But a clear consensus among experienced pollsters is finally emerging on what happened with the exits. Last month, at an annual conference of opinion pollsters in Miami Beach, Warren Mitofsky, the veteran pollster who conducted the exit poll for the networks, offered a detailed and convincing explanation of what went wrong with the polls. The reason the exits were off, Mitofsky said, is that interviewers assigned to talk to voters as they left the polls appeared to be slightly more inclined to seek out Kerry voters than Bush voters. Kerry voters were overrepresented in the poll by a small margin, which is why everyone thought that Kerry was going to win. The underlying error, Mitofsky's firm said in a report this January, is "likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."
There's another interesting wrinkle in the exit poll discussion. During the past several months, some of the early "fraudsters" -- an initially derogatory term that some in the election-was-stolen camp have embraced -- who once suspected that the exit polls pointed to election fraud, have begun to change their minds. One of these is Bruce O'Dell, a computer engineer in Minneapolis and one of the founders of US Count Votes, the group that has been leading the charge to show that exit polls prove Kerry won. After initially signing on with this view, O'Dell now thinks it's impossible to say whether the exit polls suggest that Bush stole the election. O'Dell also thinks Mitofsky's explanation -- that Kerry voters were overrepresented in the poll -- is plausible.
You're joking, right?
I aint signing up for Salon just to read it. Anyone want to give me the jist?
I aint signing up for Salon just to read it. Anyone want to give me the gist?
My understanding is that when the exit poll results were normalized to match the demographics of the actual turnout, that they were pretty much spot-on. Over-sampling of certain population subsets led to the innacurate early results.
Well, I voted early and told the exit pollster that I voted for Kerry.
If the polls showed Kerry winning it might motivate lazy Bush voters to show up.
Also, some Kerry voters might get over confident and stay home.
Always lie to pollsters.
Exit Poll Scenario:
An idiot with a clipboard walks up to a person exitting the voting location.
"Excuse me, sir." Says the idiot. "Did you happen to vote for the candidate of the Independent party?"
"No." Replies the person as he quickly walks away from the idiot.
"Cool! Another vote for Kerry!" Says the idiot as he skips away like a little girl while whistling France's national anthem.