Still not sure what to think on this. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that the Republicans stole not only the presidency, but all those Congressional races, and all those anti-gay-marriage initiatives as well. Occam’s Razor would tend to suggest that the country simply tilted slightly to the right this time around. On the other hand — well, remember who we’re dealing with. They stole one election already, and they spent four years lying about pretty much everything. Anyway, I’m remaining agnostic on this one for the time being, but Bob has some interesting stuff up:
Without getting into all the state-by-state details — I’ll let Prof. Freeman tend to the numbers — what happened last Tuesday, where a wide variety of extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to be at the extremes or even beyond their margin of error, was exceedingly unlikely — even if the benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.
But they weren’t evenly distributed. They favored Bush. Over and over and over. That’s the coin flipping. And flipping. And still coming up heads. Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of other swing states (even while the exit polls remained relatively accurate elsewhere). Almost everywhere the election was close, the coin just kept coming up heads.
How bad was it?
According to Dr. Freeman’s analysis… 1 in 250,000,000.
One in a quarter of a billion.
In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up “heads” almost thirty times in a row.
One thing I do believe: saying that something is a “conspiracy theory” doesn’t automatically discredit it. People conspire all the time. Anyone who’s ever had a job should understand this. Any time two people try to hide something from their boss — that’s a conspiracy.