Thursday, November 8, 2012

Was it Stolen?

I hate going down a birther road, but yes I believe the election was stolen, and the implications of that are very bad.

First of all, Obama received 10 million less votes than he did in 2008.  The part that is unbelievable is that Romney received 3 million less votes than McCain.  At the end of the day, Obama won in the 4 critical swing states by 500,000 votes.

But is is worse than that.  We can look at who voted.  By examining the number of Independents and their preference shift among actual voters, we know that 5 million Independents changed their votes from Obama to Romney.  So Romney started the day 2.5 million votes ahead of where McCain was in 2008.

This means that 5.5 million Republican voters are not accounted for.

They didn't show up at the polls, or their votes were not counted.  We know now that no subgroup of the coalition decided to sit out.  So the current attempts to blame the SoCons are stupid.  All of our groups showed up to vote at the rates they did in 2008.  For this to be true over 10% of Republicans needed to decide not to vote this year, who did vote in 2008.

Does that make any sense?

In fact, it is even worse, we know for a fact that heavy GOP counties were swamped all day.  We watched all day as Pasco County Florida was showing huge increases in GOP voters over the 2008 numbers.

In Virgina, with 69% of the precincts in, Romney held a 6% lead.  Yet once a small number of counties reported, that lead disappeared.


If the vote drop off occurred, it occurred in a very small number of counties.  It was not visible nationwide.

I contend that you can not get a 10% drop off in GOP turnout without it being noticeable during the GOTV effort, measures of enthusiasm in polling, or visibly lower turnout in GOP leaning precincts.

I know you don't want to believe such a thing is possible.  You don't want to think that the Obama campaign would engage in such blatant election fraud.  But these are the same people who ran Fast and Furious without regard for the cost in human lives, turned off their credit card verification system to allow fraudulent donations, and allowed CIA operative in Libya to die because it was politically inconvenient.  Do you really think that massive election fraud is something they wouldn't do?

If this is true, then we have some hard things to consider.

First of all, we are now needlessly fracturing our coalition pointing fingers at people for not voting.  Second, we are making an assumption about the make up of the American public that is not true.  We are going to modify our party and message to appeal to a group of individuals who do not represent the majority of the population.

Most difficult to believe is that we are living in Venezuela where our elections are merely for show, and the people in charge of the Governments decide who will win elections.  We become wards of the State, which is the aim of those who stole this election.

So how can this be proved?

I am going to start by looking at a few key counties in Florida.  What I want to see is the voter registration numbers by party, and then compare them to the actual votes received.  Theoretically, if this were to be done for all counties in Florida, we could see where the fraud occurred. Comparing the votes Romney received to the strike lists would show that in specific counties Romney received something like 50% of the Republican vote (picking a number out of the air) while we know that nationwide he received 95% of the Republican vote.  To really get to the answer, we would need to get the registration books, which might be possible through Freedom of Information act.  Those show who actually voted, by name, and their party.

The media will not pursue this.  This will take citizen journalists working in every state.

64 comments:

  1. Dave, I have been reviewing some counties in OH and WI and feel exactly the same thing... All the early voting numbers were WAY up for Mitt over McCain. All the GOP districts and counties reported heavy turnout...

    Even folks for Freedom Works and others following the election on the ground felt that this was a huge wave of GOP turnout AND I's for Romney...

    I HATE conspiracies but the more I look into this, the more something does not look right here...

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  2. I hate to say this because we're likely stuck with the results anyway, but I've been saying this could be done with the way we do elections now. Voting machine software is extremely hackable as has been proven over and over again by groups who are worried about election integrity...Instapundit posts on this regularly...all it would take is having machines in a few key, highly populated places programmed to skim off, say 1 out of 20 or 25 R votes and add them to O's totals...and when you check, you end up with the right total # of votes cast in the district. Remember those folks - all in swing states - having trouble getting machines to record their R votes for R/R? How many more were in a hurry and didn't notice? (shrug) I have no idea if this happened this time or not (but it sure smells like it might have), but the possibility of it happening surely exists. Combine the electronic voting with no ID requirements in most places, and you have a recipe for becoming Venezuela-North.

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    1. Yes, been saying this all long.

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  3. I know my county was up from 2004 and 2008, and in 2012 there were 4000 less registered voters than 2008. 200 more votes.

    Question in reading these is: Do I have to add straight party votes to the President/Vice President votes? If so, it's a lot higher than that.

    2008: http://www.storycountyiowa.gov/DocumentCenter/Home/View/449

    2012: http://www.storycountyiowa.gov/DocumentCenter/View/2806

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  4. Yeah, I know how you feel but at this point why complain? We can't prove anything. Just have to accept everything at face value, unfortunately.

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    1. Because if you prove fraud or whatever, you can hang it on the Dems....for decades.

      And, you can get machine voting tossed out and voter ID law passed.

      And, you never know...you might get the SCOTUS to order a new election and no, I am not kidding.

      Even 1 and 2 are reasons to pursue this.

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  5. Although we are smart people this does not require genius to see. Romney's people MUST see this and yet they say nothing. If Romney himself does nothing there is no hope for us. He must demand a recount in specific FL, VA and OH counties. We need to create a wave in social media demanding this. Why Romney has not acted to this point is a mystery. Republican leaders always just lay down and take it.

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    1. It would be too early to say anything. There would have to be extensive analyses. I am sure a guy like Barone is pouring throught things, if only to find out why he was so off.

      Now, I am also sure he knows of all the anecdotal evidence of turn out in battleground states. He may try to find some kind of equation that explains the loss of "Romney" votes in each of those state.

      I am also sure the internal pollster for Romney are doing something to try to find the missing votes. After all, their business depends on their having done a decent job. You can't simply go in front of cameras a day or two after an election like this and claim, without the country going into the streetsm "Hey, there may be as many as 2 million Romney votes missing."

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  6. Look to the tabulation software and you will find your fraud.

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    1. Who would be the ones to do this? Would it have to started by the Secretaries of State? Whom would they call to check such things. Would the software be that used in several states?

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  7. I wouldn't put it past em for a minute. They have proven they hate freedom and the constitution too many times to count.
    I was going to say check the signed off sheet numbers against actual numbers but if they were skimming from R to O you'd still get matching numbers. Only other way is to contact each signed off voter and ask if they'd be willing to say who they voted for.

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    1. That's the thing with electronic voting...no paper trail to track fraud with even if you had someone in government willing to do it.

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  8. Dave, votes are still being tabulated and will be added to the totals, according to the piece I linked to in the last thread.

    It is not strange for a small number of counties to give huge swings to Democrats. This is how voters are distributed. Reds live in the rural areas, blues in the dense areas. In VA, for example, when the beltway counties report, it gives a big push to 0bama. That isn't evidence of fraud. In fact these counties always report late.

    I think you need to see the rest of the vote come in. The final results were consistent with the exit polls. In 2004, the Democrats wanted to claim stolen election because the exit polls showed Kerry winning. Romney didn't even have that going for him.

    I appreciate all your efforts this election season. But as far as this goes, I think you should consider writing a thriller novel about a stolen election, rather than raising such charges about this one with no evidence.

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    1. Matt, no offense but you have no idea what you are talking about.

      The last 4 elections we have experienced a minimum of 7% voter growth over the prior election. This is to be expected given population growth.

      If we had the same 7% growth this year as 2008, that means that 23 million voters are missing! 23 million.

      Something stinks.

      No POTUS in history has EVER lost 10% of his popular vote from the prior election and won. Get that. Never, ever, ever. As a matter of fact, not POTUS has EVER not increased his margin on re-election.

      We have 10's of millions of missing voters.

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    2. And Romney/Ryan were way more popular with Repubs than McCain and much more motivated to vote because of anti-Obama sentiment.

