"This was no mere mistake.
Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night."
- Dick Morris, Political Consultant
Good Poll, Bad Poll
The Zogby Polls, which were known for accuracy, had Kerry winning a clear majority and sweeping the Electoral College. At 5 PM on election night, Zogby predicted Kerry with 311 electoral votes, beating out Bush by nearly 100 electoral votes. Likewise, Princeton Professor Sam Wang’s Meta-Analysis on November 1st called for Kerry with 108 electoral votes over Bush.
Zogby states that he first noticed significant polling differentials beginning in 2002. Substantial differences between polls and final results were recorded, often staggering and historic in scope. In 2002, Zogby says he was wrong in Illinois, Georgia, Colorado, and for the first time ever – wrong even in New Hampshire. This was the first national election year after HAVA was enacted, and electronic voting more widely installed.
Exit Polls, usually even more accurate - had Kerry winning as well (51 to 48), and especially strong in the critical battleground states of Ohio and Florida. Ten of the eleven swing states that had been favoring Kerry in the polls unexpectedly shifted to Bush. According to a report released by Mitofsky/Edison polling firm in January 2005, the greatest discrepancies between the polls’ predictions and the official count were found in the battleground or swing states where Bush shifts exceeded the accepted Margin of Error.
As the New York Times reported, “The presumption of a Kerry victory built a head of steam late in the day, when the national survey showed the senator with a statistically significant lead, one falling outside the survey’s margin of error.”
On average, across the country, Bush’s “official count” exceeded the exit polls’ projections for him by 6.5%.
Exit Polls were originally created as a stop-gap measure against election fraud, and are still used today around the world for that very purpose. Mitofsky http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/aboutmitofsky.html has been conducting exit polls since 1967 for some 3000 elections.
They boast an average 1% margin of error in their work. For 38 years, they offer this acute accuracy level in thousands of elections both here and abroad. EXCEPT in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 US elections.
Why would the previous near four decades of relied upon polling practice suddenly lose all of its credibility-- precisely when electronics are introduced into the voting systems?
In Germany, where they still hand count votes on paper ballots, the exit polls are so notoriously reliable that no one minds the wait for official results. Because for generations the polls’ projections have never been any more than one-tenth of a percent off from the final tally! There’s no suspense or surprise when the final tally is announced.
On the subject of paper, per the Mitofsky 2005 report data, http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970 only in the precincts using the old-fashioned hand counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the MOE (Margin of Error).Bush lost only 2 of the key swing states, New Hampshire and Nevada. These were the only 2 swing states that had verifiable paper ballots. In the states with paper trails, exit polls mirrored the final vote count - ten states in all - and the exit poll vs actual data differential showed only an average 0.8% Bush gain, within the 1% MOE, causing one to question - How did that absence of paper “trails” in those other districts somehow coincide with the failure of the long-trusted science of polling unique to those very same districts?
Patterns vs. Random
When seeking signs of fraud, statisticians claim they look for patterns rather than false positives. False positives need not be huge to arouse suspicion, but they must be systematic, not random. In the past two Presidential elections, ALL the so-called false positives indicated a Democratic win. Were it only “by chance”, the Republican candidate would have received false positives as well--about half the time. Patterns are what indicate fraud. It corresponds to the coin toss example... the coin will not land on heads every single time it’s tossed…for four years....Unless, of course, it’s been weighted.
The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate pronounced this past election’s Exit Polls to be the most inaccurate since 1988. Despite a $10 million polling system. Statistician Dr. Ron Baiman (see link below) testified that the odds of the Ohio exit poll shifts occurring as they were reported were about 55 million to 1.
The National Election Data Archive Project reported their findings on 26 states’ exit polls that had incorrectly predicted Kerry wins-- the odds against this degree of unprecedented poll failure happening, they determined, were 16.5 million to 1.
In 2000, Exit Polls showed Gore winning the most critical state of Florida by 3%. That figure flipped in the middle of the night to a Bush win, as we all witnessed. Fox News called Florida for Bush before the counting was finished. The extended Bush family was assembled for the cameras to accept the victory. That the Florida Secretary of State was acting Co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign, left some with their heads shaking in suspicion.
In 2004, Exit Polls showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 3% and the most critical state of Ohio by 4%. That figure flipped in the middle of the night to a Bush win, as we all witnessed. Fox News called Ohio for Bush before the counting was finished. The extended Bush family was assembled for the cameras to accept the victory. That the Ohio Secretary of State was acting Co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign, left some with their heads shaking in suspicion.
My keyboard is not malfunctioning—this is what really happened.
During the day, Bush’s aides informed the president that he was losing the election by about three points, according to a source with access to information inside the White House. Karl Rove however, unwavering in his confidence, is said to have affirmed his certainty that the vote would “turn around”. It was also reported that at one point on that evening a Kerry aide addressed him as “Mr. President”, citing his outside the margin of error percentage point lead as a clear indicator of victory.
