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Could unbiased election opinion polls prove electoral fraud?
By Roland Michel Tremblay (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Roland Michel Tremblay - Writer The American government has become a master at manipulating opinion polls, surveys and all sorts of statistics; they can make them say everything they want and convince us of anything in order to manipulate public opinion and the passing of new laws. The powerful U.S. PR and marketing machine costs billions of dollars every year. So much so, it could be compared to the old Russian propaganda machine which, decades ago, effectively convinced millions of starving unemployed Russians that they were living in the best and most successful country in the world. Governments always believed that ignorance for the people was bliss, one could wonder the purpose of this constant deceit. 
Opinion polls in the US are biased. So how can they efficiently reflect the outcome of a presidential election, unless the official election results are also biased? The problem with electronic voting machines is that there is no more recount possible. The first count is the last count. If someone hacks the machine and adds a few thousand votes in order to win, no one will be the wiser.
How can you fight this outrage to democracy? A return to paper ballots would have been the solution, but not enough wanted it, or else the electronic voting machines would have disappeared by now. So maybe we can fight with discrepancies between strict and scientific independent opinion polls compared with final electoral results. But then, since you cannot ask for a recount, you will need to fight for a new voting session on the basis of fraud.
Which brings up an important problem about opinion polls. If you do a search on the Internet and start comparing opinion polls for the 2008 US presidential election, you will quickly realize that depending on the sources, sometimes you can witness differences as large as 15% on similar questions, occasionally more.
A few actual polls, when only considering the Democrats and the Republicans, predict that Barack Obama will win with 51% of the vote, others that he will lose with 40%. Same for John McCain: he is supposed to win with 51% of the vote, and lose with 37%. How is this possible? Is there not a science behind these surveys? Have we not been told that they were highly reliable in reflecting the final outcome?
Are opinion polls too biased in the US? The question is crucial, because if the manipulation of the electronic voting machines is more extensive than anyone realized, it is essential for the culprit to falsify many local opinion polls to reflect the calculated outcome.
If you have many official opinion polls in the mass media stating wrongly that John McCain will win with 49% to 51% of the votes, reflecting the final manipulated results, someone could safely say that these latter opinion polls reflected a reality which is in fact a myth, facilitating election fraud. Which is why we need to insure unbiased local opinion polls everywhere in America, compare them with the final results, and contest these results if discrepancies show up.
One quick look at this page on Wikipedia will tell it all: "Nationwide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2008"
click here
If you study that page carefully, you will immediately understand that opinion polls are all over the place, contradicting each other in large amounts, and that ultimately none of them can truly be trusted. There is another page on Wikipedia which you need to study in order to understand how it is possible to manipulate opinion polls, short of lying outright about the results, which often is probably the case: "Opinion poll" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_poll
Why is this important? Because if you wish to prove that there was trickery with electronic voting machines, it will be helpful if you can prove that there have been outright lies in opinion polls. One would have to control both the voting machines and the opinion polls in order to avoid questions about this corruption of democracy.
Why is it also important? Opinion polls are an efficient tool to influence the masses. If a voter can see that both the Democrats and the Republicans are head to head, they may decide to go and vote, because suddenly they know it might make a difference. If a voter can see that a certain candidate has already lost the election, they may intrinsically feel that there is no point in voting as it is a lost battle (boomerang effect).
The "spiral of silence" is when someone's answer is influenced toward the most popular answer, but does not reflect his or her real opinion. Surveys could also influence opinions through a bandwagon effect, where the poll prompts voters to back the candidate shown to be winning in the poll.
Other ways by which an opinion poll can be biased range from offering alternative answers, suggesting who is leading the election (for example by presenting a candidate first over another), the wording of the poll, the order in which the questions are asked, and so on. An important bias can come from not using effective control in the survey, going about it less scientifically, which apparently is the case in the polling industry in the US.
You could also use a less representative sample, or survey people whose preference you might already know. For example, people watching Fox News are more likely Republicans than Democrats. Any opinion polls from that source, we know the outcome: the Republicans will win the next elections with a landslide. 
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