My thoughts on "election fraud."

[Tiggeroshii]

I have come to a conclusion after reading a few articles and going through some of the basics in the exit polling discrepancies. I learned that exit polling is working to be suppressed and as private as possible from preasure over controversies such as the 2000, 2002 and 2004 exit polling attempts. The NEP(National Election Pool- organization of media outlets that conduct exit polling while referring to Edison/Mitofsky) did not release exit polling data in this last election -although they were done. Voter News Service was replaced with a lot of preasure in 2003(by NEP, practically same thing) because of their failure to make any projections in 2002 as they attempted to turn to computers to project the outcome.

The NEP then failed to match the election results in 2004, causing more controversy and putting more preasure on organizations to pretty much stop exit polling. The NEP was forbidden in 2005 to leak election results and call early results before the ballots came in. It sounds that because the exit polling is beginning to differ drastically from the official results in elections, that people will lose faith in our process -which is a threat to our democracy for people will stop voting. 2005 was the first election year where the LA Times did not conduct a national exit poll.

If this is correct, then it will be safe to say that no exit polls will be held in 2006 and the fear of getting projections wrong will determine whether results will ever be challenged again. I recently saw the response to Edison Mitofsky by USCountVotes.org, and their research has shown that discrepancies in exit polling were 5 to 10 times greater in preceincts not using paper ballots(optical scan, mechanicalvoting machine, touch screen and punch card; touch screen had the highest WPE-Within Precinct Error).

I guess most of you guys have already come to these conclusions, but it seems to me that the Democrats should be jumping all over the fact that 2004 was the first Presidential election to be so far off the exit polling. It's sad that we monitor elections in 3rd world countries using exit polling. If we had used those standards over here, Kerry would have won with 5 million votes(which I understand most of us beleived happened anyways).

here's the analysis that responded to the mitofsky disclaimer. Ya'll already heard about this?

http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/USCountVotes_Re_Mitofsky-Edison.pdf

[Febble]

1. Well I've heard about "this"

I was originally listed as an author. I don't think its conclusions are valid (which is why I took my name off the author list).

The report itself has been superceded by at least two further reports.

http://uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=86&Itemid=43
http://uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=91&Itemid=43

I don't think the conclusions of the later reports are valid either, and the last version has had varying numbers of authors in its history of updates, few of whom are signatories to report number two.

Here is my view:

I thought the exit poll evidence was suggestive, but far from conclusive. I now think the weight of the evidence is against the case that the exit-poll/vote count discrepancy was due to fraud. I think there is substantial evidence that it was due to bias in the poll.

I also think that if you want to use exit polls to act as a check on election probity, you need a quite different form of poll. The polls conducted by E-M are designed to predict the vote count, not check that it is accurate. They routinely include vote-returns in the computations used to project the winner.

However, mandatory random recounts are a much better way of checking up on whether your election was fraudulent. Exit polls are prone to bias, as the response rate is low, and opportunities for biased sampling are high.

I do think the 2004 election was scandalously unjust, as was 2000, and that your democracy needs fixing. But I don't think the exit polls are very useful for making that argument.

Elizabeth Liddle

[kster]

16. Curious

"However, mandatory random recounts are a much better way of checking up on whether your election was fraudulent. Exit polls are prone to bias, as the response rate is low, and opportunities for biased sampling are high".

The best way of checking up on whether an election is fraudulent is to not let vote counting machines count the vote in secret and then do what your country did, get rid of any e-voting and stick with paper ballots hand counted.

What was the reason your country banned e-voting? They should have just done mandatory random recounts, did you tell them that?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/06/govt_voting/

[Febble]

17. We've never had e-voting

And God forbid we ever shall. But even without e-voting you need to have an audit system. We had a scandal this year whereby postal ballots were stolen (apparently by a local Labour Party) presumably for purposes of ballot stuffing. Paper ballots are not a panacea for electoral fraud. Ballot stuffing - and ballot destruction - are as old as democracy. In Ukraine they poured acid into the ballot boxes, didn't they?

