Exit polls and foul play...drumbeat beginning

Dick Morris is not letting this rest. Excerpt:

This is, dear Watson, elementary.

Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum. This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.

And here, via the Corner, is Michael Barone, the political numbers wonk superstar from election night who called Ohio for Bush:

Why were the initial exit poll results more Democratic than the actual tabulated vote? No one is sure, though the national sample at midafternoon, which showed Kerry ahead 50 to 49 percent, was 58 percent women. My own suspicion is that some Democrats-at the command level, or somewhere below-had an election-day project of slamming the results. New Hampshire, Minnesota and Pennsylvania initial exit poll results had huge margins for Kerry-much larger percentages than he won in any pre-election poll. If somebody had slipped some Democratic operative the list of exit poll sites-40 to 50 sites in each critical state-he or she could have slipped several hundred operatives into the polling places to take the exit poll ballots and vote for Kerry. The results would have shown Kerry much farther ahead than he actually was and, broadcast through drugdereport.com and other sources, could have heartened Kerry supporters during the afternoon and disheartened Bush supporters. When I was active in Democratic politics, in 1964-80, it would have occurred to us to do no such thing. But Democrats these days are so filled with a sense of grievance and with a feeling of justification for employing any dirty tactics to win, that this is not unthinkable. If people can game the exit polls, there's not much point to having exit polls any more.

I know Bush has won and we should all just be happy but, in order to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, we need to make an example of the shysters who hatched this dirty trick. Beyond those remedial purposes, I also want to watch these bastards squirm.