First, ONLY members could vote. You couldn’t get to the vote if you weren’t a member (I’m a member).
Second, in order to be a member, you have to make an annual donation. So nobody voted who hasn’t given money to the group.
BUT, it is true that apparently you can donate only 1 buck and it counts. I’ve not done that, but I guess that’s cheap enough that SOME people would join just to vote in a straw poll.
So before I continue, tell me — would you have donated a dollar to vote in this straw poll? Does getting people to pay a dollar to vote show a strength over other candidates who can’t get their supporters to pay a buck?
Anyway, and here’s the big unknown — there were a LOT of people who attended the conference, at least some of it, that voted ONLINE before the conference. There were only 952 votes AT the conference, but 3000 people were there at one time or another. Of those other 2000, some probably just didn’t vote, but many of them vote online because it was easy.
So we don’t really know WHO won of those that “showed up”. Romney was pushing online votes, so maybe his guys mostly voted online even if they went to the conference.
Some people want to accuse Mitt Romney of “buying” this straw poll and point to the difference between online and onsite vote totals. They ignore the fact that EVERY other candidate also received a significant number of online votes. Huckabee, who came in second place, got nearly 70% of his votes from online voters. Ron Paul got over 97% online. Thompson received over 86% of his total online. The bottom line is that Romney has all the cash he could ever want. If he’d wanted to buy this straw poll, he’d would have bought far more than the 1,496 online votes he received online. In fact, having read the newspaper reports accusing Romney of “stacking” the votes because DeMoss sent out an email asking people to vote for Romney online, I was somewhat suspicious of the final online vote number for Romney. I would have expected it to be much higher, given the breathless tone of the articles I read about Romney’s campaign involvement.
I would bet that there are several posters, the mittwitt bots, that paid the dollar and voted. I also would bet that there was plenty of the Mormon faith that did the same. But we do know he paid for the people in the Iowa straw poll.