All I'm saying is that exit polls are a lousy audit tool. It is much more reliable to randomly select ballots for auditing than to randomly select voters. Ballots can't choose not to respond - or not if a properly conducted audit is conducted.

A random audit is not rocket science - it's a standard quality control procedure. It just needs to be properly done, under independent bipartisan scrutiny.

I completely agree with you about e-voting. I think the whole concept is fundamentally anti-democratic. The ballot and the count should remain separate entities, and with e-voting they are not. Actually, your lever machines have the same problem, but are arguably less prone to abuse - I suspect however that if you'd never voted on levers, no-one would have considered DREs. You can't re-count ballots that never existed. You need physical ballots if you are going to have an auditable system.

But you know this! I am just confirming that I agree with you. However, I happen to think that the weight of the 2004 evidence indicates that theft of Kerry votes was achieved largely through voter suppression, spoilage of punchcard votes, and, when done via DREs, mostly through failure to supply adequate numbers of machines, although there is evidence that push-button DREs (as opposed to touch-screen) may have contributed to Kerry's loss of NM. But yes, DREs have no place in a democracy IMO.

[BeFree]

32. For the first time readers.....

I am plugging this post right here so that you may be forewarned about that which you are about to read....

You will find several supporters of the Edison Mitofski Exit Pollers on this thread. These supporters have waged a running battle with us for some time now. Their ludicrous idea is that the $10 million dollar exit poll done in 2004 doesn't mean anything, or at least anything close to resembling what common knowledge has taught us what exit polling really means.

Since Edison Mitofsky was caught screwing around with the exit polls they now have their agents out in force protecting their name. Heck, they want another $10 million dollar cantract.... wouldn't you?

In order to get another $10 mill contract, they have to make it seem:
1. The election was fair and square, and
2. You can't believe what you see, only what you are told.

What you are being told is that raw numbers of exit polls can't predict a winner. That exit polls ala Edison Mitofsky are stiil worth the $$$ even though the polls are useless.

But the fact is, we saw the raw exit poll numbers. And those numbers show the election was stolen. You have been warned. Denada.

[OnTheOtherHand]

33. say whaa?

Are you saying you believe that E/M is waging a campaign to get another exit poll contract -- by purveying the idea that the last exit poll "doesn't mean anything"?

Oh-kay.

For the record, I don't pay for the exit polls, I don't get paid for the exit polls, and I don't flack for the exit polls. Any questions?

[Febble]

34. I presume you mean me

as you are replying to my post, so to clarify:

I am not a "supporter" of any exit poll.

I simply think that any survey, including an exit poll, is a poor way to audit an election, simply because any survey is subject to bias. There are long and boring textbooks on the problems involved in obtaining an unbiased survey samples, if you want to know more.

I also happen to think, after fairly careful scrutiny of the evidence, that the weight of the evidence suggests that the disrepancy between the the 2004 exit poll and the count was probably largely due to bias in the poll.

If you consider otherwise, fair enough. But you don't need to be a "supporter of exit polls" to know that they are subject to bias. You just need to know something about polling.

And FYI no-one was "caught screwing around with the exit polls" - if you are referring to the fact that they were weighted by the incoming vote returns, then this information is available on the E-M FAQ, and is the way the projections have been made for years.

http://www.exit-poll.net/faq.html#a10

Which is why they are a lousy way to audit an election. If you want to audit an election, you need to do it properly.

[tx_dem41]

2. How do you feel about people like me (and there are many more)...

that purposely LIE in exit polls?

This is a very old, and not uncommon practice.

[Tiggeroshii]

12. why would you do that? n/t

[Stevepol]

3. The exit polls are the best measure available to us right now

and there's plenty of reason to think they point to fraud. The Dems should be screaming bloody murder about the discrepancies.

If Warren Mitofsky or others don't think the way polls are done is proper, they should adopt new polling methods.

The principle of exit polling is unassailable.

Febble notes that "the polls conducted by Edison-Mitofsky are designed to predict the vote count, not check that it is accurate. They routinely include vote-returns in the computations used to project the winner." If Febble is right, this suggests that if the voting machines are rigged or defaulted to give a fraudulent result (as I think is clear from many elections around the country and the widespread discrepancies all over the country in the 04 election) the actual discrepancy would be larger than reported since the incoming vote results (already tilted toward Republicans) are used to alter the exit polls as they are calculated, giving them a further tilt in that direction.

