We recently ran an interview with conservative poll smoker Dean Chambers from UnSkewedPolls.com. It quickly became our top article and my offer to post a second part from questions that were not asked was highly requested.
So rather than dig through and post questions that weren’t considered good enough for the first run I asked Mr. Chambers if he’d be willing to conduct a second interview, and to my delight, he accepted the offer.
RIGHT: This photo is much like Mr. Chambers himself; undated. It has not been photoshopped or altered in any way, whatsoever, and you can even ask him yourself. I did add the mustache and goatee though. (CLICK PHOTO TO ENLARGE)
READ PART ONE OF THE INTERVIEW HERE
Dean Chambers became well known in the 2012 election for his “unskwewing of polls to show significant leads for Willard M. Romney while all the other poll aggregators were showing a narrow victory for one Mr. B. Hussein Obama. His polling proved inaccurate by fairly significant margins, so we decided to ask him about it, some other important things, and a bunch more things that were basically just friendly ribbing.
What’s your background that qualifies you to make polling predictions?
Qualifications I would say, my qualifications I’d say is that I studied Political Sciences in school and have followed politics and written about politics and read a lot about politics in the mean time.
Your November 5th projection was only off by four states (Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida) where Obama collectively won by only about 381,000 votes. What does that narrow margin of victory mean for your aggregate’s predictive value?
I guess one thing it means is it wasn’t far off, and that I got the other 46 states right, and at least 40 of those states pretty much everyone got right, so it’s really only the 9 or 10 or 11 key swing states that were the issues that people disagreed on in the predictions and at the end it was only those four that I disagreed with me and some others on and, but there were some issues in the modeling that I uas using that caused me to be off in those four states. I was only off by four, and more than that I did realize over the weekend and by Monday night that the race had gotten closer.
I asked this before, but your projection from November 1st to November 5th changed from a Romney landslide to the narrowest of Romney victory. The polls only moved a point or two in favor of Obama during this time, so what caused such a massive shift at UnSkewedPolls.com?
Well I think we should back off from using the term “landslide” because we all have different definitions of what that means. I think 400 electoral votes is needed for that, but, the numbers we’re talking about are 311 electoral votes versus 275. That’s a total of 36 and I think that’s in five states I believe. What we’re talking about is that I changed five states based on the election getting closer, and yes, national polls only moved the race a couple points, but when you move the race a couple points in an election that, if it even was 300 electoral votes, if Romney is at 311 electoral votes and he loses 2-points nationally to Obama, it’s very reasonable to lose five or six states. And that’s what I had done when it went from 311 to 275. It’s pretty plausible. It’s pretty reasonable.
A recent poll shows that 49% of self-identified republicans think ACORN helped Obama steal the election. Do you agree?
Yes in the sense that most of the groups and elements that used to be ACORN call themselves something else now, but they’re doing the same activities and running the same programs. In many instances even getting the same government grants to do it. So, to put ACORN in quotes, a lot of people are like “Oh you right-wingers, ACORN is gone!” Well the name ACORN is gone, the groups, the activities and the programs and the stuff that they’re getting grants for from the federal government, haven’t gone anywhere. They still exist. They’re alive and well. When they stopped getting money as ACORN officially, they reinvented themselves as a number of other groups under other names. They’re still doing what they’re doing, and were very helpful to the president’s campaign.
Your BarackOFraudo.com site claims that Obama “stole” the election. Let’s go state by state. How did Obama win by fraud in:
Won by fraud in Colorado?
I haven’t got a whole lot of good information in Colorado yet, so I’m not sure if we’re really looking at fraud there yet.
But we do know republicans actively engaged in illegal voter suppression tactics in Colorado, does that matter?
Well I don’t know about that either.
That attractive young girl that was collecting voter registration but only from republicans because she supported Romney, do you remember that?
No I don’t.
What about voter fraud in Ohio?
Well there were numerous complaints about the electronic voter machines switching people’s votes. There were, for what it’s worth, the numerous divisions in Cayuhoga County where Romney did not receive any votes at all. And those issues are not, and they’re heavily democratic divisions, and you expect the president to win those, it’s the margin, it’s the turnout, there’s areas where the turnout exceeded the number of registered voters, reportedly. Or it was very high. When the turnout nationally is 60% and you have some precincts or divisions where turnout is 95% raises some serious questions about stuffing the ballot box.
