Funny Numbers: How Ohio's Pot Issue Went Up In Smoke

Do you suppose this could actually be true?  Did Jon Husted and the GOP powers that be electronically manipulate election results to manufacture a defeat of Issue 3?  That's exactly what Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman of the Columbus Free Press suggest in the article linked below.

Knowing how our state's Republican party operates (remember 2004?), I wouldn't put it past them.  In Buster's own highly informal poll of "some people I know" prior to the November vote, I found a very large majority in favor of Issue 3, and no one had any real qualms about the supposed "monopoly" it would have created.  Then it was soundly defeated, 65% to 34%.  I was more than a little surprised.

http://freepress.org/article/ohio-polls-showed-pot-legalization-winning-then-it-failed-21-0

Excerpts:

Zogby Analytics completed its poll On October 17th.  Their results showed Issue 3 supporters with 49% of the vote, 35% were opposed, and 16% were undecided.

In order to move from the Zogby results to Ohio's official results, 100% of the undecided people would have had to vote against Issue 3, and 14% of its supporters would have had to change their minds!

The Kitchens Group did two surveys one week later.  Their two polls showed 47% supporting Issue 3, with 35% opposed, and 18% undecided.

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

Given the pre-vote polling, Baiman said one would expect the state's officially reported outcome once in every 105,000 elections.

Poll taken 10/13/15