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“But, while I’m here, tell me— does the world you live in have a violet sky and three suns—are there unicorns and elves?”

Do you believe everything random articles posted on the web say, without being critical about them? The burden of proof is on the article writer, that’s how a critical thinking person approaches such a thing.

Why do I have to prove the article otherwise, when the article doesn’t even try to do that itself?

Also, “my neighbor” heard anecdotes from anonymous people on the web are used to backup claims? C’mon ... talk about believing in fairy tales!

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/

HORSERACE

Another Detail From the Exits, and Some Background

Interesting. I’m now hearing that absentees made up one third of the total vote (this is from the source who believed the numbers were the first wave) and the absentees preferred Romney, 34 percent to 28 percent. Giuliani is described as “far behind.”

A couple readers want a little more background on the exit polls. Here’s a bit regarding the issue questions reported earlier:

From partial samples of 970 Republican primary voters and 989 Democratic primary voters conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International in 40 precincts across Florida on Tuesday. The samples include 235 Republican voters and 294 Democratic voters who voted early or absentee and were surveyed in the past week by telephone. Margin of sampling error plus or minus 4 percentage points for each primary.

A couple readers ask if the exit polls are worth anything with the early voting. The early voting amounted to about 1 million in a state with 10 million registered voters. So there’s still a large percentage of the vote going to the polls today. The question is whether the people who vote early are somehow different from the people who vote on Primary Day.

On some levels, the differences will be obvious; Fred Thompson will get probably something more than one percent in the early voting, and will probably get less than one percent of the votes cast today.

But would, say, early voters disproportionately prefer Giuliani because he had been campaigning more in the state when everyone else was in South Carolina? Or are early voters older, and more likely to support an older candidate like McCain? We won’t know this for sure until we have the full results.

The polls come out in waves, and there’s usually three (although there can be more) — the morning, the afternoon, and the evening.

Also note that they’ve had problems with these in the past, most famously the early waves coming out in 2004 that showed great news for John Kerry. If I recall correctly, the exit poll organizers had college students asking the questions, and they gravitated to Kerry voters coming out of the polls (and, presumably, the Bush voters disproportionately told them to buzz off). The networks quickly figured out that the numbers couldn’t be right - I heard that the first numbers indicated Kerry had won South Carolina.

01/29 06:06 PM