Everything You Know Is Wrong

I was going to title this post "Internet Spit-Take, Take 2" because how the hell else was I supposed to take this (via Buzzflash):

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct.

Considering the cheating was so transparent and it was the exit polling that made it glaringly obvious, Ed "God My Colon Tastes Good" Gillespie figures we need to eliminate any suggestion that the machines are rigged.

Gosh, Ed, why not GET RID OF THE FUCKING MACHINES? In Ed's tiny mind, the problem isn't with the machines, hell no, the machines aren't what caused doubts about the vote. Um, well, actually Ed probably knows the machines are the reason why his idiot child "won" the election.

A little more digging around on the vote fraud fiasco brought me to this site that asks some very interesting questions:

• Why were exit polls wrong in states with electronic ballots, but not in states with paper ballots?
  
• Why were they wrong only on the Presidential race, and right on other races?

The squanderer also makes another interesting point regarding the Florida vote:

In Florida, the figures show that, in counties with one type of voting machine, voters with no Democrat or Republican party affiliation appeared to split their votes roughly 50/50 between Bush and Kerry, which was to be expected; yet in counties with another type of voting machine, unaffiliated voters seemed to vote nearly 100% for Bush!
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Some Florida counties used an "E-Touch" voting machine, and some used an "optical scan" machine. Let's look at these two groups:

• "E-Touch" Voters
  
  • Approx. 3.86 million total voters in these counties
    
    • Kerry's Base: about 1.57 million votes
      
      • Kerry's final tally: about 1.98 million votes
        26.5% more than his given base
      
      
    • Bush's Base: about 1.44 million vote
      
      • Bush's final tally: about 1.85 million votes
        28.6% more than his given base

Conclusion: Close race, as expected, unaffiliated voters nearly evenly split between the two candidates.

• "Optical Scan" Voters
  
  • Approx. 3.42 million total voters in these counties
    
    • Kerry's Base: about 1.43 million votes
      
      • Kerry's final tally: about 1.45 million votes Less than 1% more than his given base
      
      
    • Bush's Base: about 1.34 million votes
      
      • Bush's final tally: about 1.95 million votes 45.8% more than his given base

Conclusion:
Virtually every unaffilated voter would have had to have gone for Bush.

See, Ed has to like those odds almost as much as he likes the fact that if there's anyone more stupid than a Republican, it's Wolf Blitzer and his pals. I took a fair amount of stats and probabalities in college and I can tell you what a trend looks like. I also took a little non-linear dynamics (Chaos Theory) and I can tell you that this kind of clustering doesn't "just happen".

Ignore this, ignore tanks rolling in on anti-war protesters and welcome our new pro-torture AG Alberto Gonzales.