Poll: Half of Republicans Believe 2012 Election Was Stolen -- But Was the Question Skewed?

As TheBlaze has documented -- repeatedly -- there is no hard evidence that voter fraud was so pervasive as to impact the outcome of the 2012 election. But don't tell that to 49 percent of Republicans, who evidently believe that the election was stolen purely on faith.

Public Policy Polling provides this potentially alarming statistic in their most recent national poll:

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

Some GOP voters are so unhappy with the outcome that they no longer care to be a part of the United States. 25% of Republicans say they would like their state to secede from the union compared to 56% who want to stay and 19% who aren't sure.

One reason that such a high percentage of Republicans are holding what could be seen as extreme views is that their numbers are declining. Our final poll before the election, which hit the final outcome almost on the head, found 39% of voters identifying themselves as Democrats and 37% as Republicans. Since the election we've seen a 5 point increase in Democratic identification to 44%, and a 5 point decrease in Republican identification to 32%.

One strange part about this set of facts is that ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, is an organization that ceased to exist in its original form long before the 2012 election ever existed. However, it is debatable whether this fact is evidence of ignorance or savvy on the part of Republicans who finger the group as having a hand in the election. As TheBlaze reported back in August, some reports suggest that as many as 174 ACORN chapters may still be operating under different names, but with virtually no change in staff or command structure.

Granted, there is still insufficient evidence that the election was stolen, by these hidden ACORN chapters, or by anyone else, but it is an interesting detail that ACORN in particular is being fingered. However, this may also be a quirk of questioning in the poll, as the poll also found that voters will express opinions about nonexistent policies, if asked about them by name:

The 39% of Americans with an opinion about Bowles/Simpson is only slightly higher than the 25% with one about Panetta/Burns, a mythical Clinton Chief of Staff/former western Republican Senator combo we conceived of to test how many people would say they had an opinion even about something that doesn't exist.

Given that one of the poll questions deliberately asked about ACORN by name, therefore, the attribution of fraud to this group may simply have been a result of the poll, rather than evidence of a new conspiracy theory.