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Voter Suppression and Exit Poll Discrepancies in the Democratic Primaries
Voter SuppressionInsufficient polling places in Maricopa County
In this Tuesday’s Arizona Democratic primary, Maricopa County, the largest county in Arizona, reduced the number of polling places open compared to 2012 from over 200 to 60. Consequently, people spent entire work days waiting in line to vote, as voting lines stretched for over half a mile. Undoubtedly, many of them had to leave before voting, in order to avoid missing work, which I’m sure many of them could ill afford. The County recorder justified this blatant incident of voter suppression by claiming that “turnout is traditionally low” in Maricopa County. CBS reporter Joe Dana put this incident in perspective: the “2012 primary had 300,000 voters and 200 polling places. 2016 primary had 800,000 voters at 60 polling places. Polling places in densely populated Latino neighborhoods were particular targets for closure.
Numerous Democrats in AZ were mistakenly listed as independents
Consequently, because independents are not allowed to vote in the AZ primary, these voters were not allowed to vote. I don’t know the details of this issue. Were these recently independent voters who joined the Democratic Party close to the date of the primary in order to cast their vote for one of the candidates? (a perfectly legal thing to do). In any event, this mistake was never rectified.
Arizona was called for Clinton while people were still waiting in line to vote
Because of all the delays, many people were still in line waiting to vote when Arizona was called early for Clinton, with 1% of the vote in. A declaration of victory while people are waiting to vote is likely to discourage many people from voting.
Why does voter suppression hurt Sanders?
One might think that voter suppression in a party primary would not necessarily favor one candidate or the other. Of course, that all depends on whether or not the suppression was targeted at one candidate or the other. At this time I know of no good evidence that shows that to be the case.
However, one thing that must be considered is that, in general, any across the board voter suppression favors Clinton over Sanders. The reason for that is that Clinton did far better than Sanders across the board, in early voting, compared to Election Day voting, which took place largely when Bernie Sanders was hardly known to voters.
Consider Arizona, where voter suppression was especially marked. The election was called for Clinton with only 1% of the vote in, when she was ahead by a margin of 61.5% to 36.1%. All of that total reflected early voting. Yet, with 17% of the vote in (I don’t have later data on this), Sanders was leading Clinton in Election Day voting, by a small amount. Thus, any voter suppression would elevate the importance of early voting in determining the final statewide results and thus affect the delegate count in favor of the candidate who did better in early voting.
Conclusion on voter suppression
We don’t know for sure that the voter suppression in Arizona (and Ohio, where many voting precincts ran out of ballots before the polls closed and caused many potential voters to lose their chance to vote) was targeted at one candidate or the other. But to think that voter suppression didn’t happen in Arizona, where the most populous county in the state reduced the number of polling places from 200 to 60 and ended up with voting lines half a mile long, sounds naïve to me. This kind of thing begs for an investigation, aimed at discovering the cause and preventing future episodes during this primary season. Therefore, please consider signing this petition to the White House requesting that these episodes be investigated promptly.
Exit poll discrepancies
Background: The great exit poll discrepancy controversy of the 2004 Presidential Election
Those of you who spent much time on DU during the 2004 Presidential election and the months and years that followed will remember the great exit poll discrepancy of 2004, in which, according to national exit polls John Kerry won the national vote, whereas George W. Bush won the national vote according to the official vote count. The difference between the exit polls and the official vote count was about 4%. The difference was particularly great in the important swing states, where slight differences in the vote count might make a difference between winning and losing. But there was only one state where it did make a difference, and that was Ohio, where the exit poll discrepancy was over 6%. Ohio would have given the election to John Kerry.
Further investigations found numerous anomalies in Ohio, and eventually a mass of evidence was accumulated that made it highly probable, if not certain, to make a long story short, that the 2004 Presidential election in Ohio was electronically manipulated to give the election to Bush (and there was massive evidence of voter suppression as well). I wrote many DU posts on these issues at the time, but I think that perhaps the best summary I wrote of the evidence for electronic manipulation in Ohio occurred many years later, when Bush was no longer president, in this post.