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    3. Hey, Bill, no offense taken. Who could take offense at being told they don't know what they're talking about. There are still votes coming in to the total. Yes, it is WAY down from 2008, an historically high turnout election. I'm stunned by the dropoff, particularly in G0P votes. But I need to see more than that before I am willing to believe a stolen election conspiracy like this.

      We have known for at least a year now that 0bama was going to get fewer votes than his first term. He royally sucked. He deserved 0 votes. But that doesn't prove fraud. It proves idiocy on the part of the American people, and 10 million fewer idiots than 2008. But not a stolen election.

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  9. It sounds "tin foil hat" to me.

    If it was say one state, county or precinct I could see it, but across the country? With Senate seats also?

    And yet Republicans still won the House? And added Governorships? Why not steal the whole enchilada if you can hack in?

    If you want to know what I think "happened" I think too many Republicans thought it was hopeless and sat it out. Of my Republican friends, I would say 9 out of 10 thought Obama was going to easily win. Too many just didn't make the effort.

    Also, whoever was in charge of Romney GOTV effort should be publicly flogged. All they had to do was turn out McCain numbers and we would have had both the Senate and the White House. Had they turned out Bush's numbers in 2004, it would have been a 1980 landslide.

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    1. Ohio numbers seem to point out your theory: in 2008 5,773,777 votes were cast.

      in 2012, 5,273,076 were cast.

      Multiply that out over several swing states, and there's your 5 million votes.

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    2. You wouldn't "steal the whole enchilada" because 1) you don't work for those others and 2) the most important reason, you would be sending a huge red flag up the flag pole.

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    3. The thing that gets me is McCain hardly had a GOTV effort, as I recall reading. He had virtually no org, while Romney, although it comes in for criticism, had a better one than McCain.

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    4. Unknown....wow, beg to differ. Since the debate, I knew no one who thought it was hopeless. Even here in CA my Dem friends were afraid Romney was going to pull it out. They saw the Gallup numbers that week before Sandy hit and man, they were convinced Obama was losing. So, out here in CA, if they were worried, how could GOPers feel it was hopeless. YOu have some mighty low-info friends, it would seem, if they actually sat it out. People who post on blogs like this are rarely going to be people who sit out an election or have friends who are going to sit out an election. And weren't there other ballot measures or races they cared about. I don't take you seriously.

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    5. Romney GOTV was an unmitigated disaster. Project freaking ORCA was a sick and pathetic joke.

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  10. The fact that Senate seats were dropping left and right, but the GOP stayed strong in the House is troubling.

    A House seat is district by district. But the Senate, like the Presidency, is state total. If one was "fixed" the other would be too, but the House would be relatively clean (except the ones that overlap into the "fixed" districts).

    To me we need to look at the state level, since that is how our votes are made, counted, carried, and tallied. GOP has a record number of Governors, and in many cases a majority (in Tennessee it's a super majority) in the State houses, and Sec of States offices.

    Keep your electronic machines, but once the vote is tallied, you print the ballot out, look it over and put fingerprint on it. Drop the paper ballot in a padlocked box.

    That box is guarded by reps of both parties who stay with it at every step of the way, from the polling booth, to the sorting, to the announcement of how many votes when for each candidate.

    THE GOP HAS THE STATES, STOP PLAYING BY THE DEMOCRATS' RULES!

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  11. Dave I hope you do dig and dig hard. At this stage of the game imagine the worse and it is probably true

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  12. Hi!

    Thank you for this great blog. I've been following it for a while (found it via aoshq), and I just want to say that this effort of yours is extremely important. I'm not sure it's proper for me - from a country with no functioning democracy - to say this, and I hope it doesn't come off condescending or something, but I'm sensing a dangerous mood among the american conservatives these days, as if many honest and decent people want to 'go Galt' or even join the ranks of 'takers' to loot the system and watch it burn. I'd hate to live to see this, because as Ronald Reagan said back in 1964: "If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth." - and if the conservative cause is done in the US, despite all the years of outstanding efforts by outstanding people to preserve and promote it, then all the hope is lost here too. No more example to look up to, no more inspiration, nothing.

