Friday, March 13, 2009

I’ve been reading all the articles about the upsets on Tuesday. Yes, things had been swinging increasingly Republican for a while. Yes, the whole Nagin v. Bush thing made Dems look like desperate, petulant children. I’m not even all that surprised or upset that the pollsters got their predictions wrong (remember how off they were for the NH Primary last year?).

The part that worries me is the exit polls. The vote counts don’t begin to match the exit polls. I took statistics in college, I know when a difference is statistically significant, and these are.

“Maybe people lied.” you say. But why would they lie in this election when they haven’t historically? What’s different?

Well, we have squatter for a president, that’s different. But would that make more people say they’ve voted Dem when they’ve actually voted GOP? If anything, I’d think the effect would be the other way…the better not to let the irrational despot know you voted against him.

Some conspiracy posters have said that the exit-poll anomalies are greatest in districts with electronic voting. I haven’t seen that anywhere I would trust to tell the truth, so I’m reserving judgement.

The most damning story from the elections I’ve heard so far comes from Michigan. A UN group was using the election as an exercise to train a bunch of US volunteers on how to monitor and rate election fairness (the group is slated to ship out to East Timor in a few weeks). The head of the exercise concluded that there were ’serious irregularities’ in the election processes that they observed.

I really want to say that the elections are legitimate. I want to say that American democracy is alive. It just really doesn’t look that way from here.