Yet through all the massive discussion of this issue on DU and other left leaning websites, not a word of it was even mentioned by our national news media, except for Keith Olbermann on MSNBC. Instead, our national news media presented us with “adjusted” exit polls, meaning exit polls that were adjusted to fit the officially reported vote count. One could attribute benign or malignant motives to this omission. My own personnel viewpoint is somewhere in between, but leaning to malignant motives. The benign explanation is that our national news media merely assumes that when there is a discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count, the exit polls must be wrong, because it is unthinkable that the discrepancy, no matter how large, could represent manipulation of the vote count, by electronic voting machines or otherwise.
Yet almost all other democracies in the world take exit polls much more seriously than we do in the United States, and in fact use them to help in assessing the validity of the official vote count. When there is a large discrepancy, in which the official count favors one candidate and the exit polls favor the other, the issue is investigated, and sometimes the official count is reversed, based on the results of the investigation. In the United States, not only do we not do that, but the issue is never even mentioned.
I acknowledge that there can be some bias in exit polls. But they are far more accurate than pre-election polls, for several reasons: 1) They assess whom the voter actually voted for, rather than whom he or she intends to vote for at some later date; 2) Pre-election polls use models that estimate which poll respondents are likely to vote in an election, based on data from previous elections. These models may or may not accurately apply to the current election. To the extent that they don’t apply, the results can be substantially biased; 3) The accuracy of pre-election polls depends on obtaining a representative sample of voters for the poll. That is no simple matter. One very large potential source of error is that voters who use cell phones rather than land lines may be grossly under-represented in pre-election polls. This kind of problem is almost totally eradicated by exit polls. Exit polls are taken of voters as they leave their polling places. It doesn’t depend on telephones or other overly complicated sampling methods.
Exit poll discrepancies in the 2016 Democratic primaries
I first became concerned about this issue in 2016 by means of an article on the 538 website, written on Tuesday, March 15, as Democratic primaries were underway in 5 states (OH, NC, FL, MO, IL). I don’t recall the exact words used in the article, but the writer commented on what appeared to be substantial discrepancies between exit polls and official vote counts in some of the states, especially Ohio, where the official vote count favored Clinton over Sanders, compared to the exit polls. He said he couldn’t understand the discrepancies, and he concluded by saying something like, well, maybe when the full counts are in those discrepancies will go away.
Consequently, upon reading about the voter suppression in Arizona, and recalling the discussion on the 538 website about the likely exit poll discrepancies, I tried to find results of the exit polls and compare them with the official vote counts. I wasn’t able to find results of exit polls for the states that voted this Tuesday, but here is what I found for some of the most recently voting states (results represent percent shares of votes between the two major candidates):
Massachusetts
Exit polls (preliminary results): Sanders +6.6
Official count: Clinton +1.4
Difference: 8.0 in favor of Clinton (compared to exit poll)
Michigan
Exit polls: Sanders +6.4
Official count: Sanders +1.6
Difference: 4.8 in favor of Clinton in the official count (compared to exit poll)
Ohio
Exit polls: Clinton +3.8
Official count: Clinton +14.0
Difference: 10.2 in favor of Clinton in the official count (compared to exit poll)
Florida
Exit polls: Clinton +28.0
Official count: Clinton +31.2
Difference: 3.2 in favor of Clinton in the official count (compared to exit poll)
North Carolina
Exit polls: Clinton +12.6
Official count: Clinton +14.4
Difference: 1.8 in favor of Clinton in the official count (compared to exit poll)
Illinois
Exit polls: Sanders +2.4
Official count: Clinton +1.8
Difference: 4.2 in favor of Clinton in the official count (compared to exit poll)
Missouri
Exit polls: Sanders +3.8
Official count: Clinton + 0.2
Difference: 4.0 in favor of Clinton in the official count (compared to exit poll)
In other words, there were substantial exit poll discrepancies in all 7 of these states, favoring Clinton in the official count in each one, compared to the exit polls. These discrepancies are in general larger even than we saw in the 2004 Presidential Election that DU and some other websites spent so much time discussing. As in 2004, we hear nothing of this from our national news media – all we get from them is “adjusted” exit polls, adjusted to perfectly fit the official vote count. If the exit polls are in fact an accurate measure of who actually received the most votes in these states, Sanders would have won 4 of them instead of just one, and he also would have received more delegates in each of the others.
I don’t know what to do about this, and I am not blaming Hillary Clinton. But she has some mighty powerful supporters in this election, including the financial industry. My intention in posting this is to give DU members a better understanding of a potentially very serious problem.
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My buddy Thom said that HRC is a doo doo head & here's his poll to prove it. 
