With Apologies to Jim Lampley

Posted May 10, 2005 | 06:14 PM (EST)

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What if I wrote this:

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday, May 7, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and to see the odds as of that moment on the Kentucky Derby. Bellamy Road was a 5-to-2 favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted horse racing experts and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that Bellamy Road would win the Derby.

And he most certainly would have, at least if the race had been run fairly and legally. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, with the 50-to-1 Giacomo winning the race, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Enough of that. Just for the record: There is ample evidence that the exit polls on November 2 were terribly screwed up -- for one thing, speaking from memory, I believe they grossly oversampled women in the early results, leading to the (mistaken) impression that Kerry was leading. Then those results, which were never released to the public and were never intended to be released to the public, were spread across the planet on the Internet, meaning that at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Election Day, everybody, Vegas oddsmakers included, thought Kerry would win. I certainly did.

But he didn't win. And Rep. John Conyers' "hearings" on the matter did not produce any evidence that Kerry did, in fact, win more votes than Bush in Ohio. Nor did the (failed and withdrawn) lawsuits filed by fringe Democratic activists in Ohio. Nor has anyone else. As the Washington Post reported on November 11, 2004: "'It takes me about three times to explain' why the fraud allegation is untrue, said Kimberly Bartlett, community outreach specialist for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. 'You have to ask [the skeptics] why no top Democrat is making these charges.'"

With the exception of Rep. Conyers -- why indeed?