24) Exit Polls

Rolling Stone, Was the 2004 election Stolen?

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

....In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, (Stephen F.) Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''

Exit Poll and Voter Fraud:A User friendly Explanation, Sean Sabatini

www.opednews.com/sabatini_111804_vote_fraud.htm

In the U.S., exit polls are now done by an outfit called the National Election Pool, which is financed by a consortium of big media outlets. The media receive the numbers throughout the day, analyze them, and use the results to start calling election winners almost as soon as the polls close. Later, the data is made public.

But this year, a couple of remarkable things happened. One, the results were leaked early, and spread throughout the internet. Two, the exit polls said John Kerry won. In the wee hours of the morning, the poll numbers were revised to better match the official election results. (How and why is another story.) But by then the damage was done. Accusations flew that the polls were right, and the electronic voting systems had been compromised.

Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Descrepancies

www.solarbus.org/election/cd/test/documents.html

The next time you hear someone say that "some conspiracy nuts think the election was stolen" show them this report. It is signed by a consortium of PhD's and statistical experts. It states clearly that the National Exit Poll showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 3% (not to mention a 94 electoral vote commanding lead). Could this have happened simply because of random errors in the exit poll? The consortium of experts have an answer: NO.

Their conclusion:

"The absence of any statistically-plausible explanation for the discrepancy between exit poll data and the official presidential vote tally is an unanswered question of vital national importance that demands a thorough and unflinching investigation."

The Hill

http://hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx

Exit polls are almost never wrong. They eliminate the two major potential fallacies in survey research by correctly separating actual voters from those who pretend they will cast ballots but never do and by substituting actual observation for guesswork in judging the relative turnout of different parts of the state.

So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.

...But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong

...To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here...

A Corrupted Election

Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right

www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=5584

by Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf, In These Times

February 15th, 2005

Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.

Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.