Exit Polls - Good Initial Results for Kerry

[maplesyrup]

KERRY FINDS COMFORT IN FIRST BATCH OF EXIT POLLS;

Let's hope these initial results carry through, and rid us of tis US nightmare we have experiencing since Clinton left office.

[The Terrible Sweal]

And once the Bush cabal is out, how about indicting those 5 crooked supreme court traitors!

[maplesyrup]

And once the Bush cabal is out, how about indicting those 5 crooked supreme court traitors!

Well if Kerry wins, hopefully he wil lbe appointing a few justices that can relate to ordinary people.

[Slavik44]

not so fast,

Bush 25,602,699 52%

Kerry 23,791,508 48%

Amazingly Bush has a godo lead in Ohio and wisconsin (two states that ahd been added up on the deomcrat side) and bush has a lead in florda, I wouldn't be proclaiming anything for anyone yet.

[willy]

Bush Wins. It is a good day.

Maple, how them apples.

[daniel]

Bush Wins. It is a good day.

Maple, how them apples.

for 58,309,946 people and Osama Bin Laden. But what about the other 5billion people around the world?

[kimmy]

If there's one thing that yesterday's results prove conclusively, it's that exit polls are a complete joke that credible news organizations would do well to avoid next time around.

They're also a detriment to the democratic process and potentially impact results.

-kimmy

[Slavik44]

If there's one thing that yesterday's results prove conclusively, it's that exit polls are a complete joke that credible news organizations would do well to avoid next time around.

They're also a detriment to the democratic process and potentially impact results.

-kimmy

I don't think credible news organizations used them, or atleast at 1:00 am CNN had spent alot of time explaining that they don't use exit polls and exit polls are only good as a way to break down the vote into segments.

[Big Blue Machine]

Never believe any polls, except the real one on election night. Polls are a waste of money.

[Black Dog]

If there's one thing that yesterday's results prove conclusively, it's that exit polls are a complete joke that credible news organizations would do well to avoid next time around.

Wrong. Fox News regular and conservative hack Dick Morris says

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.

....

Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.

Granted, Morriss' contention is that the U.S. election day exit polls were riged by the networks to swing voters away from Bush. I suspect the more likely explanation is the vote was hacked.

While the heavily scrutinized touch-screen voting machines seemed to produce results in which the registered Democrat/Republican ratios largely matched the Kerry/Bush vote, in Florida's counties using results from optically scanned paper ballots - fed into a central tabulator PC and thus vulnerable to hacking – the results seem to contain substantial anomalies.

In Baker County, for example, with 12,887 registered voters, 69.3% of them Democrats and 24.3% of them Republicans, the vote was only 2,180 for Kerry and 7,738 for Bush, the opposite of what is seen everywhere else in the country where registered Democrats largely voted for Kerry.

In Dixie County, with 9,676 registered voters, 77.5% of them Democrats and a mere 15% registered as Republicans, only 1,959 people voted for Kerry, but 4,433 voted for Bush.

The pattern repeats over and over again - but only in the counties where optical scanners were used. Franklin County, 77.3% registered Democrats, went 58.5% for Bush. Holmes County, 72.7% registered Democrats, went 77.25% for Bush.

Yet in the touch-screen counties, where investigators may have been more vigorously looking for such anomalies, high percentages of registered Democrats generally equaled high percentages of votes for Kerry. (I had earlier reported that county size was a variable – this turns out not to be the case. Just the use of touch-screens versus optical scanners.)

More visual analysis of the results can be seen at http://us together.org/election04/FloridaDataStats.htm, and www.rubberbug.com/temp/Florida2004chart.htm. Note the trend line – the only variable that determines a swing toward Bush was the use of optical scan machines.

[Tawasakm]

The mere possibility of extensive vote-tampering in a nation as powerful as the United States sends shivers down my spine. There, more then anywhere, there needs to be a reliable free election from an informed electorate. Abuses of power can have massive consequences not only for Americans but for the world.

Thanks for inspiring nightmares in my sleep tonight Blackdog

[kimmy]

If there's one thing that yesterday's results prove conclusively, it's that exit polls are a complete joke that credible news organizations would do well to avoid next time around.

Wrong. Fox News regular and conservative hack Dick Morris says

This must be the first time in your life you've ever cited an opinion from Fox News as a source of information.

Regardless, it's not true.

If you watched any election day coverage, you saw many disclaimers about the validity of exit polls. We were warned many times to be skeptical of the exit poll results, even before the polls closed and real results started coming in.

