Posted by
Andrews on Saturday, October 18, 2008 10:28:37 PM
With Obama's lead dropping from 12% down to 2%, it seems a moot point, but I want to argue that even that 2% is an overestimate. And that that overestimate can be laid directly at ACORN's doorstep.
Now, I know many are wondering how that could be. How can fake registrations lead to mistaken polls? Don't they just call a bunch of people and add up the results? Isn't that immune to tampering?
Well, yes and no. You see, there are two types of polling that can be changed by fake registrations.
First, there are polls that try to match the party affiliations of the region being polled. If the region is 55% Democrat, they try to get 55% of Democrats in the sample. Or they use other demographic data, which often maps one to one to a party affiliation (eg. lower income black voters are predominantly Democrat, Cubans of all economic levels are predominantly Republican). So, if ACORN has put a huge mass of phony registrations into the system, they could have taken a district which is 55% Republican and suddenly made it appear 55% Democrat, which would skew the way the polling subjects are selected, and thus skew results.
A second way the polls can be skewed is in weighted polls. In these polls the initial group is still chosen randomly, but then the results are weighted based on party or demographics so that the final mix of results matches the district's composition. This would effectively work the same way that the first one did. If ACORN makes a district appear to have many more Democrats, or have a huge number of registered voters among the poor or minorities, the polls could be heavily skewed toward Obama, while the real voting patterns go the other way.
Of course, not all polls are weighted, or are based on selection criteria which can be manipulated by ACORN, but many are.
So, what does this mean? It is hard to say. Without a hard number of the suspect registrations by ACORN, and an analysis of which polls are weighted or selected based on demographic criteria, we can't tell. However, assuming that even some are based on such criteria, and knowing that ACORN placed tens of thousands of ballots in battleground states, if not more, then we can safely say that a 2% Obama lead probably means that McCain is ahead.
Then again, if Obama and ACORN managed to place enough bogus votes, who cares who is ahead? I only hope that this story breaks bigger in the mainstream media and there is some sort of outcry for honest polling. Maybe if we get enough of a scandal this time, all those vote stealing schemes (early voting, easy absentee ballots, motor voter, no ID requirements) will bring about a backlash, and states will start requiring everyone who is not absent or disabled to go to a poll on Tuesday, ID in hand and vote.
Well, I can dream, can't I?