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Without a paper trail, how could you ever know it was ever anything other than close ? People lie to pollsters you know.

And the repugs have barely started their voter suppression stunts yet.

keep to the Fen Causeway

by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 12:59:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]
People don't lie to pollsters enough to change results on that kind of scale.  Polls are almost always correct.  It's the imperfections of modeling where they get it wrong, but the differences aren't great enough to account for Obama going from winning (say) 350 EVs to 250.

Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
by Drew J Jones (myfriends@thisispancakes.com) on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 01:08:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Yup, plausible deniability. And they already stretched that pretty far in the last few elections.
by Trond Ove on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 01:20:06 PM EST
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See Drew, many Europeans have now a hard time believing there can be any such thing as free and fair elections in the US of A.

Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
by Bernard on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 04:26:00 PM EST
[ Parent ]
There are two types of obvious rigging I can think of, and what goes on in the US is more complicated.

  1. Old communist style - votes are counted, but there is only one party on the ballot, and/or the penalty for voting for opposition parties is imprisonment or death.

  2. Sham democracy style - multiple parties on the ballot, but the country's leader has enough power to falsify the results.

In the US there are signs of localized corruption - "soft" rigging like not having enough poll stations in poor and heavily democratic districts, and potentially some "hard" rigging with some diebold machines.

In states where the republicans have a lot of control, they might be able to move the results one or two percentage points. Given how close the 04 election was, some shenanigans in Ohio was all that was needed (whether or not the results actually were tainted). In 2000, Florida was so close it was within the margin of error (even within the margins of the best possible design of an election system, in my opinion); from there, the local power apparatus finished the job.

The disenfranchisement of fellons is another issue.

A few other things to keep in mind - Obama is pro business. He is not a left wing radical. McCain is unstable - to the point where I think the business community is worried. Thus I don't see a reason to expect higher levels of corruption than we've had indicators of in the past two elections.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 08:25:27 PM EST
[ Parent ]
McCain's second hail mary pass today will have pissed off almost everyone.

He probably thinks he's being Mr Mavericky, or something, but it's more likely that he's shot his campaign in the head.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 08:30:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]
yep, and I don't think this election will be close enough for the corruption that is present to effect the outcome anyway.

you are the media you consume.

by MillMan (millguy at gmail) on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 08:33:57 PM EST
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The McCain/Palin campaign is so screwed-up even the US press is starting to notice, and report it.
by ATinNM on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 08:50:51 PM EST
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Events are outside of their control at the moment thought.

Fake outrage is difficult to produce when the entire economy is unraveling in front of the voters.

And they are running out of time.

by Trond Ove on Thu Sep 25th, 2008 at 01:19:08 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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