According to a recent article in the Columbus Free Press (and picked up by a poster for the Huffington Blog), the election was fixed. All of the issues actually passed. Their reasoning? A Columbus Dispatch poll published November 9 showed all of the issues passing and the Dispatch polls have a history of being the most accurate polls in Ohio.
What happened? According to Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, the state installed new voting machines in 44 counties (around half the state) and these were all controlled by Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell using hidden controls planted by the manufacturer, Diebold.
Their proof? The Dispatch poll.
And thus the possible explanations for the staggering defeats of Issues Two through Five boil down to two: either the Dispatch polling---dead accurate for Issue One---was wildly wrong beyond all possible statistical margin of error for Issues 2-5, or the electronic machines on which Ohio and much of the nation conduct their elections were hacked by someone wanting to change the vote count.Before we pronounce democracy as we know it dead, we need to examine the other possibility, that the Dispatch poll could have been wrong.
To do this, you need to know some background information on how the Dispatch poll works and how the campaigns were conducted. Fitrakis and Wasserman neglected to provide this. They simple take it as a given that the poll is always correct.
First, the Dispatch poll is mainly a mail-in poll. Most pollsters reject mail polls as inaccurate. The dispatch defends their methodology because the act of having to fill out and mail a poll tends to select only people who will actually vote. Also, their track record normally speaks for itself. Despite using a methodology that is considered dated and inaccurate, they are usually the most accurate poll in the state. No one has ever been able to fully explain it, not even the Dispatch.
The important thing here is that mail polls are slow. Phone polls are usually conducted over a day or two but a mail poll takes between ten to twenty days. That means that a large portion of the poll was being conducted early in October.
This is important because of how the campaign on issues 2-5 was conducted. The pro-passage people started getting their message out early. The first yard signs went up Labor Day weekend. TV ads started in late September.
In contrast, the anti-campaign was slow to organize. Their yard signs didn't go up until mid-October with their TV ads following.
Newspaper endorsements are usually handed out in reverse order. The most important races are endorsed last. The state issues were the only state-wide races so they came out in late October. No Ohio newspaper endorsed all of the issues and some, like the Dispatch, rejected 2-5 completely. This was featured in the last-minute anti ads.
The timing here is critical and unusual. For much of the period that the Dispatch was conducting its poll the pro-issue campaign was the only one running. Then at the last minute an effective anti-passage campaign was waged, after much of the Dispatch poll had been conducted.
There is an old truism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In this case, Fitrakis and Wasserman are claiming that the entire voting system of Ohio has been compromised but all they offer is a single poll. They did not make any effort to break down the poll results with the actual results and find a correlation with counties that got new voting machines. They didn't even quote any other polls nor did they examine the Dispatch poll methodology for possible errors.
That's because these two men are conspiracy mongers. Everywhere they look they see conspiracies. They knew as soon as the election results were posted that there must be a conspiracy involved. They looked for supporting evidence but they didn't look for opposing evidence nor did they examine their supporting evidence very closely.
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