Whew, it’s almost over. Don’t forget to vote, and would you like to know who’s going to win?

So would we all.

There is a new poll. The survey by Rasmussen Reports shows Democrat Peter Shumlin ahead of Republican Brian Dubie by 50 to 45 percent, with three percent undecided and one percent supporting minor candidates.

The poll was taken of a randomly selected sample of 750 likely voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Do not despair, Dubie-ites. Just taking the poll at face value, it does not “prove” that Shumlin is going to win. Remember, another poll taken two weeks earlier, by anther firm, gave Dubie a one-point lead. Only the count of actual ballots tomorrow night will reveal the winner (and if the race is as close as was the Democratic Primary, more counting may be needed).

What is often forgotten is that a poll’s margin of error applies not to the “spread,” but to each candidate’s percentage of support. All this poll says is that had all 250,000 or so likely voters been polled, between 54 and 46 percent would have chosen Shumlin, between 49 and 41 percent would have opted for Dubie.

So if on Tuesday night Dubie ends up with 47 percent of the vote to Shumlin’s 46 percent, the poll would not have been wrong. The result would have been within the poll’s margin of error.

(And would require the State Legislature to elect a governor, a matter to be discussed here only if it happens, which it probably won’t).

But don’t be of too much good cheer, either, Dubie-ites. A poll’s reported results represent the midpoint of its findings, which is far more likely to reflect actual public opinion than either extreme. It’s as likely that Shumlin is really ahead 53-42 as that Dubie is ahead 47-46.

Now we come to the question of whether this poll should be taken at face value. The answer will offer no comfort to Dubie and the Republicans, but the question should be explored anyway.

Rasmussen polls have a slight Republican bias. This is not because proprietor Scott Rasmussen has a slight Republican bias. Rasmussen in fact has a colossal Republican bias. But he’s also, on the basis of the evidence at hand, a perceptive businessman (he helped found ESPN), and for the sake of his business,  a pollster tries to make his polls accurate so that people take them seriously and continue to hire his firm. A series of inaccurate polls can put a pollster out of business.

But when a voter answers his or her phone because the Rasmussen folks are calling, an actual folk is not at the other end of the line. Instead, a recorded voice asks the respondent a question to be answered by pushing ‘one’ for candidate A, ‘two’ for candidate B, etc.

This ‘robocall’ technique is frowned on by the polling establishment at the American Association of Public Opinion Research . and scorned by several quality news organizations including the Washington Post and the New York Times. In fact, Rutgers University political scientist Cliff Zukin, in a paper he wrote last year for the AAPOR, argued that “these types of surveys have little claim of scientific validity and probably should not be reported.”

One reason for doubts about robocall polls is that they can not include random sampling within the household. A person on the phone can ask to speak to a woman or a man, or the person with the most recent birthday, or use some other method to try to get a representative sample.

But as Zukin noted, “If interviewers simply spoke with whoever answered the phone, the resulting samples would be older and more female than the population as a whole.”

That could be why robocall polls have been found to tilt about two percentage points more Republican than other surveys, or than the final election results.

On the other hand, Rasmussen polls don’t have a bad track record for accuracy. In the Massachusetts Senate race won by Republican Scott Brown earlier this year, Rasmussen polls picked up Brown’s growing strength earlier than other surveys.

With all the caveats, then, it’s fairly likely that Shumlin is ahead.

Which is not the same thing as predicting he will win. It might rain (though right now the Weather Channel is predicting pretty nice weather for both Burlington and Rutland on election day) and bad weather usually keeps more Democrats than Republicans away from the polls. The Republicans might have a better get-out-the-vote operation this year (though they usually don’t). And the poll could just be wrong. Sometimes, a poll is simply wrong. Polls, after all, are based on the laws of probability, not the laws of certainty.

Rasmussen is not the only outfit polling the race. So are both campaigns. “The campaign has maintained a consistent lead in our internal polling and as the campaigns (sic) momentum grows with each day we expect to win on Tuesday night,” said Dubie campaign manager Corry Bliss after the Rasmussen poll came out.

In the same statement, Bliss tried to argue that the Rasmussen poll showing Dubie behind by five points actually predicted an eight-point victory, because polls in 2002 had understated Vermont Republican strength by 13 points.

As responses go, this one was more inventive than persuasive.