[Febble]

6. umm....

Not really. If the count is fraudulent, the exit polls will be adjusted in line with the fraudulent count. The more fraudulent the count, the larger the adjustment will have to be, unless of course, any bias in the poll tends to be in the same direction, in which case they will tend to cancel out.

But certainly, if you want to use exit polls to monitor an election, as opposed to predict the official results, you need a different kind of exit poll.

Unfortunately, what you probably DON'T want, is the "parallel election" type, where people are asked to sign an affadavit. The poll needs to be as secret as the vote or else you are likely to get biased response rates. You also need to try to get a random sample, not a volunteer sample, which is what you get in the parallel elections.

But you DO need good coverage throughout the day; teams of interviewers rather than one individual; large samples; well-trained interviewers. BYU runs a good one in Utah - check it out.

But the NEP poll is designed to allow the networks to "call" the states (we do it slightly differently in the UK, but the purpose is the same) - in other words to predict the "official" winner. Which is fine if you know your count is honest (as ours is, pretty well). It just doesn't work if you don't.

[Stevepol]

8. Well, let's look at it again then.

You say "the exit polls will be adjusted in line with the fraudulent count. The more fraudulent the count, the larger the adjustment will have to be." That sounds right to me.

The exit polls let's say (for the sake of argument) are showing Kerry winning by 5%. But the alleged actual vote results pulled out of cyberspace say that Bush is winning by 5%. The pollsters will think, Ah! we are over-counting for Kerry; therefore, let's adjust our results in line with the actual results. So let's take 3% off the Kerry exit poll figures and give that to Bush. That would mean a 6% shift and the polls would now be closer to the alleged vote (the electronic results from cyberspace), only 4% now instead of 10% discrepancy, yet the actual discrepancy is in reality 6% greater than that indicated.

This doesn't seem like a difficult bit of reasoning to follow to me. But then again it's been a few years since I studied statistics. Maybe logic has changed in the intervening years.

[Febble]

9. OK, maybe I misunderstood your point

I don't think it actually works quite in the way you say, though. It's a bit like betting before and during a horse race. Before the race starts, the odds are based on past form and current conditions (both exit poll responses and pre-election surveys). If betting continues during the race, the odds are continually adjusted to take into account who is in actually in front.

The system is designed to converge on the counted result - the greater the discrepancy between the pre-count data and the count data, the longer it will take to converge, and the larger will be the computed "within-precinct error". The within precinct error is the raw difference between the precinct poll responses and the precinct count, without any adjustment.

A poll designed to monitor the election would be a different kind of poll, and for a start, a lot more methodological rigor would have to go into the collection of the response data.

Sorry if I misunderstood you. To be honest, I'm still not quite clear what you are saying.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

4. I have read this, too

and even wondered about it before that.

But I have a question. Don't interpret this as my thinking all was on the up and up in 04, because I don't.

However, the going-in polls showed Kerry winning by from two-four percentage points. I know next to nothing about statistics, but isn't that really too close to call? Is there a margin of error in these polls?

I'm sure this has been discussed on her technically but when it gets deep into squiggles and indians (my names for statistics) my eyes glaze over.

Can someone explain it gently for old Grannie?

[Febble]

7. OK, no squiggles or indians, promise....

Yes, there is a "margin of error" in the poll. But that only allows for one kind of error.

If you toss a coin 100 times, you will get approximately 50 heads and 50 tails. But if you tossed a coin 100 times every day for a month (if you had nothing better to do, that is...) some days you might get 49 heads, some days 51 or 52. Occasionally you might get 60. Or 40. But on average you would get 50.

The polls are a bit like coin-tossing sessions. They won't be exact, but they will rarely be out by much. The "Margin of Error" tells us how far out they are likely to be 19 times out of twenty.

