Discredited Conservative Behind “Unskewed Polling” Says Voter Fraud Won Swing States for Obama

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

From BarackOFraudo.com.From BarackOFraudo.com.

Dean Chambers launched the website UnskewedPolls.com in the final months of the election to counter what he saw as a Democratic bias in most presidential polls. Chambers’ site was a hit among Fox-watching, reality-denying conservatives. He predicted Romney would win 275 electoral college votes and Obama would win 263.

Chambers was, as he later admitted, horribly, embarrassingly wrong. But the embarrassment continues.

This week, Chambers launched a new site, BarackOFraudo.com. As the URL suggests, Chambers does not believe Obama won the 2012 election fair and square. Instead, Chamber contends that Obama won the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida “by voter fraud.” (That’s the map posted above.)

Post-election, there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any of these states, and certainly nothing suggesting Obama’s wins in those four states depended on voter fraud. So Slate‘s Dave Weigel asked Chambers for evidence backing up his serious accusations. What followed was a collision between fact-based reporting and fact-free magical thinking:

“I’m getting credible information of evidence in those states that there enough numbers that are questionable and could have swung the election,” he says. “I’m only putting good credible information on there, like the actual vote counts, reports, and mainstream publications reporting voter fraud. There’s a lot of chatter, though. There are articles people have sent me that don’t hold up. Crazy stuff.”

What’s not crazy? “Things like the 59 voting divisions of Philadelphia where Romney received zero votes,” says Chambers. “Even Larry Sabato said that should be looked into.” (I’ve looked into this: 57 precincts gave McCain no votes in 2008. There’s such a thing as a 99 percent Democratic precinct, and such a thing as a 99 percent Republican precinct.) Same story in Ohio. “Some of the precincts or divisions in cleveland were projected to be 99 percent Obama. That’s a part of the state where it’s known that a lot of ballot box scamming has been done in the past. There were isolated reports of people voting for Romney and having votes changed, though they didn’t get much attention.

What about Virginia, then? “When votes were being counted on election night, 97 percent of the precincts were counted, and Romney was still leading 50-49,” says Chambers. “When that remaining 3 percent were counted, a lead of 80,000 or so votes for Romney were turned into 120,000 for Obama.” I pointed out that Virginia’s stagger-stop-stagger count often works like that, with Democrats gaining in the end. “I was surprised it wasn’t being projected for Romney when 97 percent was in,” said Chambers. (The state was actually called earlier based on vote patterns.)

Fortunately, Chambers’ failure to come with a country mile of predicting the presidential race means no one will take his voter fraud jeremiad seriously. Not even the Drudge Report, an avid endorser Chambers’ Unskewed efforts, has stumped for his latest venture.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate