would certainly be to their advantage, We then saw the Club for Growth ads in IA, which helped weaken Dean. We've had a Republican operative propping up and feeding info to Al Sharpton. And then we have these strange happenings in NH, at a time when the polling data from several sources was showing Dean closing the gap - if Dean had lost NH but only by 3-5 points, he would have been as big a story as anything else, and his campaign would have been very different going forward.
Okay, all of this is speculation on my part. But I am still very much bothered by the conjunction of the last minute change by Zogby that no one else saw and that was not shown in most of the exit polling, and how remarkably close that prediction of his was.
So, was this a dry run for how the general election will be manipulated by machine? Might if necessary there be further such manipulation in later primaries?