    For all the gloating of the lefties, this election was very close, so even if you'll find no evidence of actual fraud on such a scale that might have affected the outcome (which doesn't seem likely to me personally - you can't steal hundreds of thousands of votes in a few counties without everyone knowing and talking about it, at least that's how voter fraud works here in Russia), it's still very important to figure out what and where exactly went wrong with the republican GOTV efforts (if that's the case), which exact counties and demographics didn't match the expectations/pre-election polls. So that in 2016, when the so-called 'permanent democratic majority' might not even exist in the way it is shaped now around its (let's face it) quite unique candidate, the conservatives will be able to execute a better play - push their base to the polls, move around the issues that might turn the minorities away from the republican candidate - and, hopefully, beat the commie scum.

    Just my 2 cents from across the ocean. And thanks again.

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  13. Glad you said it. I was looking at the numbers yesterday and could not make sense of them.

    Is it also true that several hundred thousand military ballots got "lost" or were delivered late? I came across this last night: http://gunnyg.wordpress.com/2012/11/07/military-absentee-ballots-delivered-one-day-late-would-have-swung-election-for-romney-the-duffel-blog/

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    1. Yes, that's become an election tradition in this country. And no one, Dem or GOP, seems to give enough of a damn about it to actually make sure it doesn't happen each and every election. I don't know if the total is that high, but lots were lost or never go to the deployed troops or didn't get back in time to be counted.

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    2. If this is the case the Romney campaign should sue to re-enfranchise these voters. It should be easy to trace who asked for a ballot. I don't understand why a candidate would stay quiet.

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    3. Well, I've never understood it either. Why didn't Nixon fight like hell in 1960 when he and his team were certain that the Dems stole that election in Chicago and Texas? (shrug)

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    4. Case in point, one guy who is actually fighting back...West down in Florida...got a recount and it's now looking like he might end up having won. For whatever reasons, a lot of GOP candidates seem unwilling to fight for votes like that.

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  14. Not that Dem voter fraud doesn't exist but the Powerline guy linked at the HQ news dump today opined that the voter drop-off of 14 million was because the opposition in the surefire red/blue states (like TX & CA) didn't bother coming out while they did in 2008. I don't know if it's true but it was something I hadn't considered.
    /andycanuck

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    1. Well, the thing is...even if there was a dropoff in GOP turnout, that doesn't exclude the possibility that there was massive fraud, too. (shrug) It's two separate things.

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    2. I live in NYC and you better believe that I and everyone I know who voted McCain-Palin in '08 were itching to vote for Mitt-Ryan, especially this time around. We even thought that Hurricane Sandy might depress the supposedly unenthused Dem vote and we might even sneak Wendy Long into the Senate.

      Bottom line is, judging from me, Republican voters in heavily blue states would have been totally stoked to vote, despite where they lived.

      The numbers and all the anecdotal stuff pre-election do not add up.

      "J.J. Sefton"

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  15. Dave, I can easily believe the Obama campaign would engage in fraud because I was around during the 2008 primary. The caucuses were very problematic. It's been documented by many people and the information is out there if you want to look. Many people believe that the only way Obama could win the primary was in the caucus states because the traditional-voting states were too pro Hillary and too difficult to manipulate, and in fact went to Hillary.

    Given Romney's EV turnout and the high level of reports at GOP precincts on election day -- plus ORCA's early projections of swing-state wins -- something definitely smells fishy. You should touch base with Truman North.

    You will need someone of stature to take on the charge if you have enough data. I saw citizen journalists make serious attempts to expose the fraud in 08 and were called sore losers, were laughed at. No one in our country wants to believe it's possible to be like a 3rd world country. Maybe reach out to John Fund? I'd also approach Donald Trump. People laugh at him but he has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and access to key people in the GOP.

