Romney would have won if it had all come down to Ohio - Harvey Wasserman

[Jim Lane]

42. You're missing his point.

He's not contending, in the face of the arithmetic, that Ohio actually was the decisive state. His argument is a hypothetical one: If Romney had done well enough elsewhere so that Ohio was decisive (certainly a plausible scenario as of Tuesday morning), then Ohio would have been stolen. On this view, the effect of the 285 electoral votes that Obama already had in the bag was that the plan to steal Ohio, which carried risks of detection, was not implemented, because even if successful it wouldn't give Romney the victory. Therefore, it was better for the conspirators to hold off on the vote theft, so as to improve their chances of being able to get away with it in the future.

That's a logical explanation for reconciling two points: the hypothesis of a vote-theft operation that was ready to go so as to steal Ohio for Romney, and the fact that Ohio went for Obama.

Of course, that alone doesn't prove Wasserman's hypothesis. It merely refutes one possible counterargument.