But we know Ohio actively sought, with success, to disenfranchise voters in predominantly democratic areas, does that matter?
I’m not aware of any large numbers of voters effected by that. Again, because I’m not aware of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Voter fraud in Pennsylvania, what do you have for that?
The main issue that’s been raised there is the voting patterns. Even Larry Sabato (professor of political science at UVA) of the University of Virginia said the politics raise concern. He thinks they should be looked in to. And that is the number of divisions in Philadelphia County that were literally 100% for Obama, zero votes for Romney. There was a total of 59 of them. And again, it’s the turnout issues. Some of them had extremely high turnout too. Areas where 95% of the people voted. That’s not realistic. Voter turnout across the country is 60% and areas like that typically tend to be populated with voters who don’t always vote in such high percentages.
Tell me about voter fraud in Virginia?
The great question there is the high turnout among certain cities and certain areas that are heavily democratic. The other thing is, as I noted on the website, following the returns as they came in, we reached the point where 97% of the precincts had been counted, and Romney was leading 50/49, and when those last 3% were counted, it raised some questions about where those votes came from and where they were counted, and it suddenly flipped it to like 50/48 in favor of Obama. It shouldn’t be possible to flip an entire state by that amount when 97% of precincts are counted and one candidate leads 50/49.
It’s just that there were some available votes or ability to stuff ballot boxes that could be counted in the end if they were needed. This is speculate kind of stuff, because again, as I said on the front page of BarackOFraudo.com most evidence of vote scamming and vote fraud by its very nature is going to be very circumstantial. And a lot of the evidence we do get where clear cut instances of smoking-gun type proof effects a small number of votes.
Someone who’s doing something illegal, unethical, with a few dozen absentee ballots or voter registrations or something like that. It’s easy to dismiss it and say well a few dozen votes here and there isn’t really change the election, but it could when it’s done in an organized fashion. Odds are if we’re catching one or two people here and there in either party doing this, it probably suggests there’s a much more organized effort that was taking place. If a local political party has 100 people that are gaming the system, and one or two are stupid enough to be sloppy about it and get caught, it doesn’t mean those one or two were the only ones who were doing it. Those are just the only ones who got caught.
But we know republican poll-watchers exacerbated long lines in heavily democratic areas of Virginia, does that matter?
I don’t… I don’t see what the connection is. Was anyone turned away or discouraged from voting, or did they wait in long lines and still cast their votes? I understood there were some long lines in places but people waited and still cast their votes.
Well certainly some people were discouraged and left. Some people had to get to work. This was a targeted, specific, GOP effort to disenfranchise the vote, and to degrees, it worked. Does that matter?
It always matters if this is really happening, as any of these things we’re talking about do matter, if they do happen. Everyone who’s a legitimate voter who turns out to vote should be able to cast their ballot, obviously. When I say legitimate voter, you know, if they can show up and show ID and they are registered to vote, then they should vote, obviously.
Won by fraud in Florida?
There were a number of different counties where issues were raised and that’s a state that’s had some problems with making sure that their voting process works properly. It comes from both sides in Florida. The state was won by, what, 75,000 votes statewide.
But we know Florida Governor Rick Scott specifically targeted democratic areas with reduced voting days and confusing, even contradicting, voter ID requirements. Does that matter?
How would that target certain areas if he’s putting out a rule that early voting should close on a certain day, that would be state-wide?
I’m not sure it was state-wide
I’m not sure either but I would imagine that the whole state would fall under the same voting rules as far as when early voting was allowed and when regular voting opened and what-not.
So it is your assertion that Governor Rick Scott’s changes to voting in Florida were designed to uniformly change voting ability, and not specifically target democratic areas?
Well I don’t know what exactly he did other than what I heard on the news and that he was wanting the early voting to close and I assume it was uniformly across the state. I think it was that Sunday that he only wanted statewide early voting to last for 5-hours and then close and the regular vote would open Tuesday morning, was how I understood it. I just don’t know how that would effect one party or the other. More than what if either party, voters from the other party if voters of both parties have the same hours and the same amount of time to do their early voting or their regular voting. I don’t see how that makes it a different rule for the members of one party or the other, but if both the republicans, democrats and the independents and those registered from any other party have the same hours of the polls that are open to go vote, then I don’t see how that favors or disfavors either side.
What about all the districts that went 100% for Romney in the 2012 Election, should those be looked at for possible fraud as well?
