By Jim Lampley At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up. People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election. And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil. Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty's why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush's favor. Coincidence? Of course not. Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let's go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That's how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/2005/05/biggest-story-of-our-live.html
I just read it for the first time today. He brings up some very valid points that need to be looked at.
He's flat out wrong. I was checking the gambling sites continually right up to the election, and Kerry was absolutely not a 2-1 favorite. In fact, Bush was ahead the morning of the election day. The most accurate site was TradeSports.com, which was trading futures contracts on who would win the presidential election. Bush was up to begin the day. Tradesports is a very liquid market that has been proven to be more accurate than polls in the past, as it did this year again.
man this is completely freaking idiotic.... slickvic you are an idiot if you are going to base your facts on the ideas of gamblers. let me tell your r****d ass something. i am professional stock trader. do you understand that? professional? that means absolutely nothing. i have a series 7, series 55, and series 63 license that allows me to trade equities. i recently lost a LOT of money on the neiman marcus buyout because the information of the buyout was reported incorrectly to me and many other people. so stfu you idiot. many "professionals" lost a good amount of money on this. christ i am drunk right now and i have better judgement than your r****d ass. OMFG i hate idiots like slickvik! they just hear something they want to believe and then they accept it as fact. what a ******* moron. please don't ever post here again and i don't give damn if you are a contributing member because my random idiot ass is smarter than your r****ded ass.
Err, if you read the article carefully, it wasn't just that the oddsmaker believed Kerry was going to win by inside information, it was the fact that the exit polls showed Kerry to be winning. Exit polls are very, very accurate, and historically have been less than 2-3% off the mark. Obviously, Kerry was winning by a significant margin according to the EXIT polls, which are, I'll say it again, very accurate. Thus, to have a 4, 5, or 6 point swing and ending up with GWB winning by 2% is statistically impossible. The possibility of that occuring would be like getting hit by lightning 3 times in a row. Or winning the lottery twice. You should stop drinking before you post.
The exit pollers said that their samples were 60 percent women and 40 percent men. They did not have late afternoon/early evening polling data and thus a lot of men - who tend to vote after work - were not included in the samples. I DID NOT VOTE FOR GW. All these conspiracy theories only make the Dems look bad.
I have to agree with BigTexx. Every gambling site I saw had Bush a slight to moderate favorite. And yes - Jim Lampley's got to be smarter than BigTexx - the guy's a sports journalist for gawd's sake!
How do you know the exit polls are accurate? Maybe we should just not bother to count the votes and just rely on what exit pollers project the outcome will be.
slickvik69 A thread you might have missed and be interested in. http://bbs2.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?threadid=93956
