Posted on 11/04/2002 7:40:06 PM PST by NormsRevenge
| Politics - AP |
|
Voter News Service Tests Poll Info.
1 hour, 14 minutes ago
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Television Writer NEW YORK (AP) - Hours before Election Day, Voter News Service said Monday it still hadn't worked all the bugs out of a new system designed to provide media organizations with exit polling information from voters.
As a precaution, NBC and CBS last weekend began conducting their own joint poll of voter attitudes about the midterm election.
VNS, a consortium consisting of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and The Associated Press, counts actual votes and also conducts exit polling in certain precincts. That information is used by its members to project winners in individual races on Election Night.
The consortium completely rebuilt its system in response to the 2000 election, when television networks twice used its information to make wrong calls in the decisive Florida vote for the presidential election.
VNS has expressed confidence in its ability to tabulate the votes on Tuesday, though its vote counting process had never been tested in its entirety. VNS members have access to a second, independently conducted vote count by the AP.
VNS also plans to use exit polling of how citizens voted, together with the actual vote count, to help project winners and losers.
Where the system has run into trouble is its attempt to tabulate the results of questions that reflect why voters cast their ballots as they did. VNS has yet to complete a full test of a national voter survey, said Ted Savaglio, VNS executive director.
The consortium will continue to test the system into Election Day, he said.
That information is considered vital to fleshing out the reasons behind the electorate's vote, and is of particular importance to the 19 newspapers that have contracted with the consortium for that information.
The nervousness of some media members about the system was reflected in the new CBS and NBC poll, which gathered voter attitudes about issues Saturday through Monday.
"We remain hopeful that VNS will provide the national poll," said NBC News spokeswoman Barbara Levin. "However, as a precaution, NBC News has been doing our own national polling and we are prepared to use that information." CBS News spokeswoman Sandra Genelius described the new poll as a backup. CBS has considered all along that the rebuilding of VNS would be a four-year process and that the system won't be as complete this election. "The parts that we are confident in, we'll use," she said. "The parts that we are not confident in, we will not use." ABC News also said it was prepared to go on Election Night without VNS exit polling information. "Any information about which we have any doubt will simply be set aside," spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said. |
Let us say a precinct goes 60to 40 democrat when the state is exactly 50- 50. If that precinct is going 57 to 43 it could indicate a Repubican victory. Several precincts like this can accurately project a race.
What VNS does is interview voters as they leave the bellweather precincts after voting. That is the exit poll. Then when the votes get counted they compare the actual votes in these precincts with the exit polls. If they agree they call the race.
That is what was supposed to have happened in Florida. But the actual vote counts reported to VNS and the exit polls were wrong. You see if the exit polls don't match the actual votes in the same precincts then they dare not call the race. To call them in 2000, meant both sets of numbers were faked by someone.
VNS comes into a community before the election. They run an add in the help wanted section. They interview and hire applicants to do the exit polls. They would have a few hours training and out they go out on election day to poll.. I use to see them at the polls and at the board of elections on election night. Sometimes I would chat with them before I went on the air. They would tell me how the precincts they polled went. They would be calling in actual board of election counts as I broadcast them on the air.
What had to happen in 2000 was the exit pollers and the the people who called in the results had to be in on a fix. They turned in both fake exit polls and fake precinct results. Or someone at VNS played with the called in numbers. There is no other explanation.
The fake results were what promted bush to call the networks to tell them they were wrong. The VNS results had to be fake because all the networks fell for it. People are quick to blame the networks. But I think VNS was compromised. I think that is why the networks are doing some of their own result gathering this time. They want to know if VNS has been compromised again. I don't think they can know, so they re doing back up. I am sure that both VNS and the networks covered up the invasion of VNS by the Democratic dirty tricks crew. But that did not mean it did not happen.
They have had little trouble in the past. I was retired before the 1996 and 2000 elections but from 1980 until 1992 I on several occasions did election day reports on my radio show about the VNS pollsters.
They were very accurate in 80, 84, 88 and 92. I was not in the media in 96 but I believe they were accurate then too.
I think that Democratic operatives decided to screw with the VNS results. There was no way that either VNS or the networks wanted to be wrong. They will try to bias the news but they would not have anyting to gain by lying about results.
You'll recall that Jimmy Carter conceded to Reagan in 1980 at 6:40Pm EST. That was at 3:40Pm Pacific time and almost 3 hours before the polls closed on the west coast.
The Democrats screamed but there was zero evidence that it cost the Democrats any votes on the west coast. They claimed it did, but the ratios of the east coast to the west coast were perfectly normal. There was zero evidenct that Carter giving up 10 minutes after the polls closed on the east coast had any effect on the results anywhere else.
AS far as a few people reusing to talk. They compare actual results to the exit poll results.
One thing that can make it harder for VNS is absentee ballots and vote-by-mail-only like they have in Oregon.
Completely useless. Exit polls only matter when taken AT POLL EXITS.
VNS needs to be closed down, and the networks need to go back to running their own individual exit polling operations. And I predict that VNS will again screw up so much tomorrow that at least one network will pull out permanently, go it alone in 2004 ... and be far more accurate than VNS.
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