Reply #13: OK, still trying to sort this out [View All]

[OnTheOtherHand]

"You are implying there is no field input post the start of polling and the first report that would change the sex split for the final report."

I don't know what you mean by the "first report" here, so I may miss your point. We know that during the day, E/M was having a heck of a time getting gender numbers in some states that they thought were plausible. But by the time the preliminary state results went up on cnn.com as state polls closed, E/M had incorporated all the Call 1 and 2 numbers and, I surmise, many but not all of the Call 3 numbers (for instance, the N in the exitpollz.org screen shot for Pennsylvania is 1930; the final N for the crosstabs, as visible on cnn.com today, is 2107). And the call numbers include not only information on exit poll respondents, but also the interviewer tallies of non-respondents. So, there is extensive "field input post the start of polling" -- but perhaps not "post... the first report" depending on what you mean by the first report.

Presumably at some point in the evening, all the new information coming in is information about vote counts -- maybe that is what you meant.

"Holding one variable constant in doing that fit makes for an earlier going home time." Again, my view is that they could hold the sex split constant when reweighting to the official tallies, or allow the sex split to change, with equal speed; it's not a killer programming task either way. I may still be missing your point, sorry.

Hispanics/Latinos -- well, even the n=11,027 national numbers that some observers regard as pristine show Bush taking 41% of the self-identified Hispanic/Latino vote (if I can trust the exitpollz site), up from 35% in 2000. The final results bump that up to 44% (about the same increase as among whites). The LA Times final results have it at 45%. But if you run a crosstab on the unweighted NEP results, it's only 37%, which seems to indicate that demographic and geographic reweightings shifted the number substantially even before vote counts kicked in -- and I don't know why. Probably someone does, but I don't. (The Velasquez Institute poll apparently put it at 35% including absentees; that survey covered 46 precincts, so it is iffy to compare it with the national polls. Here is an institute-sponsored analysis: http://www.wcvi.org/latino_voter_research/polls/national/2004/flores.ht . Interestingly, the institute's results for Latinos in Florida are much closer to E/M's, see http://www.wcvi.org/latino_voter_research/polls/exit_poll_results_030805.htm .)

There could well be questions about whether E/M dealt adequately with Hispanic/Latino voters quite apart from whether the results raised questions about the vote count.