    Please let me know if I can help. I'm good with research.

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  16. You have my attention. Go for it. No real evidence yet but the anecdotal stuff, like Romney voters being repeatedly called that had already voted, have a fishy smell to say the least.

    And as far as whether the commies would cheat as a means to an end?

    C'mon now.

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    1. I have no idea if this actually happened this election or not, but what I can't understand is why some aren't even willing to contemplate the idea that it might have happened. 1) It *is* possible to hack the voting software...it's been done, repeatedly, by groups who are worried about election integrity and 2) Obama and his thuggish regime have shown not one iota of respect for the law, especially and including the Constitution, since taking office 4 years ago. Of course they'd be willing to do something like this if they thought they could get away with it. Whether they actually did it or not is one thing, but they're certainly willing. What? Their sense of fair play would stop them? LOL

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  17. I hope there are some hard answers to why our side didn't show up, I think that's what I'm most pissed about. Not only was this a winnable election, we could have absolutely stomped Obama.

    If you had told me Obama would get 10 million less votes than he did last time, I would have told you it would be impossible for him to win reelection. If I told you all we had to do was hit McCain's numbers and we'd win, i'd say that's simple.

    And it goes across all 50 states. I could understand a state or two having low turnout, but all of them?

    Who was in charge of the GOTV operation?

    I just know, in all my life, I have NEVER seen the enthusiasm for a Republican candidate like I saw for Romney. Neighborhoods FULL of yard signs, bumper stickers galore, etc. Where did they go? And the anecdotes were all record turnout?

    I hope people do look into this, but let's be careful, we all remeber Democrats screaming this nonsense in 2004 about Ohio.

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  18. One part of the premise for this that I find fault with is the assumption that McCain's vote was a floor. It wasn't. Every canpaign has to get what should be their base out, along with whatever swing and independent voters they can also reach. When you consider the factors in this race- bland candidate, no overarching message other than defeating the incumbent, terrible GOTV- I can start to see where turnout was missed.

    Ben Domenech's the Transom has anecdotal stories today of just how badly the Romney GOTV engine failed. (They're anecdotal, but so are stories of exceptional Republican turnout.) Instructions for ORCA were sent out late, and were poorly constructed and of little use to the strikers. Domenech notes that the certificates enabling you to be a watcher didn't arrive until the weekend before the election and instructions for using them, along with how to work the lists, weren't sent out until then and were sent via .pdf (so heaven help you if you couldn't easily access that), and the instructions didn't assume most volunteers might be poll watching for the first time. Calls for help weren't answered or returned.

    Here in Virginia, where there seemed to be good turnout at traditionally republican precincts, the GOTV effort was lacking as well. Romney had no dedicated GOTV effort in the state, instead using the state party, which has proven to be disorganized and unable to turn out the vote in the population heavy, Dem-oriented DC suburbs. Obama's campaign had many times the field offices the GOP campaign had, and I was struck by a mid-June article that mentioned the President's campaign holding 62 campaign events on a mid-summer Tuesday across the state, while the GOP schedule included just one. I also heard that, nationwide, the GOP effort counted a knock on your door or a mailer as a voter contact, while the Dem effort didn't count it as a contact unless they spoke with a person at the residence. Somewhere today I saw a reference that the Romney campaign boasted that they'd made 75k voter contacts in Ohio that day (the end of last week) and the President, after consulting with staff, said that his campaign had made 376k contacts that day. Extrapolate this out- and we're basing this on anecdotes, same as the reports of high turnout in GOP areas- and you can start to see why Romney couldn't get enough voters out.

    I'll also echo what Matt said- here in Virginia, the exurbs and more rural counties report first, and are heavily GOP. The DC beltway counties, richmond counties, and coastal counties report later, and they are heavily Dem. Any winning GOP candidate has to run up a big margin early and hope to keep numbers close in the suburban areas, so as to counteract the late swing that will occur when the Dem areas report. Romney improved on McCain's margins, but not enough.

