Why There Won't Be Exit Polls in Massachusetts
One out of four Massachusetts voters think ACORN will try to steal the election
By JOHN FUND
JANUARY 19, 2010, 12:38 P.M. ET
online.wsj.com
The Massachusetts Senate race was a complete snoozer until January 5, when pollster Scott Rasmussen released a survey showing Republican Scott Brown trailing Democrat Martha Coakley by only nine points. That surprised many, but still wasn't a true wake-up call that the race would be a barnburner. As late as January 10, the Boston Globe carried a headline trumpeting a poll showing Ms. Coakley with a 15-point lead. Mr. Brown's surge was so sudden that many of the usual accoutrements of closely-contested elections are missing in the Bay State.
One is exit polls. There will be none tonight from Massachusetts, disappointing journalists and political scientists alike. As Mike Allen of Politico.com reports, the consortium of news outlets that normally organizes such surveys didn't bother when the race was expected to be a blowout and now "wasn't confident a reliable system could be built so fast."
Another casualty of the expectation that the race would be a cakewalk for the Democrat will be an absence of absentee ballot fraud, the preferred method of putting an illegal thumb on the scale in a close race. Applications for absentee ballots had to be submitted by last Friday, providing little opportunity for those with ill intent to organize such an effort once they realized the race had tightened up.
That doesn't mean voters aren't suspicious of electoral fraud in a machine state like Massachusetts. Public Policy Polling, a firm with Democratic connections, included a question over the weekend about the infamous left-wing voter registration group ACORN, which has been linked to fraudulent activities in many states and several of whose members have been sent to jail.
When asked whether "ACORN will try to steal the election for Martha Coakley," a surprising 25% of those surveyed in Massachusetts said "yes." A total of 38% said "no," and another 37% weren't sure. Lest you think concern about ACORN was limited to Republicans, one out of six Democrats thought ACORN would attempt electoral hanky-panky. One out of four African-Americans expressed the same concern, along with the same number of voters who called themselves moderates.
Both parties have concerns about vote fraud or intimidation in today's election. Hundreds of lawyers and observers have been deployed at key polling places. But it's likely to be a relatively quiet election from a litigation angle unless the final margin is razor-thin. The Brown surge came so suddenly there was no time to plan anything devious beyond the usual negative commercials -- which in this race ran everywhere, including, for the first time in anyone's memory, The Weather Channel. |