Were there any of them? Where there any such places? Of any significant size? Maybe some rural place where 20 people live and they all voted for Romney, maybe, but are we talking hundreds or thousands?
I don’t know what the numbers are but I know there are districts that went 100% for Romney.
Was there any 100% Romney district that had numbers even over 1,000, let alone several thousand? I think someone pointed out there was a place in Texas where there was 150 votes for Romney and zero for Obama but those are very small numbers in comparison.
But the places that went 100% for Obama were both poor and black, two demographics where Obama really ran away with the race.
Assuming that there wasn’t any vote scamming or ballot box stuffing taking place in those places, then that was how those people chose to vote.
What’s key about a situation like that, and that’s why turnout is key too, if you have a voting division, and say that there’s 3,000 voters and let’s say that 2,800 are democrats, and 198 of them are independents, and that leaves 2 registered republicans, and out of those 3,000 you just happen to have a vote turnout of like 2,890 for Obama and zero for Romney, that’s like 96-97% and you have district like that vote with a high turnout, it could be easy to speculate that if 60% of those people really did legitimately vote, 60% of 3,000 would be 1,800, so that’s in line with the national average of about 60% voting, it tells you YES, based on those numbers they could have easily gotten 1,100 bogus votes.
I mean bogus in that if 1,800 people really did vote out of 3,000 and the reported turnout was 2,980 [recording clipped]. If you have an instance where there’s 3,000 registered voters and if they voted 60%, if 60% of those people legitimately voted, that would be about 1,800 votes. But then if they’re reporting that 2,900 people voted, then that could possibly mean that there were possibly 1,100 votes that were stuffed into the ballot boxes. I’m just saying, that’s a possibility.
The Obama campaign has been very adept at using technology to their advantage — mining demographics, targeting, micro-targeting, etc . Don’t you think they’d be smarter with their fraud and not do something as obvious as districts going 100% for Obama?
Well there were a lot of districts where there were just a handful of Romney votes. I think the issue there was not that they were making it 100%, not that they were stopping, not that there were ten Romney votes that showed up and they were denied their vote. What I’m saying is that extra votes could have been stuffed into the ballot box in those places to boost the turnout and that is to pad the margin.
My question is wouldn’t they be smarter about their voter fraud than to make it so conspicuous that YOU would notice it?
Those are the areas where it’s easiest to hide voter fraud. Because if a county is expected to go 99% in favor of Obama as it did four years ago, it’s easy to hide 500 votes there so the county would go, instead of 1,800/5 in favor of Obama it would go 2,300/5 in favor of Obama.
And few would question that extra 500 votes, they’d just say, well, that county just goes 99% in favor of Obama anyways, why not [garbled audio]. Every one of those counties that did that you could easily hide 4-500 stolen votes or stuffed ballot box votes and that adds up. You add 500 votes in 100 different divisions and you’ve got 500,000 votes and Pennsylvania was won by 200-something thousand votes, statewide.
So what I’m saying is, you do that in 100 different divisions and you steal the election for the entire state. In districts that are going 95%-plus for Obama, as they’re expected to, but again you turn out an extra 500 votes in each of them and you’ve stolen the whole state. Instead of losing the state by a couple hundred thousand votes, you win it by a couple hundred thousand votes.
Do YOU think Obama stole the election?
I think if it was done it was done at the state-wide level in Pennsylvania by Pennsylvania democrats. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Obama’s people were necessarily involved in it. They may have been aware of it and I’m not sure. It could have been something done entirely at the state party level for all we know.
So do you think Obama stole the election?
I think he benefited from some vote-scamming in places. There’s enough evidence to say the entire election was stolen via vote skimming (scamming?) that’s tough to say at this point. Like I said, most evidence regarding vote scamming is circumstantial.
We can always say that, in some places, vote scamming is part of it. But there are other issues that are entirely unrelated to those issues of mistakes that were made on the republican side. The voter turnout effort was very poor. This is unfortunate, and I’m not saying we should tolerate it, but we know that in any national election there’s going to be a certain degree of vote-scamming and vote fraud. I remember people asking me just a couple days before the 2004 election, “do you think these polls are really accurate, that George W. Bush is going to beat John Kerry?” And my answer was, it depends on how much vote fraud goes on. If Bush wins by an amount that exceeds the ‘margin of fraud’ then he’s going to win. Will he win by 3% nationally? I said there’s 1 or 2% vote fraud nationally and Bush was able to exceed the margin of fraud.
