http://img103.exs.cx/img103/4526/exit_poll.gif
Looking at this gif of what the exit polls say and what the machines registered, I’d say there was something seriously wrong with the election. Did the people who answered the exit polls lie? Did the exit pollsters lie? Did the people suddenly have a memory lapse and forget who they voted for? I don’t think so. States like Illinois that have paper ballots were right on the money, but the electronic voting states were way off. I heard that some districts in Philadelphia had to close the polls when they discovered some 400+ votes already in the machine when the polls opened.
Before the election, there were reports of people’s voter registrations being shredded if they registered Democratic, dead people on the polls, convicts (who should not have had their voting right reinstated) on the lists, people being missing from voter lists, and other problems including states having the wrong kind of ballots. With so many problems with the election popping up before hand, how can we be sure that what was reported was the actual will of the majority of people?
What happened? Did they lie, or did someone cheat?
More importantly… do they think we are dumb enough not to figure it out?
That’s completely removed from context, and I have no idea what, if anything, it’s supposed to prove. There is no doubt that the morning exit polls favored Kerry. There is also no doubt that the exit polls changed as the day went on. You’re going to have to do better than this.
As you can see, the exit polls heavily favored John Kerry. On FOX, Dick Morris flat out said that the exit polls had been “juiced” or “cooked.” That is, someone cheated. The intention, apparently, was to create an early perception that Kerry was winning, thus discouraging Bush voters from turning out. If that is true, the scheme may have backfired. There is some slight evidence that the early gloomy exit polls really stirred up the Evangelicals and they rallied in force.
There is a definite movement underway to lie to exit pollsters, or to at least mislead them. I’ve been aware of this for at least the last 4 presidential elections (it was pre-Cliton when I first heard the notion). This year, however, I heard people openly discussing it on the radio.
No doubt this is happening in parts of the world other than my own.
Pre-election polls are fine, but exit polls are annoying. I’d much rather they wait for the results. With luck, exit polls will become so unreliable in the future that they will be discontinued.
It’s hard to mislead a pollster on the male/female question, though. Got any ideas?
The key to the discrepancy is that exit polls do not interview 100% of the people who vote (or even close to it). The pollsters try to pick precincts that they think are representative of the general population, but even then they only get a small percentage of the people in that precinct who cast ballots.
Even the pollsters will tell you that polling is not an exact science, and the best that they can do is to extrapolate based on the size of the sample they interviewed. Why should you be surprised when the votes of the 1-2% that you talked to don’t match up exactly with the other 98-99% of the people?
For one thing that chart you posted was completely unreadable to me. Looked like a bunch of bargraphs but I couldn’t read anything else.
The big exit poll question that has been brought up in several threads is about Ohio. Apparantly someone on tompaine.com wrote an article stating that the exit polls from Ohio showed the opposite of what the outcome was. He was either using bad data, an early exit poll or lying. If you want an actual Ohio exit poll how about CNN ? I hope they are not too fringe for you. If you don’t want to bother clicking on the link here is the data from their final exit poll: males 53% Bush, 47% Kerry; females 50% Bush, 50% Kerry. Margin of error ± 5%. Despite the margin of error it looks pretty accurate to me.
I think this was the third time I have posted this in various threads. Someone else can do it from now on.
We had elections two days before yours over here.
In our system the media (or anyone else AFAIK) is forbidden from releasing poll information during the election day before all votes are cast.
Polls are bad enough, but having them running like headless chicken during election day is a serious mistake, IMO.
It’s possible that the early voters included a disproportionate number of highly-motivated voters, who had been waiting impatiently for their moment in the booth for years and didn’t want to put it off until later in the day.
There is no law against it but the major media voluntarily keeps any election day predictions to themselves on election day. This was after years of outcry about the exit polls effecting voter turnout, especially out west. This year the airways were free of exit polls until the polls closed. The internet was another story.
I would consider it my sacred duty to tell them that I, as a loyal Nader supporter, felt that the state of helium subsidies was the most important matter facing our nation today. Being honest with pollsters takes the fun out of it…
Hahahaha! It’s really cute how you get such a kick out of skewing the only real checks and balances system available to the public regarding our voting system.
You’ll excuse me while I go weep for humanity. kthx.
Exit polls are extremely accurate. They’re so accurate that they’re actually used to check the legitimacy of elections in other countries. The electronic voting machines are know to be inaccurate, shoddy and vulnerable to tampering.
Yes, something is funny but there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Expect a push for more Diebold machines in more states over the next several years and get used to a one party system.
Watching from the UK, I gave up and left the CNN-election coverage-showing palce after exit poll results came through showing Michigan 55-45% for Bush. Wisconsin wasn’t much better. (this is after Florida had already gone for Bush). I went to bed. I got up Wednesday morning to find Michigan had gone for Kerry.
The exit polls sucked this time. They were calling South Carolina (South Carolina!) as “too close to call” when all other polls (and common sense) indicates that South Carolina is a Red State. A seriously Red State. Exit polls were not very helpful this year.
Exit polls can indeed be manipulated, if one knows in advance where the specific polling locations are going to take place.
One theory is that the Dems knew the locations in advance, and they sent out their legions of angry sheep to deliberately manipulate the polls in these specific locations, causing the poll results to heavily favor Kerry.