Neither Bliss nor the Shumlin campaign revealed any numbers from their internal polling, requiring the curious to engage in tea-leaf reading to try to figure out what the polls might show.

Until the weekend, there were some signs that Dubie might be ahead. Conventional political strategy is to shift, in the final week or two, from television advertisements attacking the opposition to more positive ads, often featuring the candidate talking directly to the camera.

Last week the Shumlin campaign and its allies were still running anti-Dubie ads, while the Dubie campaign was featuring a spot called, “I’m your man” in which a blue-shirted, smiling, Dubie looked directly at the camera and promised to focus on jobs.

It’s a very effective ad even though its main point – “Vermont’s economy is in crisis” – is wrong. By all the usual criteria – economic growth (or, these days, shrinkage), unemployment rate, poverty rate, foreclosure rate – Vermont’s  economy is less in crisis than that of most other states.

This would be the downside of a Dubie governorship—the constant (and, worse, inaccurate)  griping about Vermont’s economy (there would be upsides, to be discussed later regardless of the outcome).

By the weekend, however, the Dubie campaign was back on the attack, including one ad – falsely accusing Shumlin of wanting to let prisoners out of jail – that has been widely criticized for being not just inaccurate but dishonest.

Considering that even many Republicans have been speculating that it is ads like this that seem to have put Dubie behind in the race, the decision to keep running it could be a sign of some desparation.

Maybe the Dubie campaign’s internal polls weren’t that different from the Rasmussen numbers.

WARNING: Turns out the News Guy is not the only Vermonter receiving  regular if not incessant emails claiming to be from the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System screaming: “Your Federal Tax Payment…has been rejected.”

You probably know this, but just in case, the Internal Revenue Service does not communicate via emails. These emails are attempted scams. What the IRS would like you to do is forward them to: phishing@irs.gov.

Or just ignore them.

CLARIFICATION: It turns out that the fellow who read through the August 15 Rutland Herald on the News Guy’s behalf didn’t read it closely enough. He was, kindly,  on his own time and on request from here, trying to find evidence for Brian Dubie’s claim that an article in the paper on that date supported Dubie’ss contention that Peter Shumlin has proposed releasing some prisoners before their terms expire. The article, Dubie said, reported that Shumlin “wanted to empty the prisons of 780 nonviolent offenders.”

As reported Wednesday (scroll down) the volunteer reader from Rutland could find neither hide nor hair of any such statement, though he did find a profile of Shumlin in that day’s paper.

Actually, way down in the third from the last paragraph of that profile, there was such a hide and/or hair.

At least so says – and there’s no reason to doubt her – Dubie spokesperson Kate Duffy, who emails that the story contains the following: “Emptying the prisons of non-violent offenders, he says, will cover the nearly $50 million price tag attached to his early childhood education plan.”

So Dubie was not making something out of nothing.

Only something out of little. The words “Emptying the prisons of non-violent offenders” were not Shumlin’s, but the reporter’s, There remains not a scintilla of evidence that Shumlin ever proposed releasing a single convict before his or her sentence has run its course, and Dubie’s continued efforts to argue that his opponent has made that proposal is pitiful at best.

(Though perhaps here it should be noted that Shumlin’s office still has not replied to an email asking how and why he misstated the numbers about the decline in the number of Vermont dairy farms).

NON-WARNING: If anyone is really concerned about either voter fraud or voter intimidation in Vermont next Tuesday: stop. By all discernible evidence and all rational analysis, neither will occur. That the subject is even under discussion seems to be the result of various confusions plus perhaps a little opportunism.

Here’s what happened: A small item in Monday’s Burlington Free Press reported that  members of Vermont’s “Tea Party” movement (also known as the Green Mountain Patriots) would hold a “poll watching training session” in Rutland Wednesday evening.\

The next day, Democratic Secretary of State candidate Jim Condos pounced, suggesting that the Tea Partiers were planning voter “intimidation,” and claiming that his Republican opponent, Jason Gibbs, was associated with the Tea Partiers “and other national groups that are planning to interfere with the voting process.”

In reply, Vermont Tea Party coordinator Jon Wallace of West Rutland, in a telephone interview Thursday, called Condos “shameless” and “disgusting,” as he insisted that “poll watching is part of the responsibility we have as citizens,” and that the Tea Party “wants every eligible voter to cast a ballot.”