However - and here's the tricky bit - the Margin of Error just tells you how far out the poll is likely to be purely by chance. Polling isn't really like tossing coins. The heads and the tails can have minds of their own. Maybe the heads don't like landing face down, and do a little twisty thing in the air before they land.

So as well as having a "margin of error" due to chance, polls can have bias - and the margin of error doesn't tell you anything about that.

Error due to chance is called "sampling error" -

Error due to heads and tails having minds of their own is called, technically "non-sampling error".

The exit polls were well outside their "Margin of Error" due to chance (sampling error). But they could still have been biased. How biased is what we want to know. Because if they weren't biased, maybe the count was.

Hope this helps. Tell me if that was too hard or too easy. Or useless. ;)

[OnTheOtherHand]

11. a question and another answer, no squiggles

You wrote, "the going-in polls showed Kerry winning by from two-four percentage points." Did you mean the pre-election polls?

If so, then (1) most observers don't think they showed Kerry winning by 2 to 4 points -- a lot of them showed Bush ahead; and (2) yes, it is too close to call, because no one can know in advance who will actually vote, or whether they will change their minds. Margin of error matters too, but even a really huge pre-election poll with a 2-point margin seems "too close to call."

The other thing is this: the random "sampling error" (see Febble's post) tends to get smaller, as a percentage, as the sample size increases. If you flip a fair coin ten times, you well might get three heads, which is only 30%. But if you toss a fair coin one million times, the chances of getting 300,000 heads are... well, very very small. However, overall error in a poll doesn't necessarily decrease as the sample size increases. The most famous bad presidential poll in history, the 1936 Literary Digest poll, had over two million respondents, which means that its "margin of error" should have been less than one tenth of one percentage point. But it was off by 19 points -- it predicted that Roosevelt would get crushed by double digits.

So if anyone tries to tell you that the exit polls couldn't have been off by three points (or six points on the margin -- the Literary Digest poll was off by almost 40 points on the margin) because the sample was too big, well, that is just bunk. They might have other reasons to believe that the exit polls couldn't have been so far off, but that one is silly.

And by the way, if they tell you that exit polls were always accurate until 2000, that is silly too. Ah me, I really have to write an article about exit poll myths....

[Bill Bored]

15. Better yet, an article about the difference between an exit poll

and an audit.

And while some of the hype over the Ukraine Exit polls was introduced by the media, there is actually a fair amount of it by the US State Dept too, if not re Ukraine, then other exit polls. Just search their site and you'll see it.

The question arises then: why should the US bother to fund exit polling in other countries?

[Febble]

18. I dunno the answer

to your question, but I do think international observers are important where there is reason to suspect rigged elections. If all you can do is conduct an exit poll, well, sampling voters is one way of doing it. But as I said to kster, sampling votes is one heck of a lot better, if you do it properly. Samples of votes are unlikely to have non-response bias.

And if you conduct an exit poll in a foreign country as a way of monitoring the election (as opposed to giving the TV networks something to talk about) then you don't do the kind of poll commissioned by the US TV networks. You design your methodology so that your number one priority is to achieve an unbiased sample, which, though difficult, is more likely if you assign more than one interviewer to each polling place, plan for large sample sizes (I'd say at least 100 voters per sample), and thoroughly train your interviewers in random sampling protocols.

You know what? It's just occurred to me that random selection of precincts to check that the vote matches the precinct count is a bit daft (especially given that the counts will probably rarely match precisely). Wouldn't it be more sensible to take a random sample of ballots from an entire county (or some subdivision), count those by either hand or even by scanner, and see whether the proportions for each candidate was "significantly" different from the proportions in the county as a whole? Or is this even dafter? I have a very hazy mental picture of the physical details of your arcane voting system. Ours is so simple, just piles of ballot papers, poured out on to tables and, well, counted.



Vote counting in the UK, 2004.

[Bill Bored]

31. Dafter I'd say.

"It's just occurred to me that random selection of precincts to check that the vote matches the precinct count is a bit daft (especially given that the counts will probably rarely match precisely)."

Depending on the reported margin, such discrepancies can be either ignored or investigated further (i.e., more auditing) based on whether they could possibly change the outcome.