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    1. I think that's what is most maddening, our country may be forever ruined over something very basic like getting out the vote. And Obama's get out the vote sucked, he got 10 million fewer voters.

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    2. From reports that I've seen, his GOTV definitely did not suck in the areas they targeted in a few specific swing states. If you believe the numbers being reported.

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    3. But if Romney got less votes in the swing states than McCain, doesn't that mean his GOTV sucked? And McCain got less votes than Bush did in 2004.

      I'm just flabbergasted that Romney's campaign (flush with money) ceded out the GOTV operations to state parties in the swing states. Everyone knew this election was going to come down to 3-4 states, there should have been a MASSIVE ground operation spearheaded by Romney there as soon as the nomination was clinched.

      Someone really screwed up here, and I'm not sure if that makes me less angry or mad. When I was getting the results, my first thought was "this is now a liberal country, get used to it" but now it just looks like it was an election where someone on our team simply screwed up.

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    4. Oh, don't get me wrong. From what I'm hearing, Romney's big GOTV thing - ORCA? or whatever the hell it was called - crashed and burned big time, too. If it does turn out to be just ineptitude for a guy with this much money to have gotten less voters to come out than the rolling disaster that was the McCain campaign, well, heads need to roll. And, in case anyone needed another data point, it's yet another good reason not to let the inside-the-Beltway folks influence the selection process as much as they do. I don't know...as I said above, I have no idea if the voting machines got hacked or not. I just know it's possible and needs to be checked...for no other reason than to be sure. Although I'm not entirely sure you can check at this point with no paper trail to follow.

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    5. KingCranium, you make some good points, and I too have read on blogs like Red State, how superior a GOTV org Obama had to Romney's. Those points are well-taken.

      But, you know what? The most important get out the vote stimulator is 1) intense dislike for the incumbant and 2) a belief your candidate is a good one--and this sentiment grew and grew and grew with GOPers and 3) a belief the election is close and if you vote for your candidate, you can win and 4) crowd surge and pictures of that surge and enthusiasm for the guy you prefer.

      All of those 4 things were in play, esp, in the battlegrounds. Sometimes you have to simply apply what your eyes and ears tell you and believe what you see and hear until you have logical data that disproves what you have seen and heard.

      That Romney lost is not what defies the eyes and ears. The turnout does. After all votes are tallied (yes, it often takes weeks for a final count, but usually pollsters can look at the early totals and tell if turnout has been up, down, or relatively equal to the previous election) we'll see the final numbers, but in listening to Barone just yesterday, while he gave an explanation of why he was wrong in his projections, I could tell the guy was still very stumped. He's not a partisan hack; he's a pro, and he can't stand to not understand the numbers.

      At this point, all this is conjecture, but it's worthwhile conjecture because people who are looking into the numbers will either see an explanation ....or they won't.

      You know, maybe some of you aren't people who live in corrupt areas where vote fraud goes on all_the_time. Nixon won Illinois in reality; Kennedy became President when Daly and Papa Kennedy held their numbers until the rest of Illinois showed a Nixon victory. Even Beckel, the ass on Fox, and that is what he is (I get sick of people, even those with whom he works, acting like he's a lovable idiot--he's a cheater, a thug), has vitually admitted to holding out counties until other counties came in to see how many votes needed to show up, and this was in the day when there weren't electronic means of cheating.

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  19. I have the 2008 data and the 2012 data now for all Florida counties. In the three counties I have looked at so far, Romney received 2000 more votes than McCain did in each county. These are two swing counties and a red county.

    I don't have data that will prove anything yet, but I have enough to run some statistical analysis and identify where the the vote drop occurred.

    There is something fishy and I'm trying to get to the bottom of it. This will take time though. I have to build a big spreadsheet.

