It saddens me greatly to report that the voters in Florida and Ohio are staggeringly dishonest. They appear to have uniquely lied to the exit pollsters yesterday, unlike the honest citizens of every other state. This seems the only rational explanation for the very big discrepancy between (the original) exit poll results and the outcomes of their (reported) votes.

It is sad when the citizens of such fine states cannot be relied on to accurately report their votes. It is a good thing that Diebold is there to report their votes for them

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/53438/6175

I'm not sure why some people were relying so heavily on exit polling to determine the outcome. It seems that, depending on where you poll and on how many people you poll, the results could vary widely.

Oh, good lord, you people have never been at a real live election
except as voters have you? The people who SPEAK to election polls are the people who WANT to speak, and have TIME to speak; not the "average voter"

1) People who are "fervently" for certain candidates will always go and tie up the person who's taking the exit poll. That will skew the polls.

2) When the national news initially calls Ohio for Kerry, it becomes a self reinforcing tendency for people voting FOR Kerry to stop and talk to the exit polls. People voting for Bush aren't in a good mood, and aren't going to stop.

3) There was such a huge turnout that it took quite a while to catch up with the information from the exit polls.

4) The composition of voters changes over the day.
Voters come in waves- first early morning workers just before 7am, 8am, 9am depending on whether they work 7-3, 8-4 or 9-6.
Then homemakers in the later morning, retirees, then waves of returning workers from 3pm, 4pm, 5pm. Next are the after dinner families.



No, they had long lines, lots of media, and if you haen't noticed everybody waving "Hi MOM" behind every TV camera crew out there, people act stupid infront of cameras, and infront of new sources.

Where is all this "magical thinking" coming from, where everything that eveyone does flows perfectly. Exit polls are done by people, people take bathroom breaks, they leave at the end of the 8 hour day they signed up for.

You assume that there's some media good interrogating people as soon as they step outside the polling place.

Exit polling is like the polling you see on the streets of center city
- lots of busy people walking right past a person with a clipboard,
and then people who WANT to talk politics will stop and talk politics.

Also, the first thing you learn in Psychology 101 is that people will tell opinion pollser what the people think the opinin poll wants to hear.
Same way that many voters will be polite and
take a sample ballot from the Republican,
then another from the Demorat-
and then toss out the one they don't agree with.

Of course the exit polls were behind. The people who had been working on them were there from 6am to 12 am, or, more likely they had many people go home. Some people who had to leave to pickup kids from day care, people who went home to eat dinner, then come back.

Hal

I agree with everything you say Hal. I know I wouldn't stop to talk to exit pollers. I don't know anyone who likes talking to pollers.

Point of the post was that the exit polls were off specifically in OH and FL. Two major battlegrounds. Both using electronic voting.

No proof of wrong doing but these sorts of things need to be investigated and not accepted at face value.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.htm

To a degree, both of you are wrong.

People doing exit polls have a base matrix that tells them what they need to talk to. Thus, Hal, you may go over and buttonhole the exit poll representative and talk his/her ear off - and your choice will be ignored.

Ezra, you may walk right by and they don't care.

For all pollers this year (and this has been a growing problem), the percentage of those willing to be polled has dropped from about 70% to 45% according to Republican pollster Frank Luntz. This makes things more difficult.

But, if the baseline matrix is good, you can still get valid results.

All year, the Gallup polls included more Republicans than did most polls. Thus, the Gallup numbers (Princeton Research) were generally higher for Bush than other polling organizations.

The people who did the national exit polls apparently had an oversampling of women - which skewed early results toward Kerry.

But, since the networks have long agreed not to release exit polls until after a state's voting period has ended, the mistake had little or no effect.

It did effect left and right wing bloggers who got early (and questionable results) and posted them all over. I posted them here after seeing them on both right and left pages - and I said that they looked pretty iffy.

I couldn't care less whether people lie to these folks (exit poll takers). I'm interested in some of the underlying numbers but couldn't care less about who they voted for (except as it correlates to specific issues - and even then, I don't believe it).

__________________
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” - Jane Jacobs

So why do you expect them to be accurate?
You yourself contribute to their inaccuracy?

No, it's more likely that there were only exit polls in contested states.
There are several major battleground states.

There are lots of places that use electronic voting.

But it sound more like "it's them" - "they stole the election"
"we're to intelligent to have lots fair and square", "we're the masters of the political race"

It sounds like you're hoping that you can show that some devious person,
whether Illumanati, Jew, Republican, deleted votes.
- Uh huh, and Hitler promoted the gossip that jews ground rats into the sausage they sold to germans-

" Dark whispers- 'there's something wrong' - we're too good to loose.
Must be "them" stealing from us, stealing our votes, erasing votes,
must be those foreigners, Diebold's a foreign name eh? "

That's all pure unabated paranoid B.S.


Oooh.. the county website was off. On the day it probably got the most hits ever recorded.

Sombeody told somebody something. That's news.
Somebody in government wrote down the wrong numbers- call Michael Moore

One number didn't reflect the count that the person answering phones at some over-worked hall had.

Boy, I guess after reading that, I'm convinced that the problem of double posting you see at Philly blog must be investigated, it's got to be that John Ashcroft bug from the mayors office, planted by Jewish Mossad agents, the same guys who frame McGreevy, all planning some form of world domination that has been uncovered by some minor clerk in Volosuia County. Boy, this will be a bigger movie than "the Pelican" brief, bigger than anything we've seen before.

Take off the tin-foil hat, stop looking for Illumanti signs on the back of the Dollar Bill- stop pulling out the anti-counterfiet strips on the 100 dollar bills they're not mind control trancevers and they're not GPS locators so the CIA can track you.

People didn't agree with you.
That's the basic flaw of intelligent people in politics and customer service.
People don't care if you're right or wrong, they care if you listen to them.
You don't win people's hearts through their minds, you win their minds by focusing on things close to their hearts.

Hal

Did I touch a sensitive spot?

:shock:

Ah, and they have their special decoder glasses so they can distinguish republicans from democrats on sight?
or
They have magic powers and can determine income levels, sociallly conservative, fiscally liberal people at a glance as well?

No, they stop as many people as they can- every Nth person if they can.

They have a dillema of hiring THOUSANDS of people to work THOUSANDS of polling places- which means they have thousands of undertrained poll takers, or they pick a few polling places that they hope will be representative of an area.

So- which single polling place do YOU pick to represent all Philadephia Voters? Remember, you've got 4 college kids with no sleep heading down I-95 at 5am in the morning, which polling place in Pennsylvania do we send them to?

And who says that 1 polling place in Bucks, or 1 polling place in Philadelphia will accurately reflect millions of voters?

It's very simple, until you actually think about how to go about doing it-
Then you realize the incredible problems, and then perhaps you realize that exit polls don't tell you anything that you don't already know.

Hal

How come the solution you want to hear is the only rational one?

Actually, yesterday NPR had the much simpler solution-
The exit poll company's computer crashed.

Occam's Razor- the simplest solution is the best-

Hal

Whoa! Don't go throwing around big words like "rational". That post of mine was a cut and paste from some liberally biased source. I should have removed the offending term before posting.

I want to hear that the race was fixed by electronic voting machines because so much circumstantial evidence screams that there is fraud. All that is missing is the smoking gun.

I'd post all the "evidence" and "reasoning" here but I know I'd just be called a tinfoil wearing hippy. I do quite enough talking to walls as it is.