"Wouldn't it be more sensible to take a random sample of ballots from an entire county (or some subdivision), count those by either hand or even by scanner, and see whether the proportions for each candidate was "significantly" different from the proportions in the county as a whole? Or is this even dafter?"

I don't think this would work. When you randomly select precincts, you should already be selecting a certain percentage in each jurisdiction, usually a county, or at least that's how the law should be written. This takes into account the possibility that certain election administrators might have screwed up the count one way or another because ALL of them are randomly sampled.

If you take a whole county and attempt to audit it, this is too much like an :puke:exit poll in that you are relying on :puke:demographics instead of randomness to come up with your sample. And if the election is a close one, you could easily get the audit wrong.

[Febble]

35. Not what I meant!

Sorry, a bit stressed right now and wasn't clear.

I'm with you - random samples of votes, whether by machine, precinct or any other unit of analysis is far preferable to "random" samples of voters, which will never be random.

But probably precinct is the only practical unit to sample.

[OnTheOtherHand]

20. one, two, three

1) I'm not sure what specifically you mean about "the difference between an exit poll and an audit." My pet peeve, of course, is hearing over and over and over that a national exit poll that gives Kerry a three-point margin constitutes some sort of statistical proof that Kerry won the popular vote. (And we both could enumerate the other tired arguments that come up.) But as for this, are you asking along the lines that Febble pursues -- not just explaining for the umpteenth time (but perhaps more clearly) why the 2004 exit poll wasn't an audit, but describing what a well-designed audit would entail?

2) I wouldn't say there is a lot of hype about foreign exit polls on the State Dept site, no, but I do see references to maybe half a dozen countries, many of them citing both exit polls and quick counts/parallel tabulations. Obviously (yes?) this doesn't prove that exit polls are relied on to audit the results of foreign elections; it shows that they are one source of information. That said, let me try to tackle your closing question.

3) Why should the US bother to fund exit polling in other countries? If I were really skeptical, I would probably say that the US rigs the exit polls to support its policy preferences -- and that would be fairly easy to do, since one could just tamper with the precinct selection and no one would catch on for a long while. But I have no basis to think that US-funded exit polls actually are rigged. Let's try assuming relatively benign motives.

Here's what Daniel Fried said that the US was doing in the Ukraine:

Our objective was to seek to bring about conditions so that Ukrainians had an opportunity to choose their next leader without coercion or manipulation. To that end, we helped train and field domestic and international observers; educated judges on Ukraine’s new election law; funded exit polls, media monitors, and parallel vote counts; and stressed that we viewed the conduct of the election as a test of Ukraine’s commitment to democracy. U.S. assistance was fully transparent and focused on improving the integrity of the election process so that Ukrainians could better determine their own future.

http://www.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/50304.htm

Election observers, media monitors, exit polls, and parallel vote counts are all sources of information about the conduct of the election. Umm, why not fund them all?

Some folks might frame the question this way: "If exit polls aren't reliable, why fund them?" Which is sort of like asking, "If anti-malarial medication isn't reliable, why distribute it?" or "If condoms aren't reliable, why use them?" or "If airbags aren't reliable, why require them?" The question may or may not be cogent, but binary debates about whether these things are "reliable" aren't very helpful.

[Bill Bored]

21. Sorry, I don't buy the exit poll stuff.

Either they are reliable or they aren't.

If they aren't, we are wasting taxpayer money on them. The Govt. Accountability Office should get involved and stop this.

If they are reliable, then why not use them here, designed to be reliable? (I'd still rather see real auditing though.)

If you tell me there's some kind of composite metric or analysis in which all this stuff is taken into account to see if the result POINTS TO fraud, then why not report that methodology and those results and not just "exit polls?"

The whole exit poll thing has done nothing but muddy the waters and I'm sick of it. If I never read another exit poll again, it will be too soon.

As far as the difference between an exit poll and an audit, I thought my suggestion was self-explanatory, but in a nutshell, the difference is that audits can prove fraud and exit polls can't.

[Febble]

22. Well, I think I agree

An audit, done properly, should be subject only to sampling error, which is calculable. Any survey or real people will be subject to non-sampling error.