    If anyone wants to do something useful, getting to the vote totals by county in VA, OH, and CO would be very helpful. I need to know the totals by county in 2008 and 2012.

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    1. Dave,

      thank you for looking at this, and you're right, the MSM certainly won't.

      I honestly want to know the "why" even if it's not the answer I want to hear for why we performed so poorly.

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    2. Thanks for looking into this, Dave...I'll see if I can get my hands on the vote totals for Virginia for you. Or rather, I'll see if I can sweet talk my wife into doing it since she is the research librarian and what she'd produce would likely be a lot more useful than what I would. :-)

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    3. Dave in OH there appears to have been major dropoffs in rural counties. Inexplicable. Don't be deterred by the anti conspiracy types. There was not a single pollster or modeler who predicted record low Rep turnout.

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  20. VA data by county:

    2012:
    http://electionresults.virginia.gov/resultsCTY.aspx?type=PRE&rid=3545232527424045364&osn=0&map=CTY
    2573 of 2588 repoted though

    2008:
    https://www.voterinfo.sbe.virginia.gov/election/DATA/2008/07261AFC-9ED3-410F-B07D-84D014AB2C6B/Official/1_s.shtml
    no xls version as far as I can see

    O: 1,891,486 in 2012 vs 1,959,532 in 2008 = 68046 drop
    Romney: 1,781,445 vs McCain's 1,725,005 = 56440 gain
    total votes: 3,732,259 vs 3,723,260 in 2008 (+8999)
    also, all 3-rd party candidates were up from 2008 (e.g. Gary Johnson 30,437 vs Bob Barr's 11,067), but that gain is not enough to account for ~100k diff between R and O

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  21. I have no problems, after what I have read about unions and thuggism and the connection between the AFL-CIO and Trumka, Obama, Chicago believing this could happen and believing it could happen w/out the candidate, in this case Obama, even knowing--which would explain his despondency. This was a man who didn't think he was winning, not even that last day in Ohio.

    Dave, if you have "discovered" that which seems not likely, then a guy like Barone and Rasmussen have too. And, if they are as puzzled by this as you, I would expect the Romney camp has been told.

    I know people in Ohio who were sure Romney would win by at least 3% points because of the turnout and the enthusiam. I also can't really wrap my head around Barry's turnout being that good no matter how good his GOTV was. Just because you've had an org in place for a long while doesn't mean the people you have contacted are happy with your candidate and sufficiently unhappy with is opponent to the point they actually go to the poll and vote Obama. In fact, I'd think a lot of the people in Ohio that were contacted by Obama forces would have said, "Yes, I did vote." But, I'd have to believe some of those GOTV voters for Obama actually voted for Romney.

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  22. I agree with Bill Mitchell above. Don't be deterred. I don't know how old you are, but my father, gone now but born in 1910, used to tell me about union activities in NYC. Although a blue collar electrician all his life, and a member of a union in CA at a pulp mill, he hated unions.

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  23. Made a public spreadsheet for Ohio votes in 2012 and 2008 by counties:
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AvOVqZcOv-MvdElOSXFQdWliallJalozVG9CbGdCVUE
    (data from Ohio SoS site)

    Votes were down in almost every county for both candidates compared to 2008. Obama lost 248,183 votes vs 2008, Romney down 93,200 vs McCain, and yet Obama got 107,241 votes more than Romney.

    It's not impossible to 'lose' a few paper ballots here and there, but it takes a coordinated effort to do it on a state-wide scale.

    Still, that's only part of the story. Is there any data available from campaign officials working at the polls, so that we could compare turnout county by county?

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    1. Do your vote totals include all votes? That would be EV, absentee, and day of election votes?

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    2. Two more things though:

      (1) Total voter turnout: 5,431,309, total votes cast for president: 5,364,303 - does it mean that 67006 voters (1,23%) didn't cast a ballot for president? Is that number more/less than usual?

      (2) There's still over 300K outstanding provisional and absentee ballots.

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    3. 2 Anonymous @ November 8, 2012 3:08 PM:
      from what I understand, absentee and provisional ballots are not yet included in these vote totals, since they are labeled as 'outstanding' on turnout report page here (either that or my English fails me):
      http://www2.sos.state.oh.us/pls/enrpublic/f?p=212:52:0::NO:::

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  24. My point is this.

    Did even a single computer model predict RECORD LOW REPUBLICAN TURNOUT?

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  25. All 2008 results by county at the bottom of the page here:
    http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/
    eg. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/counties.xls

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  26. What is just absolutely heartbreaking is, the polls and Nate Silvers of the world were right but for the WRONG reasons. None of them actually thought Republican turnout would be less than the disaster that occurred in 2008. Obama performed terribly, it's just that we were worse.

    You could also tell (at least in my eyes) Republicans thought they were going to do well and Democrats were terrified.

    But about the whole vote stealing, this would have to basically have to be a 50 state conspiracy, turnout was down everywhere. No one is questioning whether the Left would steal an election if they could. Of course they would, what I'm questioning is, that seems to me to be too big of a conspiracy with tens of thousands of people involved. Especially considering many states are completely controlled by Republicans from the top down. And then there's the fact Republicans actually picked up House seats.

    Regardless, I think it's worth exploring, let's just keep a healthy perspective. I remember being glad Democrats though voting machines were why they lost in 2004 instead of actually figuring out real solutions, supposedly even Kerry bought into the idea.

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    Replies
    1. On the day before the voting, if you recall, Obama looked for all the world like a guy who knew he was going to lose, too. It wasn't just his followers.

      To be sure, the GOP needs to fix a whole bunch of things, whether something was funny with the voting machines or not.

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    2. The candidate himself wouldn't have to be in on anything. Not even a Plouffe or Axlerod. No one said this would have to have been done by Obama's closest people.

      They didn't expect their turnout to be greater than Mitt's and Mitt didn't expect the low turnout.

      My question would be why didn't Obama expect his machine would beat Mitt's. They saw the discrepancy, yet you are so right that Obama looked to be the defeated candidate. CBS has a story up that Romney is "shellshocked" as he went to bed Monday night believing they really would win.

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  27. Here's a link - stolen from Instapundit - on the many problems with electronic voting machines...and the general, all-around mess that voting is in the USA:

    http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/computer-security/why-dont-we-have-foolproof-voting-machines-yet-14501027?click=pm_news

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  28. If by "stolen" you mean perverted by the votes of millions of aliens on the dole that received instant uncontested US citizenship, yes, it was stolen. If by stolen you mean perverted by voting dead people, voting illegal aliens, and multiple voters, yes it was stolen.

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  29. I believe Obama stole the election. I am glad to see you doing this investigation. But what I am wondering is, if there is a legitimate question, then where is the Romney campaign and a team of lawyers? He spent so much money to get to the nomination and now he wants to throw in the towel?

    Why can't WE THE PEOPLE demand verification of votes?

    We can't afford a war of words here. If it turns out there was fraud and Romney really won, we can't let Obama get away with it this time.

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    Replies
    1. National Republicans never seem willing to fight for much of anything, even their own political careers. (shrug) Damned if I know why (well, for one thing, we keep nominating weak candidates), but they never seem to care enough to stand up and say, "No! Enough! This will not stand!" Until the GOP finds some folks who will do that, to provide some real leadership, the Dems will keep right on doing this over and over and over again. Look at what West is doing in Florida...he demanded a recount, and it looks like he will end up winning now. I have no idea why Romney (and Mia Love in Utah which looks even more suspicious) aren't doing the same. I assume at least part of it is the "for the good of the nation" nonsense, but how can it be for the "good of the nation" long term to let one political party keep cheating its ass off in every single election? I don't see how it can be, but then I'm not one of the "geniuses" running the GOP either.

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