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Official Vote Tally on Ohio's Pot Issue Deemed "Statistically Impossible"

By Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fritakis, Reader Supported News

23 November 15

he "stolen election” controversy over this month’s officially defeated Ohio pot legalization referendum has gone to a new level.

“The results are not only impossible but unfathomable,” stated Ron Baiman, Assistant Professor of Graduate Business Administration at Benedictine University, where he teaches economics and statistics.

The Columbus Free Press asked Baiman to calculate the odds of the official vote count of Ohio’s Issue 3, to legalize marijuana, being correct – compared to the tracking polls charting voter preference leading up to this year’s November election. The Free Press supplied Baiman with poll results taken prior to the election by noted pollster Jon Zogby.

The polls leading into the November 3 vote showed the referendum passing. But the official results claim it lost by 2:1.

The standard assumption with such polling is that the undecided voters in the poll would have potentially gone 50-50. Thus half of them would be voting no and the other half would be voting yes on Issue 3. Baiman pointed out that with such an assumption being probable, the odds against the referendum losing 2:1 go through the roof. They are, he said, “one in a trillion.”

The analysis showed that even if the most illogical outcome is assumed – that every single undecided voter in the polls voted against Issue 3 – it is still statistically impossible to accept Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s official tally as being credible.

If the Zogby poll was accurate, says Baiman, one would expect the official outcome as reported by the state once in every 105,000 elections.

As general rule, undecided voters do not tend to split more than 60-40 percent in favor of one side or the other.

Pre-election tracking polls are performed using a random and representative sample. They accurately reflect how voters of various demographics are likely to vote. All such polls do contain a margin of error. The Zogby poll has a 4.9 percent margin of error, which leaves the official outcome of the Issue 3 vote still very far out of the realm of reasonable statistical probability.

Another Issue 3 poll done by the Kitchen Group showed a closer split between the yes and no vote. It was conducted one week before Election Day, with a random survey of more than over 1000 Ohioans. The odds that Husted’s official tally is correct based on the Kitchen poll are even heavier than with the Zogby poll…in this case yielding a result that would be expected only once in once in every 799,000,000 elections. [see attachments]

There can be only two explanations for this.

Ohioans can assume that the well-funded corporate multimillionaire growers backing Issue 3 who hired highly-regarded pollsters were given made-up drivel as the poll results. Or, Ohio’s notoriously corrupt, antiquated and highly-vulnerable voting system was hacked or manipulated by partisans like Ohio’s Secretary of State Husted.

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