Summary: The Portage County TEA Party’s refusal to accept that President Obama won Ohio makes the group appear detached from reality.

The Record-Courier reported Sunday that the Portage County Tea Party insists Mitt Romney won the state of Ohio on Election Day.

Of course, that isn’t true, but they will not let the truth get in their way.

Executive Director Tom Zawistowski sent an email to members that said, in part, “I do not believe the election results in Ohio or Portage County” because “surveys showed Romney leading between 2 percent and 5 percent and we lost by 5 percent.”

But he ignores that there were also polls from Public Policy Polling, YouGov, Ipsos and many others that showed Obama leading by a handful of percentage points, and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model for the New York Times correctly predicted the electoral outcome in all 50 states. Any claim that Romney was the undisputed leader in the polls is nowhere near accurate.

So why did Obama end up with the most votes in Ohio? The Portage County Tea Party suspects voter fraud, so the group is planning to test the official results by contacting all registered voters of one Suffield Township precinct and ask for whom they voted.

We think this effort is completely useless.

First of all, as everyone should know, hardly anyone willingly agrees to take part in these types of surveys, so the likelihood of getting complete and useful input from all Suffield voters is remote at best.

Secondly, the official Ohio vote differential between Obama and Romney is vastly greater than the number of recent confirmed cases of voter fraud.

We wonder if Zawistowski, as well as other Portage County Tea Party members volunteering for the survey, realize how incredibly ridiculous this makes them look. The belief that Romney was the real winner of Ohio has absolutely no plausibility whatsoever.

Unfortunately, they are far from alone in their beliefs. Public Policy Polling released a poll Tuesday in which 49 percent of Republican voters said they think Obama was not the legitimate winner of the election, and 50 percent said they think the Democrats engaged in voter fraud.

Obama won, fair and square. We’re sorry if that does not please you, but it would be beneficial to accept that facts are indeed facts. It’s time to stop acting like sore losers and join the rest of us in reality.