Maybe everybody should calm down. First of all, in Vermont, the Tea Party represents a small if not quite insignificant minority which couldn’t intimidate more than a handful of voters if it wanted to. Second, there is no reason to suspect that it wants to. Condos may have been making much out of little as he saw an opportunity to link Gibbs with the Tea Partiers.

But considering the national context (to which he referred) Condos didn’t make much out of nothing. This is all part of the continuing debate between Republicans who suspect voter fraud and Democrats who claim Republicans are using “ballot security” concerns to try to scare minority (meaning mostly Democratic) voters away from the polls.

The Democrats have by far the better case. There is almost no voter fraud in America, and more than a tinge of racism in the allegations of it, most of which focus on minority polling places. Most of the few federal convictions over the last decade or so have been technical or individual (somebody voting in another town to vote for his brother-in-law; or maybe to vote against his brother-in-law). Large-scale voting fraud would make no sense. It would too complicated, too expensive, too easy to get caught. In fact, today’s only credible vote fraud accusations – fake absentee ballots cast in a Troy, N.Y., city election – make the case. There were – if the allegations are true – all of 36 fraudulent ballots cast.

(Even history’s most celebrated voter fraud, Richard J. Daley’s Democratic organization supposedly stealing votes for John F. Kennedy in Chicago in1960, may never have happened. It’s the stuff of legend, but there’s no convincing evidence demonstrating that any votes were stolen).

On the other hand, there is real evidence of attempted – and sometimes successful – intimidation of black and Hispanic voters at the polls. Armed private guards at polling places in Newark; leaflets falsely warning prospective voters that they’d be checked for unpaid traffic tickets or utility bills at the polls in Baltimore; false information about when and where to vote in Cleveland.

But that’s never happened in Vermont, where Democrats are neither as identifiable nor as easily intimidated.  Besides, Wallace is so open about what the Tea Partiers intend that he emailed a copy of the instruction sheet passed out to the potential Tea Party poll watchers. It essentially tells them to obey the law and not be disruptive.

Not that Wallace has any evidence of voter fraud in Vermont. He said he had heard from “college kids that some students they know boast that they vote several times.” That doesn’t really qualify as evidence.

Vigilance is always in order, and there’s nothing wrong with politically involved folks being on the lookout for intimidation or fraud. In this state, neither is likely, and whoever wins Tuesday will almost surely win fair and square.

UPDATE: The News Guy did not get to Woodstock yesterday for the evidentiary hearing in the case of Galloway versus Town of Hartford (scroll down to Wednesday’s post). Allen Gilbert of the Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union reported that Judge Katherine Hayes indicated she would rule in a week or two in journalist Anne Galloway’s request for official records relating to the seizure of a man in his own home last May. The ACLU is supporting Galloway,

Cicero at court

With a week to go, one question dominates the Vermont campaign for governor: Can it get any pettier?

Don’t bet against.

Conventional political wisdom holds that in the final two weeks of a campaign, the candidate should “go positive,” start telling voters why they should vote for him, leave off telling them why they should not vote for the other guy.

If that’s going to happen here, it has not happened yet. As late as Saturday evening’s final debate on WCAX-TV (Channel 3), Brian Dubie and Peter Shumlin, each claiming to be waging a “positive campaign on the issues,” spent more time squabbling over trivia.

An interesting question here is whether the two candidates are equally guilty, and it’s interesting not because there is any real doubt about the answer, but because there is some problem with the very notion of “unequally guilty.” Neither side being innocent, are there gradations of guilt? Or does even one transgression justify (if not require) a “plague on both their houses” judgment?

In the non-political realm, when assessing journalists or scholars, the outlook here is the second one, derived from the old Roman legal principle of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. The witness who deliberately falsifies anything surrenders credibility for everything.

But in elections, at some point the voter has to choose between two contenders, both guilty. In that case, comparative guilt may be necessary. To the extent (and it should only be some extent) that the voter’s decision is based on how the candidates campaign, it makes sense for the voter to judge which candidate hypes and distorts more than the other, even while deploring such behavior in both.

In this case, it’s an easy call. Peter Shumlin has spun his own record on tax legislation to emphasize the times he helped cut taxes, which he did, while ignoring the occasions he helped raise them, which he also did.

