So, Ron Paul's supporters aren't stuffing boxes...

...they're merely participating at a high rate in unscientifc polls. Thanks go to Dan Fitzgerald of the Libertarian Freedom Council for setting me straight on this one.

To quote:

Well, on the charge that we "stuffed polls"...

Prior to the May 3 debate, Dr. Paul's numbers were:

Disapprove:47%
Neutral :44%
Approve : 9%
total votes for all candidates: 73,180

Afterwards, he went from 9th to 1st:

Disapprove:24%
Neutral :34%
Approve :42%
total votes for all candidates: 90,100

Now, we're just not that sophisticated or organized. If we could've pumped him up that much, we would have done so in both the "before" and after. I voted in both, once each.

In the SC debate, he started out better: to be expected, if he gained some traction from the first debate:

Disapprove:41%
Neutral :32%
Approve :27%
total votes for all candidates: 4,894

After (12:41 am EST)

Disapprove:18%
Neutral :17%
Approve :65%
total votes for all candidates: 6,224

So, this time his negatives dropped by 23 points, and his positives went up by 38 points.

The mechanism MSNBC used was only one vote per IP address. This is certainly defeatable, but to get the numbers to break this way would have taken a lot of foresight, and either massive collaboration or a single hacker with the ability to send votes from thousands of different IP addresses - tens of thousands in the first set of votes.

I noticed that early in the post-debate voting on the second night, at 10:48, the numbers were:

Disapprove:16%
Neutral:11%
Approve:73%
total votes for all candidates: 991

With a slow, slight deterioration through the night.

So, Dr. Paul's spammers are technologically superior to the supporters for all of the other campaigns, and are also just incredibly patient. Instead of flooding the poll, they kept it at a trickle throughout the night, keeping pace throughout.

Also, we saw Dr. Paul winning the "text message" poll until a late surge by Romney, who won by a % or two. Simply, we couldn't have hacked that one, unless we were out there mugging people and stealing their cell phones, which would undoubtedly, unlike Dr. Paul's successes, been widely reported.

So, no, not a "scientific" poll, but Zogby still isn't including Dr. Paul in their polls, and Rasmussen is reporting that Dr. Paul hasn't gained any traction since the first debate, based upon their polling from April 10-12.