Posted on 11/04/2004 11:30:46 AM PST by Nascardude
Those faulty exit polls were sabotage
By now it is well-known and a part of the 2004 election lore how the exit polls by the major television networks were wrong.
Likely this faux pas will assume its place among wartime stories alongside the mistaken calls on Florida’s vote for one side and then for the other in the 2000 election. But the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.
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. When I worked on Vicente Fox’s campaign in Mexico, for example, I was so fearful that the governing PRI would steal the election that I had the campaign commission two U.S. firms to conduct exit polls to be released immediately after the polls closed to foreclose the possibility of finagling with the returns. When the polls announced a seven-point Fox victory, mobs thronged the streets in a joyous celebration within minutes that made fraud in the actual counting impossible.
But this Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. So, according to ABC-TV’s exit polls, for example, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa, all of which Bush carried. The only swing state the network had going to Bush was West Virginia, which the president won by 10 points.
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.
The mistaken exit polls infiltrated all three networks and the cable news outlets and had a chilling effect on the coverage of election night.
While all anchors refrained from announcing the exit-poll results, it was clear from the context of their comments that they expected Kerry to win and wondered if Bush could hold any key state.
Indeed, one network hesitated to call Mississippi for Bush because of the uncertainty injected by the bogus exit polls. Dark minds will suspect that these polls were deliberately manipulated to dampen Bush turnout in the Central, Mountain, and Pacific time zones by conveying the impression that the president’s candidacy was a lost cause.
The exit pollsters plead that they oversampled women and that this led to their mistakes. But the very first thing a pollster does is weight or quota for gender. Once the female vote reaches 52 percent of the sample, one either refuses additional female respondents or weights down the ones one subsequently counted.
This is, dear Watson, elementary.
Next to the forged documents that sent CBS on a jihad against Bush’s National Guard service and the planned “60 Minutes” ambush over the so-called missing explosives two days before the polls opened, the possibility of biased exit polling, deliberately manipulated to try to chill the Bush turnout, must be seriously considered.
At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum.
This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.
It didn't happen that way. The networks were not getting their exit poll numbers from Drudge or any blogger. They paid for the survey, and they got the numbers from the pollsters. Even if the results had not been leaked, the networks were led to believe that Kerry was running away with it.
The only reasonable explanation is that someone within the polling organization leaked the polling places to the Kerry Campaign, and that Kerry sent his voters to be there at that certain time. The people the pollsters were talking to might not have even voted at that place, but were prepared to tell the pollsters that they had just voted for Kerry.
If the fix wasn't in, why aren't all the networks that had this stuff as p.o.'d as Morris is?
If you're willing to relate your story publicly, I'm sure Rush, Hannity, and Morris would all like you to contact them.
I think THEY ALL KNEW - anyone connected with the Kerry Campaign, the DNC, etc. Estrich certainly still maintains her contacts with Lockhart, McCurry, et al. They knew EXACTLY what they wanted the exit polls to show - that KERRY was ahead, and they wanted to influence the voting pattern in the rest of the country. I totally agree with Dick Morris on this one.
As well he should!!!
a) by asking them (are you a strong republican, strong democrat, or a moderate/undecided)
b) by picking specific polling places to test that have traditionally had more swing voters.
Despite the exit polls being revealed to be worthless with regard to presidential vote accuracy, the MSM is now trying to spin 'the will of the people' using those same exit data samples. What a bunch of putzes.
One of my favorites saw one media outlet trying to spin the Bush victory as a result of people going to the polls to deny homosexual rights.
It's never as simple as the people simply not being able to stomach the democrat's candidate. No, it must be, it has to be something else. It's all so unfair...
Children!
Dick is on Hannity right now. Hopefully he'll talk about the exit polls
worst of all, it cost me a few hours of sleep.
some have said that there was an organized play by democrats to enter voting places and then leaving (without voting, we think) in hopes of getting an exit poll. let's investigate, but wait for the data before rushing to judgement.
(Bill Clinton leaps in front of the microphones) "That depends on what the meaning of 'after' is. Sir Hillary got his name many years before my wife was born, so it is clearly true that my wife was named after Sir Hillary."
Exit Pollsters are Toast!
RamS
There's the answer.
Everyone should now know that any 'trends' data presented anywhere is most likely bogus with the intent of depressing opposition party turnout.
That should be prosecuted as a civil rights violation.
.
Naw, Ostritch was ticked that what's-his-name introduced her as "a know-it-all."
Well, we can be consoled by the fact that most Dems had the same experience, only they didn't get better later.
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