My Exit Poll Venting Thread

[Bill Bored]

OK, I hope USCountVotes finds lots of smoking guns and proves that Kerry won the popular vote AND the electoral college hands down. I'm glad they are raising the public's awareness of the exit poll discrepancies. I'm for anything that raises the specter of election fraud into the national consciousness and if we can't fix the electoral process maybe we can at least fix the exit polls.

But I think we have to continue to look at HOW the fraud may have been perpetrated and why the polls agreed with the vote tally in places such as TX and GA (E-votin' states) but were totally out of line in VT and NY which have little or no E-votin'. And the swing states need to be the first priority!

Focusing so much on the popular vote, which has no legal standing in the election outcome, may be a needless diversion. No one really campaigned to win the popular vote, but if anyone did, it was probably Bush because he lost it in 2000 and he wanted to be seen as some sort of straight talkin' populist as he conducts his stealth class warfare on behalf of the wealthy and the corporations. Yeah, Bush needed to win the popular vote but in the reality-based community, it's the electoral vote that counts.

If we want to deny Bush a mandate, we don't need exit polls to do that. Just look at his approval rating, the polls on Social Security, Iraq, and the rest -- even Schiavo. I don't hear much talk about a mandate anymore, do you? I'm more concerned with who won the Election, and like it or not, that's the Electoral College.

So have fun counting all those votes and if I can help, I will, but PhDs notwithstanding, I don't care who won the popular vote and neither does the Constitution. I care about who won FL, OH, PA, IA, NM and a couple of other swing states which, because of their collective lack of decisiveness on the issues and their collective ignorance about the true differences between the two major parties, somehow get to determine who runs the whole damn country.

If there was a theft, it occurred in the swing states, and so far, Ohio is the only one that's gotten any traction. And yes, OH, PA and FL were outside the margin of error of the exit polls, but so were 13 or 14 other states. That leaves about 35 that more or less agreed with these polls. Good luck sorting that out.

[Zan_of_Texas]

1. "If there was a theft, it occurred in the swing states" - not necessarily.

1. There were either thefts, or an amazing series of coincidences linked to an amazing array of errors in the registration, tallying and tabulation of votes in the 2004 presidential election.

2. There is some evidence that popular votes WERE padded for Bush in states besides the crucial states that seemed decisive on electoral votes.

If anyone's vote didn't count, or counted for someone they didn't vote for (and that happened, lots of times.....7 million? perhaps), each of those instances is a breech of democracy.

Different people will focus on different states or counties, and that's good, because it seems that the mechanisms of theft/mishap were quite diverse.

[Bill Bored]

4. I don't disagree but how much of this is reflected in the exit polls?

Registration fraud? Nope.

Voter Suppression? Nope.

Not enough machines? Nope.

You have to get to the polls and vote to be included in the exit polls, or vote absentee and happen to get a phone call.

7,000,000 votes?
With 35 out of 50 states (+ DC) within the Margin of Error. I'm not so sure.

I look forward to reading their report, but there were plenty of problems in states that the exit polls said were within the MOE.

[Maine-i-acs]

2. It wasn't just the E-Votin' - it was the E-Tabulatin'.

Optical scanners in NH - tabulated by central server
Optical scanners in ME - results phoned in by precinct

Both states had 2/3 of votes counted by optical scanner but tabulated differently.

Both had similar pre-election and exit polls.

Maine's votes agreed with the polls within about 1%.

NH had a huge mysterious swing to Bush (>5%). And they almost stole the state.

This is how they padded the votes. Multiply times the number of central tabulators and you get your mandate plus OH, FL and NM (Probably IA too).

[Bill Bored]

5. And Oregon, which used central count Op Scans and the US Postal Service

to transmit their votes? They could have been padded too, and voters couldn't have been warned about ballot errors after they filled them out, but yet they came out fine in the exit polls. Were there no under- or over- votes?

We shouldn't stop trying to improve a system just because the exit polls said it was OK, should we?

ME and NH are good examples though, and I do consider NH to be a swing state, so we agree there. But of course there has been a partial recount of NH and it passed. How did the exit polls compare in THOSE counties?

MI MD KY CA ME OK WI MT all matched the exit polls almost perfectly and there was lots of e-voting in some of these states. MD is having huge problems with their Diebold machines and yet they were within 0.8% of the exit poll, same as OR! Makes me wonder.

GA is strange too. Ask any anti-bbv activist in GA if their voting system works OK and they'll say it's the WORST! Yet they were within the MOE too. Does this mean we don't investigate GA?

And I just saw one county in IA where there were 4,000 more absentee votes for Kerry than for Bush, yet Bush beat Kerry at the polls in this particular county, and statewide, he only won by 10,000 votes! Yet IA's exit poll was only off by 1.13%.

The more I look at these exit polls, the more I think they were no better than the election. This doesn't mean the election wasn't stolen, or that the exit polls shouldn't be studied with a view toward improving them, or whatever. Maybe this is what will come out of the research, assuming someone will be willing to pay for a better solution. I'm just a bit wary of relying too heavily on these polls to point the way to the fraud.

[Zan_of_Texas]

6. Bill, you may have already seen this.

It would tend to agree with what you just wrote.

Exit Poll Madness - Analyst Steve Freeman & Company Offer False Choice
by Lynn Landes
March 4, 2005
Free Press.org
http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1181

Beware of exit polls and the analysts who study them. These folks would have us believe that exit polls tell the gospel truth. They even quote the duplicitous toe-sucking Dick Morris to make their case. "Exit polls are almost never wrong," Morris writes. The man is a known creep.

LOTS MORE

[Bill Bored]

7. Yes, I think I'm in this camp.

I've tried very hard to accept the early exit polls. TIA and others have done some very good work, but there are too many anomalies for me to have blind faith in the process.

Fortunately, DU has shown that exit poll aficionados, humans and fish can co-exist peacefully though, right?:)

TIA---> :toast: <---BB

[Amaryllis]

8. Yep. Yep. It's the tabulators, stupid. YOu got that right.

[Melissa G]

3. These folks are interested in 'How" The entire archives of

everything I can find on 'How' at DU has gone over to Steve Freeman and I suspect US Countvotes who I have sent some things to as well.
As everything is documented I am sure everything will come out!
I love you Bill Bored! You are Great! Keep the Faith! Truth will out!