Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Ohio Republicans Face Exit Poll Dilemma


According to sources inside Romney campaign headquarters in Ohio, Republican Secretary of State John Husted is still undecided about which official explanation he will use to defuse Democrats’ and the media’s unease when exit polls in the upcoming election unequivocally indicate massive electronic voting fraud again across the state.

Explained Bernadette Harris, Cuyahoga County elections board chair and co-chair of the Romney for President campaign in Ohio, “Internal analysis shows that just too many black voters are going to wind up making it to the polls after all for Mr. Husted to deliver the state to Romney without borrowing Karl Rove and former Secretary of State Blackwell’s Plan B from 2004.

“Certainly we’re going to keep up the caging. We’re going to keep illegally purging blacks and other minorities and young people from the voter rolls. We’re going to slash the number of voting machines in heavily Democratic precincts and then keep withholding provisional ballots as Democrats wait in lines for ten and twelve hours and more, hopefully in the rain.

“And like in 2004, the RNC is going to send us a Strike Force of operatives to challenge and generally intimidate all the hopefully rain-soaked, demoralized and systematically misinformed Democrats waiting in all the long lines.

“But according to our numbers, voter suppression alone is not going to get the job done.”

“And what that means,” said Ms. Harris’ co-chair Pat Kaplan, “is widespread electronic voting fraud, and what that means once again folks is that exit polls are simply not going to remotely square with election results.

“Voters across the country are going to wake up again the next day to the impossible news that an insurmountable Democratic lead at bedtime was somehow surmounted while everyone was sleeping.

“And these people and the media are going to need an explanatory bone thrown to them.”

Based on interviews with Ohio election officials and/or high-level Republican operatives, the conventional Republican wisdom seems to be that it would be needlessly risking the chance, however remote, of waking the sleeping giant of disenfranchised voter outrage by going again with the Reluctant Responder hypothesis to explain away the three to six points worth of fraud that exit polling has uncovered.

Secretary of State Husted is reported to have narrowed his list of potential new explanations down to two: the Contrary Responder hypothesis, according to which Republican voters in large numbers would be said to have claimed they voted for Obama; and the Repeat Responder hypothesis—the notion that Democratic voters changed shirts with each other or deployed other measures to respond more than once to exit pollsters.

Said Mr. Husted’s press secretary Katherine Thomas, “Obviously the explanation doesn’t need to be much. I mean, look how easily everybody swallowed the unbelievable, thoroughly debunked idea that for the first time in recorded history all us Republicans got shy about sharing our political views.”

Ms. Thomas also dispelled the rumor that Mr. Husted may simply outlaw exit polling in the state, or have RNC Strike Force operatives harass pollsters till they give up.

“Think about it for a minute,” explained Ms. Thomas, “without the pretty much fool proof numbers from exit polling, how’s our IT guy supposed to know how many votes to flip in the middle of the night?”

Added Ms. Thomas, “The whole thing’s pretty moot anyway. If the American public hasn’t found the courage by now to stop pretending they don’t know these elections are being electronically stolen, they’re never going to find it.” 

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