CPAC; Ron Paul won 2 years in a row; they change to electronic voting and he comes in 4th today?

Huffingtonpost:

WASHINGTON -- The organizers of a major conservative conference here over the next three days are trying to widen participation in a straw poll, a not-too-subtle attempt to give a Republican presidential candidate other than Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) a chance to win.

For the past two years, Paul has won, by large margins, a straw poll of attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The results have been something of an embarrassment for CPAC, organized by the American Conservative Union, which comes from a more traditional conservative point of view than Paul's libertarian-tinged version.

This year, the American Conservative Union and CPAC are moving from paper ballots to electronic voting that will be accessible from a computer or a handheld device, said Al Cardenas, the conservative union's current president. He told The Huffington Post that he hopes this will increase the number of attendees who participate in the straw poll.

"Obviously, in the past, it's been somewhat compromised because only a third of the people who attend voted," Cardenas said in an interview. "It used to be a fairly cumbersome process because you had to do it manually. Now, for the first time this year we're instituting an electronic vote.

"So people can vote through Saturday afternoon, and before, that wasn't the case," he said. "And we're hoping that instead of having a third of those in attendance vote, we'll have two-thirds or more vote."

More than 10,000 people are expected to attend, Cardenas said. He said that he wasn't "worried" that Paul would win the straw poll for a third year in a row.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/09/cpac-ron-paul-_n_1264500.html