User:Kevin baas~enwiki/belief consistency

(From the DU)

To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:


 * 1) That the exit polls were WRONG...
 * 2) That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.
 * 3) That Harris last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.
 * 4) The Incumbent Rule I (that undecideds break for the challenger)was WRONG.
 * 5) The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)
 * 6) The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)
 * 7) That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.
 * 8) That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.
 * 9) That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.
 * 10) That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.
 * 11) That Kerry did WORSE than Gore agains an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.
 * 12) That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.
 * 13) That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election.
 * 14) That people who voted for Bush were not anxious to speak to exit pollsters in the states that Bush had to win (like Florida and Ohio) where the exit polls were off, but wanted to be polled in states that he had sewn up (like Arizona, Louisiana and Arkansas) where the exit polls were exactly correct.
 * 15) That Democrats who voted for Kerry were very anxious to be exit-polled, especially in Florida and Ohio. That accounts for the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual votes in these two critical states.
 * 16) That women were much more likely to be polled early in the day in Florida and Ohio. That is another reason why the exit polls were wrong in those states. In those states in which the exit polls were correct to within one percent, women did not come out early.
 * 17) That the University of Pennsylvania Professor (trained at MIT) who calculated the probability of Bush gaining votes beyond the exit polling margin of error as ONE out of 250 million, does not have any credibility.
 * 18) That network newscasters who claim that those who consider the possibility of fraud are just wild conspiracy theorists do not have an agenda.
 * 19) That it is just a coincidence that only since the 2000 presidential election have exit polls failed to agree with the actual vote - and that Bush won both disputed elections.
 * 20) That exit polls are not to be trusted in the United States, even though they are used throughout the world to monitor elections for fraud.
 * 21) That even though more votes were cast than there were eligible voters in many precincts of critical states, it is not an issue that needs to be covered in the media.
 * 22) That the absence of a paper ballot trail for touch screen computers does not encourage fraud, even though they have been proven by hundreds of computer experts to be highly vulnerable to fraudulent attack.
 * 23) That statistical tests which indicate a high probability of fraud are just conspiratorial junk science.
 * 24) That his vote tallies could exceed his exit poll percentage in FL by 4%. Based on 2846 individuals exit polled, the polling margin of error was 1.84%.  The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 1667.
 * 25) That his vote tallies could exceed his exit poll percentage in OH by 3%. Based on 1963 individuals exit polled, the polling margin of error was 2.21%.  The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 333.
 * 26) That his vote tallies could exceed his exit poll percentages in 41 out of 51 states.  The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 135,000.
 * 27) That his vote tallies could exceed the margin of error in 16 states. Not one state vote tally exceeded the MOE for Kerry.  The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 13.5 Trillion.
 * 28) That his vote tallies could exceed a 2% exit poll margin of error in 23 states.  The probability of this occurrence: as close to ZERO as you can get.
 * 29) That of 88 documented touch screen incidents, 86 voters would see their vote for Kerry come up Bush - and only TWO from Bush to Kerry.  The probability of this occurrence: as close to ZERO as you can get.
 * 30) That Mitofsky, with 25 years of experience, has lost his exit polling touch.
 * 31) That by disputing the Ukrainian elections, the Bush administration would base its case on the accuracy of U.S. sponsored exit polling, while at the same time ignoring exit polls in the U.S. presidential election, which the media reported Kerry was winning handily.
 * 32) That Bush could overcome Kerry’s 50.8% - 48.2% lead in the National Exit Poll Sub-sample (13,047 polled) and win the popular vote: 51.2% - 48.4%, a 3.0% increase from the exit poll to the vote tally, far beyond the 0.86% margin of error.  The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 282 Billion.