Am I, Um, Missing Something?

In the United States, exit polls "showed" us that Kerry was going to win a decisive victory over the incumbent President Bush. The consensus is now that the polls were wrong.

But the same papers which told us that the U.S. polls were wrong are suggesting (or crying) "shenanigans" over election results in the Ukraine, where exit polls suggested that the challenger was going to beat the incumbent.

Oh, wait - I'll bet it is just that with Ukraine's firmly established democratic traditions, and the amount of money and prestige on the line behind their pollster's efforts to presage the election return, it is simply impossible that their pollsters erred. (Counting the votes to determine the victor? How old-fashioned.)

I'm not saying that election returns in the Ukraine are untainted. Heck, even in this country we suffer the taint of such election peculiarities as the "vote whores" of Texas. But I'm not one to hang my hat on exit poll results, here or there.