Republican pundit Dick Morris says that exit polls are almost never wrong, and that it would be inconceivable for the exit polls to be as consistently wrong as they were on Nov 2 without there being foul play afoot.
He points out that exit polls are routinely used in third world countries to detect fraudulent elections.
Desipite this, it does not occur to him that the elections could have been rigged.
Morris believes that it is the exit polls that were somehow rigged, despite the fact that a media outlet has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by announcing results that turn out to be wrong, and that there is considerable evidence that it was the elections which were rigged, and they were rigged by manipulation of vote totals in Diebold’s electronic vote-counting machines (NOT the ballot box machines, which had previously aroused suspicion).
It’s possible for anyone who’s alone with a vote-counting machine for two minutes, and who knows how, to untraceably alter the vote counts in a Diebold vote tabulator.
The only evidence of this (without a recount) would be the fact that the exit polls were discrepant from the officially reported vote counts.
There is some supicion that this vote-altering technique was used in favor of the Republican party in the 2002 elections and the 2002 Florida Democratic primary (to keep Janet Reno off the ballot against Jeb Bush); blackboxvoting.org is doing their best to investigate whether it was (as seems likely) used to propel George W. Bush to victory in 2004.
Fraud in the vote-counting machines can only be detected via an audit of votes. That audit is impossible with touchscreen voting machines without a paper trail, which is what Diebold has been trying hard to sell to states as a more “secure” and “reliable” solution. Sounds like they don’t want audits to be possible, to me. But right now most machines do use paper, so an audit is possible, it’s just difficult and expensive.
It’s stunning that the Republican spin machine is now trying to cast doubt on the only thing that could indicate the presence of fraud and trigger audits — exit polling itself.
UPDATE: Cripes, a lot of people are buying his spin.
Ed-
Have you seen this:
http://ustogether.org/Florida_Election.htm
I have no idea on the credibility of the source (someone told me that Florida makes all this info public as normal procedure), however, what it would show is that the electronic votes were likely *not* tampered with. Instead, the inference is that the tallying of the results for optical scan machines was manipulated – a potentially shrewed technique since everyone is focused on the tallies of the eVoting machines.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Diebold makes the optical scan vote tabulators as well as the touchscreen machines. Why bother messing with touchscreen machines when you can mess with the tabulators? Much simpler and more direct. Hose a whole election at once from a central location, instead of machine by machine.
Blackboxvoting.org has been on this for a while. They did that demo of how to hack a tabulator in less than 90 seconds with virtually no computer expertise on TV. Nobody did anything about it.
But this is something that should be traceable with careful forensics *if somebody bothers to do it*. I sent some money to blackboxvoting.org, because they are organized and doing something about it.
So far, people who *should* be investigating this stuff, like the FBI, haven’t bothered.