You hear that term ‘margin of fraud’ quite often [the editor of this site has never heard it before, despite being a voracious consumer of political news]. Because it’s believed especially in some of these states that there is a substantial amount of vote fraud. And I’m not saying it’s entirely by one party, but most people believe that democrats are more likely to engage in vote fraud than republicans, and that they’re better at it, and that they’re more skillful at it, and that they do it more often. And in my own survey and a couple of QStar Polls I asked people which party do you believe is more likely to engage in vote-scamming and vote fraud, and of course, 97% of the republicans said “the democrats”, well about 80-something-percent of the democrats said “the democrats” and about 80% of the independents said “the democrats”. So it was hugely bi-partisan, and this is perception, most people perceive that the democrats are more likely to engage in vote fraud.
Aside from your own internal polling, what evidence do you have that democrats are more likely to engage in voter fraud?
From what I have seen, and some could say this is bias, and others could say the opposite, but I assume there are more instances of, and I’m not 100%, keep in mind that there are some instances where republicans have been caught in vote-scamming operations, but I’ve seen more reports and allegations, as well as more proven instances of democrats engaging in vote-scamming than republicans do. There is some degree of it happening in both parties and I believe we should have multiple layers of different kinds of reforms that should be put in place in our electoral system to prevent any vote-scamming of any party.
But the electioneering that was done to disenfranchise voters was overwhelmingly done by the republicans in the last election cycle. That means we have literal, proven, factual, undeniable evidence of Republicans trying to disenfranchise votes, but we have no actual evidence of democrats, or anyone, trying to stuff the ballot box. Does that matter?
I’m not sure you can say that there’s NO evidence, because there were a number of voters that raised issues about electronic voting machines, which I think members of both parties have questioned the electronic voting machines. I know there was some among the democrats that thought the electronic voting machines supposedly delive4red Ohio to Bush in 2004.
I think there’s good reason to question whether we can trust those electronic voting machines and I think there’s people on both sides in the last 15-years that have reason to doubt them. The more recent reports from 2010 in Nevada and several states that have used them in 2012, in the case of 2012 numerous voters reported that the electronic voting machine was defaulting to Obama votes, and they were changing them to Romney and the machine would change them back.
It reported instances of voters that had to change them back two or three or four times to Romney before the machine would finally register the vote as Romney. We don’t know how many voters weren’t as persistent and didn’t get their votes changed back to Romney as they had intended to vote. Because of that, actually, their votes were recorded for Obama when they were trying to vote for Romney.
You made a wager with David Wellman from DailyKos. According to the terms of the bet, you owe $1,140. Why won’t you pay him?
Because I owe him nothing. When you read you’ll see I can agree but then I never actually did agree. You might think that sounds kind of indignant but the point is that I did not agree. When I realized what he was up to I pulled back from it. I did not actually make a final agreement to that. When I said I CAN agree that means I might. You say you can it means you have the potential to do it but I never actually did it. So I never finalized that and never actually did agree and furthermore people in different states making a bet on the internet on the presidential election is an illegal act, so it’s not enforceable. Bottom line is I didn’t agree to it either. He’s engaged in a little propaganda effort which he engaged in up until about ten days ago and his efforts have been, again, trying to enforce an illegal contract bet that I didn’t actually agree to. He’s made a big propaganda effort of it and that stopped about I think about 8 or 9 days ago and that’s because he’s been served a letter from my attorney asking him to cease and desist. I’m guessing he received that.
Would you pay the money to a charity instead, or just assert that it was never a valid bet?
No, it wasn’t a valid agreement because I didn’t agree to it. Although for the record, if you look at his Twitter archives, there were two other people that he got into this kind of position with and he’s trying to collect money from them too, and they’re also refusing to pay. This is a little game of his that he’s going after, and I flat out told him, dude, you need money? Get a bleeping job. You know, don’t be trying to hound people for these bogus bets that you go and do and try to say to these people they owe you money. They don’t owe you squat. Get a bleeping job, if you want money. Earn your money like the rest of us do, don’t pull these little internet scams and say that people bet when you try to collect money from them. He’s a scam artist, that’s all he is.
Conservatives claim to want smaller government and less government interference in daily life. Why then should the government regulate abortion and gay marriage? Seems like a lot of extra government in our bedrooms, vaginas and married, committed, loving anuses for a small government party.
