Pollster.com

I am not a big fan of Ras, but are you serious?! If Chambliss is vulnerable, we could be looking at a 9-12 seat pick-up for Democrats. The Democrats would have complete control, assuming that Obama can pull it off.

The Martin/Jones primary just happened. That gives Martin a bit of a bump. We'll see if it's sustained in future polls.

If Martin runs a PERFECT race and Obama actually registers 250k voters AND makes a dent with white transplants and makes this a single digit race upticket, then Martin would have a chance. So...yeah...let's say 15% chance right now. Hey, it's Georgia, folks!

The problem with GA is that republicans have run the electronic voting machines since 1998, when they stole a few elections with the special code they used in their diebold (premiere) dre's.

it did not matter that max cleland was ahead in the polls by 15-20% when he "lost," so even with a bunch of new registered voters, i don't have much hope for GA at all.

Yep the fix is in....some of you lefty's have to learn, when you lose you lose. Even my kids don't whine this much when they lose a game of Monopoly. The GOp won, oh they must have cheated, its getting old. If you really think that's true then I have some gremlins I'd like to sell you too....
Try to defeat the GOP on issues, instead of whining when you lose.

Stillow is right. When the GOP was overwhelmingly defeated on this issues in the 06 midterms, they did not whine about getting crushed at the polls. They whined about the damage to their brand and the future of their party but they never brought up cheating, not even in the close contests.

Yeah I'm a liberal Democrat and it annoys the hell out of me when these nuts emerge and wine about voting machines. They make the rest of us look like morons.

I used to run a blog and we automatically banned people who wined about voter fraud. It's racists on the Right and nutcases on the Left.

@BarackO'Clinton

That's right, there was no law suits filed...the GOP took it on the chin and whined about why they lost....I'm glad most on hte left don't honestly beleive the voting machiens are tempered with ,etc...

Undoubtedly there are more allegations of voter fraud than there are actual instances of it. Still, the 2000 Florida fiasco was so messed up that you can't even call it an election.

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of voting machines should be to help voters produce a paper ballot printout that the voter can easily check and that cannot be misinterpreted by even the most partisan poll worker. Electronic records of any sort are too hard to validate in a way the public can trust.

Incidentally, why would "Virginia Centrist" identify him/herself as a liberal Democrat? Too much wining on the blog?

@ youforgotpoland

Just want to say that you have the best username on this site.

Up until 2000, the voting machines in Philadelphia were set to slate ballot voting. You pressed your selection of either one of the three parties at the top and pulled the lever. Everyone on the ballot in the party of your presidential selection got voted for. It was as simple as that. You couldn't cross vote. I didn't like it much. In the state that I now vote in, you can choose whomever you want in either party that you want. I like this way much better. Options are always the better way.

Cleland wasn't ahead by 15-20% in 2002. That's typical of the nonsense the fraud crew likes to spit out.

The Cleland/Chambliss race was tightening all the time, nearing 50/50 and with obvious momentum to Chambliss. Barnes in the gov race was the shocker, losing to Perdue after generally leading by high single digits.

There were many factors at play in 2002. Nationally the tide shifted to the GOP over the final weekend, apparently due to national security concerns. I remember a glaring headline atop page 1 of the USA Today Monday issue, indicating the late surge in weekend polling.

Also, Ralph Reed was blitzing Georgia that year with his strategy of a relentless push in the final days, mailers and voter contact. It was so successful they put Reed in charge of the entire South in 2004.

Most important of all, Georgia was already moving to the right and it always polls too favorably to Democrats. You can almost guarantee that every Georgia statewide poll understates the GOP candidate. In '96 I used that knowledge to predict a narrow victory for Cleland in his senate race against an underfunded Republican. It was one of the key results when I won an 16-man election pool. Cleland was expected to cruise but won by barely 1%. It was similar to '94 when our hero Zell Miller narrowly prevailed in the gov race, against the same Republican who Cleland beat in the senate race two years later. Name escapes me.

BTW, the fraud crew loves to use early exit polls to identify rightful results. On election day 2002, leaked early exit polls -- before the system collapsed -- indicated Chambliss led Cleland by 4 points. You can still find those early 2002 exit poll numbers on the internet.

the righties have been whinning for years about voter fraud, illegal immigrants voting, the dead voting, etc.

they whine just as much as the left.

player said:
"Up until 2000, the voting machines in Philadelphia were set to slate ballot voting."

Maybe that's what you thought, but maybe you are (or at least were) such a low-information voter that you didn't know how to split your ticket? It used to be (on paper ballots especially) that there was a single block you could check for a straight ticket

OR

you could vote for individual office, straight or split-ticket, as you desired.

BTW - got any citation on your assertion? I've done a Google search, and found nothing on that.

@Mike in Maryland:
There were no paper ballots. They had a machine in each booth that you pulled the lever on. One pull and you were done. There was no way that I know of to split a ballot much less parse it all the way down.