Schoen's firm, which was hired by an opposition group in Venezuela, conducted preelection surveys, and also undertook a large exit poll on the day of the Chavez recall. His preelection surveys indicated that those who wanted to recall Chavez were ahead by at least 10%, and gaining momentum. In his exit poll, the margin for the antiChavez side grew to 18%. Schoen expressed disbelief when the results showed that Chavez retained his office by the same 18% margin. That, of course, is a 36% swing from an exit poll conducted the same day, or about six times the margin of error in terms of a vote shift. We are talking here of many standard deviations away from the expected result. That result is about as likely as Osama Bin Laden agreeing to be on Bill O'Reilly's show in person tomorrow night.
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The two things that are suggested by these results are that a fraud may have occurred, and that if it did, the fixers were lazy. Having identical vote totals on hundreds of different machines around the country is about as likely to occur as the results from the famous missing ballot box that was used to give 'Landslide Lyndon' Johnson his 87 vote victory in the Senate race in Texas in 1948. The votes in that mystery precinct when they finally turned up, were almost 100% for Johnson, and the voters who signed in to vote "that day" did so in alphabetical order, a first I am sure, even for Texas.
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And two Venezuelan professors, including one from MIT, and another from Harvard have issued their own report,
concluding that there is at least a 99% chance that the election result was a fraud.
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There is no front page news story on this in the New York Times or Washington Post of course, and no editorial condemning Chavez for holding onto power through a probablyfixed election. And of course, there has been no criticism in the liberal press for Saint Jimmy, who has, over many years, sanctified the behavior and character of the leaders of North Korea, Yassar Arafat, the Sandanistas, Fidel Castro, and now Hugo Chavez. Carter, the Nobel Prize Peace Prize winner, is also the man who invited serial liar Michael Moore to share his Presidential box at the Democratic Convention, effectively anointing him by extension, as a truthteller, like Carter himself.