I saw something on one of the sites that the conservatives want a government so small it can fit inside someone’s vagina. So you’re talking abortion, same-sex marriage, and what was the other issue? [marijuana] Right. Notice that conservatives aren’t anarchist or even mid-archist, they’re not saying that government should be so small that it hardly exists, though there are some libertarians that believe in that. Conservatives want limited government. But wanting limited, there are certain tasks that it should perform. This is something I’m going to be writing considerably on in the coming months on ConservativeReform.com. And that happens to be the three issues you’re talking about right there. I believe those issues should be decided at the state level, not federally.
Decide abortion at the state level? You know, let the court decide it. It’s headed that way anyway, unless the makeup of the court changes. If the supreme court would repeal Roe v. Wade, that [wouldn’t] make a single abortion illegal anywhere. All that does is just turn the issue back to the states. The marijuana issue IS being decided at the state level right now. I get the impression that this administration is federally kind of backing off and allowing the states to determine their policy on marijuana, including the states that have legalized it. I think the federal government should stay out of that and let that be decided at the state level. If states vote to legalize it, then that’s what they’ve decided in [those] states. I personally wouldn’t vote to legalize it myself, but if the state I live in votes to legalize it then it [should be] legal in that state.
And it’s the same thing with same-sex marriage. It’s that the issue should be voted on at the state level. Now there will be some conservatives who disagree with me on this, and what will be interesting is that some of those people are the ones that have preached in the past in support of the 10th amendment and saying that these issues should be decided at the state level.
Do you think the government should undo the 2nd amendment and put gun rights back to the states?
No, because the 2nd amendment is in the constitution. That’s a clearly defined right, to keep and bear arms–
No it isn’t. No it isn’t. It’s the right of a well regulated militia to keep and bear arms, not for an individual
The supreme court has upheld that as an individual right.
Right, but should they? Shouldn’t they just throw this back to state’s rights?
Well, but the supreme court has regarded that as an individual right, recognized under the 2nd amendment. I don’t see any need for that. It seems pretty settled to me from the supreme court.
Roe v. Wade is very much settled. If we want to throw that back, shouldn’t we throw other rights to the states as well? Throw back the right of prohibition, also enshrined in the constitution. Utah would very much like this state’s right.
There’s a difference between the 2nd amendment and Roe. There isn’t any individual right to abortion established in the constitution.
There isn’t any right to liquor established in the constitution either, shouldn’t the states be free to decide?
The right of free expression is, the right of free religion is… those were both established in the bill of rights.
So what you’re saying is we should allow state’s rights when it comes to conservative issues, but not liberal issues?
Naw. Naw. I said it’s that the states are allowed to vote on issues like same-sex marriage and legalizing marijuana. And they have and they are. Those are obviously not conservative issues.
There was talk before the election that New York Times has a liberal bias, but they were the only ones in the MSM to call the election correctly in every single state. Will you admit that they in fact have NO bias?
I think we’re talking about two things. One we’re talking about Nate Silver‘s work, and he happens to be affiliated with the New York Times. But he isn’t the New York Times himself. And for bias, we’re talking about the news coverage and I think it’s pretty clear that when a story like Abu Graib spends 44-days on the front page [outrageous claim needs citation, or can be discarded out of hand], there’s some bias going on there.
So I just did a street poll the day before yesterday where I showed two pictures of you to random women, and none of them were interested. Can you unskew that to make them want to have sex with you, and have you tried that in your own personal life?
Those answers would be no and no and honestly I’m not surprised.
I read a rumor today and I wanted to hear you confirm or deny it. Is it true that you sweat Velveeta?
Not true. Where did you hear that?
I actually read it in my dream journal
Ah. I think it was inspired by the Cheetos [question from the previous interview].
Is there anything you’d like to say about the previous interview we conducted, or for that matter, about this one?
Yes. I’d like to ask you an interview question. Do you buy into this into any of this conventional wisdom right now that Hillary is the anointed nominee for 2016?
Yes I do. The only negative I see for Hillary is that she’s going to be 69 when she comes up for election, but that’s not old by presidential standards, especially when you consider that women outlive men. There is no presumptive nominee. Biden is going to be much too old, certainly to serve two terms, let alone one. The only real rock star on the left is Hillary, and she’s got her Secretary of State cred, her senatorial cred, and the fact that she was first lady, which gives you a whole lot of inside look at how the White House works.