To everyone’s amazement, Bush strongholds of Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina were being announced by the networks as “too close to call”. At 7:30 PM the networks announced Ohio and Florida both at Kerry 51, Bush 49. In fact, the National Exit Poll data was also off that day in the oddest manner, in that the final tally was an exact flip of the numbers.
At 4 PM exit polls called Kerry 51, Bush 48.
At 7:30 PM it was still Kerry 51, Bush 48.
Then by 1:30 the following day it reverses to Bush 51, Kerry 48.
Per Dick Morris, political consultant for both Republican and Democratic campaigns, “According to ABC TVs exit polls, Kerry was slated to carry Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa...all of which Bush carried.” He goes on to say that “Exit polls are almost never wrong,” because of all the surveys and polls, they are the ones that eliminate the polling of the potential ‘non-voter’. Only those who actually GO to the polls will be queried.
Bill Hawkes, a retired longtime AC Nielsen statistician, states in Wisconsin’s “Capital Times” (November 8, 2004); “The difference is clearly beyond any sampling variability... The community of statisticians and media experts need to not let this be dropped.”
Back to the Ukraine, http://www.templetonthorp.com/ru/news808 the election fraud we were permitted to hear about. Did you know that the method used to determine that election violations were in fact committed was, again, the Exit Poll discrepancies? Exit Polls showed Yushchenko leading Yanukovych 45% to 37%. There had been much speculation and fear of tampering prior to the election. Bad voter lists and doctored ballots were also suspected.
When over 100,000, draped in orange, took to the streets for 17 days to protest what they believed to be fraud—action was swiftly taken to prepare for the revote. One month later, with the prevailing candidate’s agreement, the revote proclaimed Yushchenko’s Orange Revolution to be the winner. After struggling to get any media or governmental attention to our cause here at home...one could almost hate them for their freedom.
An article http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970 from In These Times by key numbers maven Dr. Steven Freeman, and Professor of Statistics, Josh Mitteldorf says:
”The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the "ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud." Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.” Along the same line, a resignation was forced in the Republic of Georgia recently due to Exit Poll discrepancies.
One exit pollster, Ken Warren – St. Louis University Professor of Political Science- who has been working in the field now for over 20 years, says he has only on ONE occasion seen any error greater than 2% between the exit polls and the final tally. That was in a 1982 Primary election in which massive vote fraud was subsequently uncovered.
Here’s an amusing snip from an article http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23580-2004Nov3?language=printer that appeared in the Washington Post, on November 4, 2004, offering one rationale for the polling ‘mix-ups’ [Italics mine]: “A server at Edison/Mitofsky ‘malfunctioned’ shortly before 11 PM. The ‘glitch’ prevented access to any Exit Poll results until the technicians got a backup system operational at 1:33 AM yesterday. The crash occurred barely minutes before the consortium was to update its exit polling, with the results of later interviewing that found Bush with a one-point lead.” Those midnight technicians keep stepping in to help out in our new electronic era elections....and just in the nick of time!
This time we have the vote totals and the exit polls both changing their minds in the middle of the night. Both flip flopping in the same direction – deciding they preferred Bush after all… After the perfunctory moonlight visit from the “technicians”. It could happen.
As the unruly racket about the Exit Poll discrepancies grew even louder from the keyboards of disgruntled Democrats... the preponderance of ‘official theories’ explaining just WHY they were so inaccurate grew proportionately. At the end of the day, we ended up with nearly as many rationales for Exit Poll discrepancies as we had reasons for invading Iraq.
There were the college-aged pollsters that didn’t do the job, the elderly poll-workers who weren’t up to speed, the early over sampling of women, the chatty Democrat theory, the ‘polls aren’t perfect’ theory, there was the glitch in the malfunctioning server, the danged Dixiecrats theory who- even though they vote Republican- stay registered as Democrats, and then, my pet theory-- the Shy Republican Theory.
Nothing beats the Shy Republicans theory...those voters who purportedly, in record numbers, recoiled from pollsters in shame – unwilling to discuss their Bushian vote aloud with anyone.
Two problems with that theory - First; the polls are conducted anonymously on forms filled out in private, and have been for years...No names or identification requested. And secondly; in Mitofsky-Edison’s own report of January 2005, data showed the Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the exit poll surveys. Six months later - and they’re still coming up with new theories.
And they call us “conspiracy theorists”...
With all the annoying exit poll discrepancy reports whisking across the internet at lightning speed, it should come as no surprise that the Republican National Committee Chair, Ed Gillespie, waited only 2 days following the 2004 Presidential election to publicly call for the elimination of all exit polls before the National Press Club.... Thereby, entirely eliminating from American elections, the traditional stop-gap device and primary election fraud detector historically relied upon by the rest of the world. http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04027.html
Not only do votes and exit polls behave capriciously... but today, one year later—we now find the voters themselves flip-flopping. Either that or they are suffering some strange form of selective Election Day amnesia.
A recent AOL poll, sampling over 400,000 voters asked, “Did you vote for President Bush in the 2004 election?” 55% of the respondents said NO, and only 40% said YES. (5% said they did not vote) 55%. That would be a majority.