And arguably should have. A really forthright candidate would stand his ground and point out that sometimes taxes have to go up. That may be too much to ask of any politician these days.

By and large, though, Dubie is both quantitatively and qualitatively the guiltier. More of the what he and his campaign commercials have said has been out-and-out false. It’s also been falser, not to mention more personal and more petty.

The Shumlin campaign commercial that aroused the most condemnation was accurate, if perhaps childish. That was the “Pinocchio” spot in which Dubie’s nose grew after each of three misstatements.

Misstatements they surely were. At least one may have been an error rather than a falsehood, and in the Pinocchio story his nose does not grew when he makes mistakes, only when he lies. So the ad went farther than scrupulous intellectual honesty would allow. But it was not baseless.

Neither was another Shumlin allegation criticized earlier here, and repeated by Shumlin in Saturday’s debate, that Dubie favored a $100 million property tax increase. Actually, Dubie favored a 2009 plan by Gov. Jim Douglas that, had it been enacted, would almost surely have resulted in some increase in property taxes, possibly even $100 million.

But from the way Shumlin and his campaign put it, one would think that Dubie had just come out and suggested that kind of property tax hike. He did not.

The irony here is that there’s a harsher attack Democrats could make on this Douglas-Dubie proposal. Not that it would raise property taxes, but that it was not serious governing, and perhaps was never intended to be.

The problem being addressed was that the cost of education was rising, too fast in the view of the Republicans. Serious governing would have started in at least mid-2008 by getting together with the various constituencies – teachers, school boards, superintendents, town officials – and trying to come up with a cost control plan.

Instead, in January, after most school budgets had been finalized, Douglas proposed shifting some costs (mostly the state contribution to the teachers retirement program) from the General Fund, largely financed by sales and income taxes, to the Education Fund, which gets most of its money from property taxes. The Governor and his allies, including Dubie, didn’t want property taxes to go up. They wanted to raise the threat of property tax increases to pressure schools to make big cuts in their budgets rather than face the wrath of property tax-payers.

That’s not serious governing. It is a cynical political ploy.

(And, as it happened, one that didn’t work. The Legislature didn’t adopt the Douglas plan, the school boards did not change their budget recommendations, the voters did not defeat many school budgets. It all came to naught).

But that critique is hard to express in a 60-second TV ad, and too complicated for a political speech. Easier just to say that Dubie wanted to raise property taxes.

Dubie’s transgressions can be dealt with more briefly. He continues to make statements that are simply false, and that he must know are false unless he is willfully refusing to acknowledge what is obviously true.

First, he continues to insist that Shumlin has proposed freeing non-violent convicts before their terms expire. As noted earlier here, Shumlin’s account of his corrections policy in his official campaign document is a touch vague, and might have led people to infer that he did mean to release prisoners early.

But neither in that document nor elsewhere did Shumlin ever say that this was what he planned to do, and plainly it is not. That earlier account suggested that it was “not dishonesty as much as stubbornness” that kept Dubie from acknowledging the facts.

Maybe that’s not an either/or situation.

Even less defensible is Dubie’s insistence on citing the obviously flawed Seven Days “survey” (closer to a poor effort to conduct a survey) finding Shumlin “ethically challenged.”

This matter was dealt with here adequately on October 11 (Ethical Quandary) and need not be repeated, or elaborated on except to wonder at what point political stubbornness morphs into complete shamelessness.

Political/Media Note 1—Usually, a candidate who gets endorsed by a newspaper can take that endorsement to New York City and get on the subway, assuming said candidate also has a farecard.

But the Burlington Free Press endorsement of Shumlin could help him. Whatever else it may be, the Freep is the voice of Vermont’s – or at least northern Vermont’s – establishment. That has to include the business establishment, and even though Dubie will probably win more business votes, the endorsement at least sends the signal that Shumlin is OK with the movers and shakers.

Political/Media Note 2—Great Job Saturday by Channel 3 co-anchors Darren Perron and Kristin Kelly as they firmly but politely interrupted both Dubie and Shumlin in an effort to get them to answer the questions they’d been asked.

It didn’t work, of course. Both candidates just regurgitated their talking points, and the anchors didn’t try to push it. They didn’t have to. They’d made their point.

A nice refutation of the assumption that TV news anchors are just readers. This was first class journalism by both of them.