Well, that didn't take long. The loony left have it all figured out. It seems that Kerry actually won and that Bush stole the election. The exit polls which showed a huge Kerry win were actually correct and the actual counts were wrong.

I hope that this dies down quickly. It doesn't help anyone to insist that elections are fixed. In this case they are blaming most of it on punch cards, just like in 2000. The solution to punch cards was supposed to be touch-screen voting but, after Democrats noticed that the biggest company making these machines, they changed their minds. They are convinced that the newer voting machines have secret code that allows Karl Rove to change votes at will. So, pending all sorts of challenges against these machines, we are stuck with punch cards.

What about those exit polls? There are all sorts of theories. One is that the pollsters oversampled women. Others think that it was a deliberate attempt by the media to give Kerry a last-second boost while the west-coast polls were still open.

My opinion is that:

1) They oversampled and were in such a rush to get out results that they did not properly correct.

2) Different people vote at different times. I happened to be taking the morning off for a doctor's appointment. Otherwise I would have voted after work. There must have been a few hundred people in line with me but no more than a couple of dozen were dressed for work. This was even more true when I tried to vote at 9:00. I suspect that this skews things. This is probably why they over-sampled women. They were sampling stay-at-home moms. Is this a group more or less likely to vote for Kerry? I don't know.

3) The pollsters say that they gave out warning with their numbers but the networks ignored them. If you assume that most people in the media wanted Kerry to win then they were less likely to question good news.

4) I've said it before - there are a lot of closet Bush supporters out there. When asked, face to face by someone with a clipboard, they will not admit it but in the privacy of the voting booth they can vote their preference.

Instapundit and others noticed that the networks were quick to call states for Kerry but slow to call them for Bush. This is because they check actual counts in against exit polls. When the two agree they call the state, even when a fraction of the vote has been counted. When the exit polls show a different candidate winning they assume that there must be some important precincts that haven't reported yet or some other factor.

I don't think that any of this shows a crooked system but I do think that it shows some media bias in not looking closely enough at data that matches their hopes.

And to the loony left - Bush won! Again! Get over it.