Exit Polls and GOP fraud
Tue Oct 31, 2006 at 07:52:03 AM PDT
I'm no tinfoil hat guy, and generally try to take conspiracies with a grain of salt. That being said, if this election once again produces results that are disjunctive with the exit polls, I'll be convinced that massive fraud will continue to take place for the foreseeable future, whether via electronic voting machines or more "bricks and mortar"-based methods (throwing away ballots, etc.) Karl Rove's optimism might be, as Kos says, a bluff. Or it might be the knowing smirking optimism of the prize fighter who knows his bout is rigged.
The question I have, what should we do about it? I for one don't have any ideas. But if the evidence is overwhelming (which it appears to be nearing) that massive fraud is tainting our elections, what should we do?
I'm not a scientist, but to me it seems highly likely that fraud has already occurred in every election since 2000.
First, we have the huge and unprecedented gaps between the exit polls and the actual counted results. To me, this is the most obvious indicator that GOP vote fraud is occurring. While the GOP faithful try to prop up spurious claims of a new "paradigm" (proposing such nonsense as "Republican voters are less likely to trust a poll watcher who they perceive to be liberal leaning" or "Republican voters are routinely undersampled in exit polls"), this defies decades of sampling, during which time far greater and more empirically validated paradigm shifts have actually occurred (more women voting, Moter Voter acts, the emergence of Nixon's "Silent Majority", etc.) That polling methods worked through all these changes, without failing, and suddenly stopped working in 2000, and stopped working in 2000 in a way that was completely unidirectional (i.e. always overestimating the Democratic vote in national elections) and in a way that only failed in contested elections (i.e. from my understanding, exit polls were accurate, consistent with historical margins of error, in non-contested elections like Texas and New York State, but saw huge divergences from the actual vote count in contested elections like Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004), seems completely implausible.
Second, it is accepted as given by the GOP party faithful, including its hardcore leaders, that the Dems have engaged in fraud on a massive basis. Talk to your average wingnut and he can cite, for days, instances of uncorroborated vote fraud that the Dems have committed (i.e. registering dead voters, submitting votes on behalf of senile elderly people, etc.). Ask that wingnut why he or she can't corroborate his claims (other than from Rush or Hannity) and he or she will tell you it's because of the liberal media bias that pervades our country. In short, the GOP party faithful believe that elections are already illegitimate. Given this, is it so hard to believe that they wouldn't do what they can to tip the scales in their own favor, whether through legal or illegal means?
Third, we have already seen an enormous number of examples of Republicans, at both the highest and lowest levels, behaving illegally to keep the GOP in power (e.g., the NH phone jamming on election day, the K Street Project, the countless instances of African American voters complaining that they had been illegally denied the right to vote, Blackwell's misdeeds in 04, Bush v. Gore, etc. etc. etc.) Given this propensity to break the law to win elections, along with the governing assumption among Republicans that elections are already illegitmate in this country due to massive fraud on the part of the Democrats, it appears to me quite likely that large parts of the GOP will continue to break the law to win elections. I've been operating under the assumption that the GOP will steal 2-3 points in any election with national implications (this appears to be approximately the differential between the exit polls and the vote count).
The question is, how far will the GOP go? Given that control of the House might seriously jeopardize the livelihoods and well-being of senior GOP officials (criminal investigations, anyone?), not to mention break the monopoly of power that was so hard for the GOP to attain, and given that the Dems are currently projected to win the House handily, will the GOP be so bold as to actually, and completely impossibly, "win" enough elections to keep control of the House? What happens if the GOP does keep control of the House, winning races it is projected to lose by 10 or more points? What to do?
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