You give great credit to polls that say Obama is 2% ahead in some critical battle ground states. Those same polls say Obama is behind, by over a dozen points in terms of voter enthusiasm. I guess you can say the polls are correct when you agree with the results, but the same polls are incorrect when you do not like what they say, but I am not sure that position would be very persuasive.OLD1953 wrote:... the Obama campaign has a lot of money that mostly came from small donations. This means he has a large and very motivated group that feel connected to him personally.
Virtually all these "small donations" came in through automated systems run by the various Obama campaign organizations which do not collect information on what the actual source of the money was. By design these automated systems only collected information on who "some" unknown person claimed was making the donation. What does that strange statement mean? All donations through Obama campaign automated systems are received electronically from bank accounts, credit cards, etc. All these bank accounts and credit card accounts have names and addresses associated with them. Those names, on those accounts, are available at the time the credit card or bank account donations is processed but are not recorded by the Obama campaign automated systems. The Obama campaign has reported, both in 2008 and during this election, that they do NOT recorded the name and account number information of the people associated with these bank accounts, credit cards, etc. Normally businesses would collect the name data associated with the bank account or credit card to prevent fraud. But the Obama campaign automated systems encourages fraud by not recording that information. Instead the Obama automated systems allow a different name and address, even one totally unrelated to the account where the money came from, to be reported by unknown third parties, as the donor of these transactions.
This unverified ( as in not verified to have any connection to the bank account or credit card account that was the actual source of the money ) name and address information, that is recorded by the Obama campaign automated systems for each "small donation" could be keyed in by a live person, or supplied by other computer programs interacting with the Obama campaign automated systems, at the rate of hundreds of donations per minute. The true source of the name and address information could be anywhere, such as unknown third party software, or unknown third party individuals, simply picking names and addresses randomly out of online telephone directories in random U.S. cities.
If election fraud was being committed using these Obama campaign automated systems, it would be the third parties committing the election fraud, not the Obama campaign. As the Obama campaign repeatedly points out, election laws do not require collecting credit card or bank account related names or account numbers. Who would want to commit such fraud? Obama supporters, such as foreign citizens, foreign governments, foreign corporations who can not legally make any contribution to Obama and U.S. corporations/associations who can not make huge donations to Obama legally. Anyone with Billions of dollars and who would benefit greatly from Obama being re-elected, could also use this simple method. ( For example: China, Iran, Russia, the too big to fail banks, George Soros, or foreign based front groups for any of these).
Interestingly, third party internet transaction data collection sites report the vast majority of transactions with Obama campaign donation servers are coming from IP addresses in foreign countries. Sort of hard to explain if these were just average Joes in the U.S. making small contributions from their living room in the United States.
Is this type of fraud going on, on a massive scale, by unknown third parties with 100s of millions of dollars to throw to Obama? Maybe, maybe not ( the Obama campaigns have made sure they do not record, and do not report. any data that would allow this to be investigated ). But the huge disconnect between the enthusiasm shown in the polls you rely on for other purposes, and your suggestion that small contributions reported by the Obama campaign automated systems as evidence of huge enthusiasm by Obama voters, does appear to be a problem.