A little information about how exit polls are conducted, combined with some common sense and understanding of basic statistical methods should be enough to inform anybody (except possibly Maplesyrup) of the reasons why they're unreliable. I posted on this in another thread already, but to summarize:

The sample size is small. The responses are voluntary. Pollsters decide who to approach. Exit polling is not conducted across a variety of precincts, it is conducted at a few precincts which pollsters presume to be a reasonable cross-section of voters. And more importantly, the time of day. Exit polling is conducted early in the day. Who votes early in the day? Largely it is housewives, the unemployed, and students-- demographics that skew heavily toward the Democrats.

If you watched the election day coverage, you saw a multitude of analysis all telling you this kind of thing. You saw experts tell you that exit polls have a huge margin of error compared to scientific, random-sample polls. You saw people tell you that unless the election is a landslide, the exit polls aren't going to give you accurate indicators.

Exit polls are useful for the political parties to figure out what factors played into voters' decisions when they were in the polling booth. They can help them do a "post mortem" and pick up information that might help them next time. And if they find that their supporters in eastern time zones aren't getting out to vote, they can get their volunteers phoning people in western time zones.

As for hacking of electronic results, who knows? Maybe it happened. I'll be very interested to hear more if there's anything to it. But let's give up on exit polls. They're unreliable.

And reporting of exit polls shouldn't be permitted until after polls are closed, anyway. It has the potential to influence voters.

-kimmy

[Black Dog]

If you watched any election day coverage, you saw many disclaimers about the validity of exit polls. We were warned many times to be skeptical of the exit poll results, even before the polls closed and real results started coming in.

Well, they are polls, not predictions. No matter how good the sampling process involved in an exit poll, it is still sampling, which means that there is a margin of sampling error. As well, they are useful in providing details of how specific demographic groups have voted and the expressed reasons for their vote. They also help pollsters develop voter turnout models for future elections — that is, a sense of how many of each demographic group can be expected to turn out for an election.

[kimmy]

If you watched any election day coverage, you saw many disclaimers about the validity of exit polls. We were warned many times to be skeptical of the exit poll results, even before the polls closed and real results started coming in.

Well, they are polls, not predictions. No matter how good the sampling process involved in an exit poll, it is still sampling, which means that there is a margin of sampling error. As well, they are useful in providing details of how specific demographic groups have voted and the expressed reasons for their vote. They also help pollsters develop voter turnout models for future elections — that is, a sense of how many of each demographic group can be expected to turn out for an election.

All of this is true. Exit polls have their uses. Predicting results is not one of them, but that doesn't seemed to have stopped people from reading that into the exit polls result they were seeing mid-day on Nov 2.

-kimmy

[Black Dog]

All of this is true. Exit polls have their uses. Predicting results is not one of them, but that doesn't seemed to have stopped people from reading that into the exit polls result they were seeing mid-day on Nov 2.

Ah...but look closer: we're seeing massive discrepencies between exit poll data and final results, and we're seeing these discrepencies more in states that used electronic voting machines over paper balllots, which prompted adjustments in the exit poll data. Curious, no?

[maplesyrup]

And whose fault is that.

Obviously exit polls were used to manipulate and mislead because of the media's news reporting methods.

Exit polls have their healthy uses, just not at election time.

[kimmy]

Certainly. And I acknowledge the potential for hijinx with the electronic voting system used. Touch screens? No paper record? WTF?

I find it completely laughable that the worlds' technological superpower is apparently unable to reconcile electronic efficiency with paper accountability.

When I voted in civic elections last month, I was given a piece of paper with boxes to fill in, and a black marker. I filled in the appropriate boxes, put my ballot in a privacy sleeve, and took the sleeve to a nice woman. She took my ensleeved ballot and put it into machine which removes the ballot from the sleeve, scans it electronically, and deposits it into a locked box for safe keeping and, potentially, recounting if required. When the computer had scanned my ballot, it displayed a message to confirm my ballot had been accepted. The nice lady smiled and sent me on my way. The entire process took under a minute.

Civic elections in Canada have this worked out smoothly while it continues to mystify American election officials. Maybe we should offer assistance and impartial observers, like we do for little banana republics that are new at this whole democracy thing.

-kimmy

[Black Dog]

Exit polls have their healthy uses, just not at election time

Uh...when else would you use an exit poll?

[maplesyrup]

Exit polls have their healthy uses, just not at election time

Uh...when else would you use an exit poll?

Sure gather the data at elections, but use it later, not during voting day.

[Big Blue Machine]

Never how wrong the polls were for our election? We all thought the Libs and Cons would be neck and neck. Of couyrse they weren't.