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.
He's right as rain on the exit-polls, but I wonder if he still thinks the GOP should abandon the Christian Right, as he bloviated on October 22nd, 2004.
FYI!
Let's help Morris on this one. He is right and someone needs to investigate what happened and what collusion was going on between the Dems and the media.
The democrat party is a criminal enterprise with tentacles throughout the MSM. It simply is.
Fox delayed calling Virginia, North Carolina and Mississippi for Bush early in the evening because of these idiotic exit polls. They caused Florida and Ohio to be called late as well.
As a matter of fact, I would not be surprised if these exit polls didn't cost President Bush the EV's of New Hampshire and possibly Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.
Every story you see that says how one group or another voted is not valid. But the media will still run them.
For example, CNN said Bush picked up no more votes among blacks than he did in the 200 election and that women went for Kerry by over 55%.
How can they report this when it is so widely publicized that the exit polls were wrong?
Speaking of third world elections, does anyone Know the results of all those "inspection teams" that were supposed to monitor ours?
Betcha the weenie shamelessly went free riding on the exit polls, repackaging them as his at 5:00 pm on election day so he could claim to have called the election just right.
Instead he shredded his credibility and destroyed the reputation he built in 1996 and 2000.
I think the toe sucker can use a little Viagra as bacK up!
Bookmark.
Actually, I think a Democrat operative somehow knew which polling places were going to be exit polled. I have been registered as a Democrat for many years (in Ohio) and I was called the night before the election by a Democrat operative (who did not know that I have turned away from them)--I was told that there would be exit polling at my voting place--and I was advised to be there between 10-11 am and to make sure that I answered the questions of the exit poller.
I couldn't do this--as I had already voted early so that I could spend the day working on get out the vote for the GOP. But I suspect that somehow the DemonRats knew which places were to be polled and when--and they made sure that there were plenty of enthusiastic Dems there at the appropriate time--willing and primed to participate in exit polling. They CHEATED! And yes--I did complain--but with all the fraud they commit--who knows?
My daughter is Ca had already voted when she heard about 3pm Ca time--that the Pres had lost all the swing states. She said she felt like she had been hit in the stomach--it is a good thing she had already voted because she completely lost heart---the tone of the early coverage was entirely--where did the Bush campaign go wrong? Will we look back and say that his performance in the first debate was where the tide turned against him? How will Kerry handle Iraq? Who will serve in Kerry's cabinet? She thought it was lost for sure until REAL data started coming in.
There was also a brief conversation with sKerry early in the day--where he said that he hoped the president would accept the results without litigation--as he would. It was obvious that at that point he thought a win was in the bag.
Then--when sKerry the flip-flopper found out he had lost--he of course considered litigation until he discovered it would hurt him more than help him.
NO ONE in my family will EVER vote DemonRat again.
I would ask Dick, who gives a rat's a**? find something more important to fight for, like your ex-boss having Vince Foster murdered or something"
Or put another way, Kentucky and America won.
I remember that Mike Royko (the great columnist in the Chicago Sun Times) once put out a column - sometime in the 80s - prior to election day that proposed lying to exit pollers. It was so. The exit polls were completely incorrect. I thought it was hilarious.
Kerry believed the exit polls!
He was writing his victory speech
with Bob Schrum when the states the
exit polling told him he was going to
win, started going in Bush's direction.
When Bush won Florida, Kerry's people were shocked.
I saw this on Jim Lehr's news cast last night (PBS).
I know exactly how she felt. I had voted early (CST) and when I read about these bogus exit polls, I felt like a sledge hammer had hit me in the stomach. I'm happy we won, but I'm still mad as hell about this dirty trick.
Not THAT wrong.
It was done to disenfranchise the Republican voters just like they did with Florida calling the state for Gore in 2000 before the polls were closed...yes, this needs to be pursued.
Go get them, Dick.
It stinks to high heaven.
Just heard Rush say that the first numbers about the women vote came directly from the Kerry campaign.
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