Ballot Problems Responsible for Hillary's Win?

Photo from source, ABC News

This story is typical on a day after a surprising election outcome. Hillary Clinton pulled out a seeming "come-from-behind" victory in the New Hampshire primary. It's become the story, even though John McCain was almost pronounced dead as a candidate a few weeks ago, and he won too.

But since Hillary's votes seemed out of scale with the pre-vote polls, people are falling all over themselves, trying to sort out why. Now, I have no doubt that election fraud occurs. I will go to my grave believing that the current occupant of the White House cheated to get there. But in this case, I think we should remember how many people were undecided going in.

Also worthy of mention, Air America's Rachel Maddow's point that all year, Hillary had double-digit leads in New Hampshire. Barack Obama's ascendancy was just a few days old. That may have been the anomaly. And, I'm sorry, but if 3% of the voting public would be so lazy and/or stupid that they'd vote for the first name they recognize. . .there's just not much you can do about that. You can't idiot-proof it enough for people that dumb.

[Excerpt]

Ballot Changes Cited in Vote's Discrepancy With Polls

Without a doubt, a big source of the discrepancy between the pre-election surveys and the election outcome in New Hampshire is the order of candidates' names on the ballot and in the surveys.

Our analysis of all recent primaries in New Hampshire showed that there was always a big primacy effect — big-name, big-vote-getting candidates got 3 percent or more votes more when listed first on the ballot than when listed last. . .

Read more at: ABC News