"It will be the greatest election night in History". Terry McAuliff, DNC Chairman, 8:00 PM, November 2nd, 2004.
Enough said.
Exit polling organizatoins do not keep precinct pollers on the staff year round. After all they only work 2 days and evenings a year.. primary and general election days is it.
The way exit polling staff are acquired is the company puts adds in the local papers for a one day job. They then interveiw and hire the best people from those that show up. Actually it is about a 4 day a year job.. They get a days training before the election on how to exit poll. What someone or some organization must have done is send ringers to the cattle call for exit pollsters. The ringers people got hired. They had to turn in fake results.
Here is how it worked every year until 2004. The person who polled the voters as they left the polling place was charged with getting the actual numbers from that precinct and sending them to the central office. Lets say they had 50 bellwether precincts in Florida. Perhaps 10 or 15 would have been chosen because they tend to get counted early. Voters news service, when they were doing the exit polls told the board of elections people which precincts they were exit polling.. So they would get counted by the board of elections first.
When the local exit poller calls in the actual votes results from the precints that were exit polled the networks compared the actual votes in the bellwether pricints to the exit poll results for those precincts. If they were in close agreement they would assume that all the precints in the state were accurate and call the state based on the exit poll results.
IN 2000 the so called actual numbers fed to the networks and the exit polls sent to the network agreed. The problem was the actual vote numbers fed to the networks and the numbers from the boards of elections were quite different.
Isn't it funny a whole bunch of precincts exit polls were wrong and then the so called actual results were wrong in the same way. That is a precint that exit polled 55 to 45 for gore... had actual numbers called in to the networks that were 55 to 45 for Gore. However the board of electinons actual count was 50.5 to 49.5 for Bush..
If the exit polls for a precinct were 55 to 45 Gore and the actual vote for the precinst 50.5 to 49.5 Bush.. the networks would not have dared to call Florida for Gore.
They said there were computer errors. But would every error favor Gore and penalize Bush to match the called in exit polls?
That is just beyond belief.
The only believable explanation is those who were exit polling and those that were calling in the actual results to the networks were sending made up figures for both numbers. And they made those made up numbers match.
They tried it again in 2002 with more care used in selecting the precinct workers... but the results were the same. The media held back until they got the real numbers from the boards of elections directly.
In 2004 they had people call the boards of elections for the actual results and this time the exit polls and the actual results did not agree at all.
It is obvious that the media never revealed what actually took place. I could not imagine any good reporter with network clout not being able to get to the bottom of the situation. I think the networks know.. I also thing they have no motivation to report what actually happened.