The following quote and response are from a mailing list I’m on with a few friends, published with no permission whatsoever.

I suppose Ed does not always want to be the
uber-liberal on the list. Perhaps this is why he
hasn’t posted here about voting irregularites
vis-a-vis exit polls.

Do you think the Democrats perpetrated a wide-spread
conspiracy to rig the exit polls? I do.

–Matt

This has been preying on my mind lately. We have the scenario that you would expect in the case of massive fraud by vote machine manufacturers:

• Major manufacturers of voting machines and vote-counting machines tight with right wing politicians

• Strange Republican upsets follow everywhere their machines go

• Paper trails difficult or impossible to get

• The huge Republican upsets were not successfully predicted by pollsters and tend to accompany discrepancies in exit polls

• Democrats and other liberals blame themselves and vow to do better next time and learn to be nicer to the people who don’t like them, because that’s what liberals do. Cigarette smoking man snickers quietly to himself cause the liberals are so predictable.

It’s quite possible that America is no longer a democracy except in the sense that Iraq was a “democracy” because you were allowed to vote for Saddam Hussein.

OK, this isn’t a Cigarette Smoking Man style plot, because he would have found a way to rig the polls too….

I’m not saying this happened, I’m saying that it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, and if it ain’t a duck I’d like to see some evidence for the non-duckitude.

The story is that this election was swung by “evangelical voters” voting on “moral issues,” but why would those people not show up in polls? If anything, it appears polls have tended to over-represent Republicans, not under-represent them (Gallup tended to “normalize” the data to show a huge Republican spike disproportionate to actual Republicans in the population — perhaps in response to past Diebold chicanery?).

I mean, yeah, maybe that’s what happened, I’m just wondering why it looks so much like a rigged election if it’s not.