Saturday, November 13, 2004

More Wacko Conspiracy Stuff from Lefty Bloggers (Drat Them)



Or, rather, more odd patterns in the elections, perhaps. This time in North Carolina, and yes, the link is to the Democratic Underground, not the most academic of sources. But the analysis is quite interesting. What it consists of is comparing the results based on absentee ballots only, the results as exit polls predicted and the actual final election results. The pattern that appears to hold is this: absentee ballots predict the same as exit polls as the final elections in all elections, whether about people or issues, except for two: the choice of a U.S. Senator and the choice of the U.S. president: in these two elections the final results were considerably different from both the absentee results and the exit polls, though these two agreed. Note that in North Carolina a very large number of people used absentee voting.

Many here agree that there were problems with the elections without any implication of fraud. I think that transparent elections are the very foundation of democracy, and this may explain why I feel it is so important to keep studying the results and their legitimacy. This makes me into a conspiracy-theorist wacko, but what do you think having half of your body human and half snake makes me into? So I don't mind that too much. To repeat, I'd rather that we are all weirdos this way and find that there is no reason for concern than the opposite alternative where we offer more tea and cucumber sandwiches to each other while tut-tutting all that is wrong with the Democratic party, and all the time, maybe, just maybe, the elections are completely unreliable.

This is the one thing that I could not live with. Just to explain why I flog what so many consider a dead horse (not that I'd ever flog any kind of horse, of course).