And I'm not sure I want to hear the words "exit poll" again for a very long time either (even though I never did you a pie chart).

And I'm afraid I wouldn't trust the US to conduct clean exit polls to "monitor" other people's elections - actually, I wouldn't trust any government, except, possibly, Canada.

But UN sponsored election monitoring, including, even, the conduct of well designed exit polls if nothing else was available, might be useful in monitoring elections in countries where the democratic process is in doubt.

Like the US, for example....

[OnTheOtherHand]

23. "Either they are reliable or they aren't."

Well, that's more a statement of attitude than of opinion. I say that in real life, some things are more reliable than others. And I think that the US exit polls have provided useful information about the 2004 election, and I do not blame the polls for the people who have IMHO recklessly misrepresented them. I think that citizens in a democracy have to get used to "muddy waters."

(I wouldn't say there is any "composite metric" -- I would say that people look at all the evidence available to them, or as much of it as they like, and then form their opinions however they choose. Surely you would agree that in both the US and Ukraine, other stuff besides exit polls has been taken into account in the fraud debate.)

That doesn't mean that I am an exit poll booster in general (I really don't care that much about exit polls in the abstract!). Nor does it mean that I support (nor bother to oppose) US funding of exit polls in other countries. I suppose if I argue against it, I might burnish my anti-imperialist credentials here -- but if I argue against exit polls in the US, I will likely get trashed for trying to consolidate the Diebold reign of terror. Or maybe no one will care, which is appropriate, since my opinions do not generally change the course of history. I was mostly trying to answer your question: why does the US fund exit polls abroad? Whether it should -- hey, whatever. Not really what I am here to discuss.

The "exit poll debate" (my phrase, not yours) has been a colossal PITA for me. But I will still be scouring the 2006 exits for shards of insight into what happened. It is an occupational hazard, I guess!

See ya....

[kansasblue]

5. Other countries rely on exit polls. But I agree there are...

better ways of monitoring an election. But for now people understand exit polls and they are important.

The 'out' parties (Dem and Green) should have exit polling of there own.


An even better idea is a 'parallel election' concept that was used in California. After people voted they were asked to vote again (outside independent confidentially) to help monitor the vote.

There needs to be a way to audit.

I argue that there needs to be a voter database. The votes are recorded, not by name but, by number. With this voting number you could view the final record, find your voting number and see if you vote was recorded correctly. Each voter could preform an audit.

Too much data? My ass! I just read the Google saves every search performed on their site and matches it to the IP address. If they can handle that much data then an local election system could do the same.

[Febble]

10. There are a couple of big problems

with "parallel elections". One is that voters are asked to sign an affadavit, which is something that many people may be reluctant to do, as it violates the principle of the secret ballot. It is therefore likely to introduce bias. The other reason is that there is no attempt at random sampling - the aim is to get full participation. Unless full participation is obtained, what you will end up is with a volunteer sample rather than a random sample.

If a poll is the only way of monitoring an election, it has to be a good poll. BYU in Utah seem to have the methodology sorted out pretty well.

Which countries did you have in mind when you sid that "other countries rely on exit polls"? We certainly don't in Britain - we rely on a transparent counting process (paper ballots, hand counted) and regard the exit polls as a bit of a joke. Because we can rely on our count pretty well, we know that when there is a poll-count discrepancy, it was the poll that was off. And it often is - outside the "Margin of Error".

I agree. You need a proper auditing system. It's the only way. We do a complete hand recount if the result is close.

[organik]

13. exit polls are only 1 small part of the picture

to be sure, they are interesting to look at, but there is overwhelming evidence that the repubs tried every trick in the book to steal this last presidential election (ie shredding dem registrations, "caging" lists, intimidation, etc). Anybody read Mark Crispin Miller's new book? Exit polls just a tiny bit of the evidence. ALL of the evidence combined lends credibility to me that the exit polls were closer to the correct vote count.

Also, why hasn't E/M released their data? Something to hide? It must be secret and proprietary, like the Diebold source code.

We can talk more about exit polling when Steve Freeman's book is out...

