RESULTS
They stopped the count at 1,637 votes, which, going off our counts in our thread here, was about 5:00PM.
4:52PM yesterday said:
Ron Paul. 35.48%
Mitt Romney. 35.42%
Rick Santorum. 16.97%
Newt Gingrich. 12.13%
Total Votes: 1632
The last time the Arizona Republic had a poll similar to this (last August), I posted it here and they pulled the results from the poll into the printed newspaper at about 4:40 local time (I thought it was later like 7PM but I was mistaken)
Anyway, this was a little suspicious. As you can see in the above picture, they stopped the poll during the short period of time Romney was ahead of Ron. We have the vote totals when there were just
5 fewer votes than the total quoted in the paper, 4:52PM yesterday.
We were beating Romney 579 to 578 at this point. At the totals they printed in the newspaper, Romney beat Paul by anywhere from 2-4 votes. They rounded the percentages to 36% for Romney and 35% for Paul, even though they were both at around 35.5% (Paul just below, Romney just above)
This could just be a coincidence that they end this poll at a different time than the last poll, but then I looked up at the top of the page with the results....here is a picture:
Yes, the Arizona Republic today endorsed none other than Mitt Romney. Did they purposely wait for Romney to beat Paul in the poll before ending it? Paul was beating him just minutes before, and re-took the lead a little while later. It's a little suspicious, especially since the vote totals they counted just happened to round Romney's up from 35.5% to 36% and Paul's 35.4% down to 35%.
Anyway, take from this what you will....unfortunately we literally lost this poll by about 3 votes lol. It would have been nice to beat Romney in a poll from viewers who watched the debate, as again these results were announced on the same page that the paper endorsed Romney.