[Mb-civic] Lessig's Blog Entry On Vote Incongruities

[Edward A.Puckett]

...

"The six news organizations at the left contracted with two polling 
organizations at the right to provide exit poll information one week 
ago today. Those data were inconsistent with the actual results — 
significantly so. Dick Morris says that “this was no mere mistake. Exit 
polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election 
night. I suspect foul play.” The aim of the evil doing in Morris’ 
judgment was to suppress Bush votes — which it apparently didn’t. But 
the same data are used by skeptics on the other side, to suggest that 
those who had a hand in tallying the vote — in particular, one company 
whose President had promised to deliver Ohio for the President — 
changed the votes that the exit poll surveyed.

I think both claims are bunk — I don’t think there was a conspiracy to 
suppress the Bush vote, nor do I think Diebold stole the election for 
Bush — but there are obvious puzzles that need to be resolved. First, 
there is Morris’ point — exit polls are just not that wrong. Second, 
there are the insanely inverted county votes in the many heavily 
Democratic counties in Florida that had their votes counted by optical 
scan (and tallied by Diebold machines among others). Why were the polls 
so bad? Why did Democrats in those counties overwhelmingly defect to 
the President while remaining “liberal” in their other votes?"

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See: http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002282.shtml