[Febble]

14. Yes, E-M does have something to hide:

information that would violate the confidentiality of the respondents. But details of all questionnaires logged on election night are downloadable. What is not there is the precinct IDs.

I agree, exit polls are a small part of the picture, and I'd love to see more attention focussed on the things you mention.

But I don't think it follows that the exit poll discrepancy was caused by fraud. Many of the things you mention wouldn't have affected the exit poll, although they would have affected Kerry's voteshare.



(edited for typo)

[philb]

19. Its pretty clear that exit polls are more accurate & unbiased than Officia

l counts in the U.S. these days.

Thats also true in a lot of autocratic countries other than the U.S. which is why the UN uses them to assess election viability.

If the public is going to allow a group of elites to control the U.S. election system and to not allow exit polls, and to manipulate other polls- as has been occurring the last decade,

then I guess the public deserves what they are getting.

[onthebench]

24. Exit polls remind me of high school

when asked what kind of music you listened to in high school, you better not respond "Beethoven" or your ass was whipped.

The last exit poll I saw was in Connecticut. They used UConn students to ask the questions. The pollster had to stand outside in 40 degree weather. My half hour observation during the peak time was that even though she tried to take every fifth person, she ended up only getting the people who were vocal about their choice. Being that more people had something to be vocal about in the last presidential election (like "that G-D man is an idiot"), I can imagine that an exit poll can be skewed towards Kerry. If you voted for chimpy just because you felt it was the lesser of two evils, you were not going to spend time (after you had to wait 2 hours to vote) talking about the vote.

When you only have half of the voters voting, isn't the election itself only a sampling of opinion?

[Febble]

25. Ha!

Yes, very interesting. But I disagree last sentence.

Elections are not samples. They are mandates for government. If people choose not to vote they implicitly assent to the choice of those who do.

But yes, I'd be prouder of voting for Kerry than for Bush. In the UK the Tory voters are much less inclined to admit to it. Although the relative accuracy of this year's exit polls in the UK may have been because of all those Labour voters (like me) holding their noses as well.

[Tiggeroshii]

26. Can you explain what the Labour party is?

I understand parliamentary systems have more parties in action, so I would understand that the Labour party may be one of the parties in or outside the majority. There are coalition parties in the UK, yeah?

[Febble]

27. I did a piece about the British Constitution

for Daily Kos just before our election, which might help:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/3/20/6453/39287

But to be specific:

Labour is the "left of centre" party in Britain, the "right of centre" party being the Tories, aka Conservatives. It is the "Labour" party as it was the party of the trades unions originally. There is also a centrist sort of party with libertarian aspects to it called the Liberal Democrats, which was in fact an amalgamation between the Liberal Party (who tended to be bearded, sandal wearing teachers and social workers) and the Social Democrats, who splintered off the Labour party when it moved Leftwards.

We vote for members of parliament, who stand for a party, much like your Representatives. The difference is that the leader of the party that wins the most seats gets to be Prime Minister. At the last three elections Labour has had an absolute majority of seats, so Blair, as leader of the Labour Party (yes, he really is leader of our "left" wing party) is PM. However, Blair has moved the Party so far to the right (it is called, informally "New Labour") that on the whole, the Lib Dems are further to the left. So it's a bit complicated. We have rarely had coalitions as our First Past the Post system tends to ensure big parliamentary majorities for the winning party, even though they may not (indeed rarely do) get a majority in the popular vote.

All through the Thatcher years, the Left was split, which is largely why the Tories had so long in power. Now the Tories are split, and so Blair's rightward move is largely unchecked. I hope things will change soon.

[Tiggeroshii]

28. Thanks!

I'll be adding your article to favorites so I can read it a little bit later. I very much appreciate the explanation and never knew you had teh FPTP system. Thee have abeen a lot of propositions(some of which I support) that lookto ammend the US constitution away from our FPTP system and into a PR syste. With the executive being elected sepereate from the legislature in the US, it would not face the kinds of constant political instability that often occurs in the German or Canadian system.

[onthebench]

29. The last line was my attempt

at Daily Show type humor.

[Febble]

30. OK

sorry. :)