The candidates for the GOP have been using a War on Women and their reproductive rights as the centerpiece to take back the White House.

If we look at the polling data, it seems that about half the women in the country do not mind being paid 70% of what a man earns and are OK limiting contraception.  Who are these women making up close to 25% of our population?  (See the attached poll. One funny thing about this particular poll is that is doesn't hit 1500 respondents – a basic threshold for legitimacy in polling.  At less than 1200 respondents the poll was either done on the cheap, in a lazy fashion, or stopped when the numbers got to a percentage the pollster liked.)

I am sorry.  It does not pass the smell test is that women are trending towards the GOP.

I started thinking about a series of on line articles showing a statistical anomaly with respect to larger polls trending slightly ahead for GOP Votes.  This is pronounced with automatic voting machines with no ability to track back the votes.  In other words, there is no paper trail of the votes.
Link

It also seems some Pro-Romney folks own stakes in voting machine companies. Link

So if you are going to steal an election, owning the counting mechanism makes sense.  But you would have to get the public to accept the results from a bad count.  How?  Use fraudulent polling data to support the projected results?  As you can tell, I am not buying these polls.

The small wheels in my conspiratorial mind begin to turn.  (Or, is that conspiratorial wheels in a small mind?)

Imagine, if you will (I love Rod Sterling), an alternate universe.  Yes, a Twilight Zoney universe where a subject is trapped and fooled into thinking what the owner or ruler of the universe wants you to think.

Submitted for your approval, a situation where large telecoms or hackers were involved in intercepting polling phone calls going out to the potential poll subjects (via a Voice Over IP Network).  Once the call was intercepted, the call would be routed to call center associated with a given campaign to give the 'proper' campaign responses to the pollsters.  The owner of the alternate universe can tell the pollster whatever is applicable to the topic at hand.

No matter what the angle of the poll being taken, you can get a uniform result, once you get the phone numbers of the outgoing pollsters for the intercept.  The pollster thinks they have a good subject and all of a sudden the numbers don't make any sense.

How to defend against such a situation?  It would be cool if all the polling companies made a quick investment in disposable, untraceable phones for one or two polls where they interview at least 1600 people, just to see if there is a difference.

Is this technically feasible?  I don't know, but my experience with caller id and Rachel at Cardholder Services tells me that telecoms are at the mercy of these types of hackers.  If I can yell at Rachel at Cardholder Services' buddies until I am blue in the face about how they have hijacked MY caller id, then why is not feasible that someone else can hack a routed call coming from a pollster that is legit and send it to Lower Gibip?