Almost sounds like a mandate. Coming under the category of: Things that definitely make you go “Hmmmm...”
Is it possible that voters in this poll simply forgot who they’d voted for? Or are they still feeling shy? Given everything that has happened since... I suppose it could happen.
When the poll question was asked “If a new election were to be held today, would you vote for Bush?”— the numbers slip even lower, to a paltry 33% responding YES.
Bad polls.
Notable Numbers
A pre-election study http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/press_releases.htm by Annenberg Public Policy Center in November, 2004 of registered voters had determined that 31.8% of the electorate called themselves Republican, while 34.6% called themselves Democrat.
Statisticians cited the difference as giving the Democrats an edge of 2.8% just prior to the vote, with the margin of error quoted as only one-third of 1%. This “edge” was a near match to the Exit Poll’s predictions of the 3% Kerry win.
On November 2, 2004 at 7:00 PM CST, the Iowa Electronic Markets http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/ - where investors wager real money on election outcomes - were giving Kerry a 76.6% and Bush 20.1%.
"We're about twice as accurate as polls," said George Neumann, director of the IEM.
Run by the University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business, the IEM is regarded as the grandfather of political betting sites since its founding in 1988. The Iowa academics who founded IEM had sought to discover whether markets, as they've been proven to be in economic matters, could supersede the polls as a more accurate predictor of political futures.
Over 100 universities have enrolled in the IEM (many large research-oriented institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Northwestern). Faculty members use the IEM in accounting, finance, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and political science courses across the country - there are said to be over 3000 active traders.
And for those who follow the sports oddsmakers… more of the same. Sportscaster Jim Lampley writes, “At 5:00 PM Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite.” He cites a 5 ½ point gap between the final polls and the nation’s tabulated vote tally...a variance of over 4 times the statistical Margin of Error (MOE).
I won’t even bring up the Boston Red Sox World Series win and what that portends.....That would surely be a fanciful leap into uncharted Conspiracy waters.
Bush tallies exceeded the margin of error in 16 states; Kerry tallies exceeded the MOE in.. well, not one state. Odds of this are 1 out of 13.5 Trillion. How ‘bout them odds?
Numbers, numbers, numbers.... Here are some good ones from Florida. Baker County has 3126 registered Republicans and 8926 registered Democrats. And yet, Bush received a miraculous 7738 votes (Kerry a paltry 2180) - meaning Bush would have picked up every single Republican voter as well as over 4600 of the Democrat’s votes - or more than half. This was explained by the Dixiecrat factor. Otherwise known as Republicans who register as Democrats just to mess with everybody’s probability factors.
Speaking of quixotic voting patterns-- Just before the election, the mid-October 2004 polls showed that 56% of the Electorate believed the country was headed in the wrong direction. The previous 16 months had echoed that same sentiment with numbers consistently polling at or over 50%. And yet.....
At least 59 newspapers that had backed George Bush in the 2000 election dropped their endorsements for him in 2004.
Then there is the old formerly infallible Incumbent Rule: Any incumbent who polls less than 50% in the exit polls always loses. Bush was polling between 47% and 48%. Reason being – to win, he would need to capture the bulk of the ‘undecideds’. Professional pollsters are unanimous in their convictions that the “undecided” vote historically goes primarily to the challenger. In this case, however, we are told that incumbent George W. Bush received 80% of the undecided votes - again, setting all new records in election history.
Everyone knows high voter turnouts bode best for the challenger. 2004 national turnout was the highest on record since 1968...And yet.
Then in January 2005, in an Annenberg survey http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/index.htm - after the election but just prior to Inauguration - a scant 32% of Americans say they supported Bush’s ideas and policies, while a resounding 50% say they did not… just as he was about to be sworn into office, traditionally a time of great optimism. The Washington Post described Bush’s inexplicably low approval ratings in a Gallup poll as the worst rating at this point in a president's second term ever recorded by Gallup, dating back to Truman. Could it be the Shy Republicans hadn’t yet gotten over their Election Day affliction...and were still lying about Bush?
Or-- was it that tens of millions of voters, who did not support his ideas, who did not agree with him, and who felt the country was headed in the wrong direction... simply decided to vote for him anyways, and then subsequently... to lie to pollsters on the way out, writing in that they voted for Kerry instead? Now, that would constitute one mystifying segment of the electorate. Given Bush’s sweep of the so-called Christian Evangelical vote, could these pious folks possibly have been bearing false witness to Edison- Mitofsky? Or were they just being impish?
As of this writing the trends continue sharply downward for Mr. Bush’s approval ratings. http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/10/bush.poll.ap/ September 2005 saw the AP- Ipsos polls finding 65% believe the country is on the wrong track under his leadership, 59% disapprove of his job performance (with only 39% approval), 52% disapprove of his handling of hurricane Katrina. 50% say President Bush is not honest, while only 48% say that he is. And if you examine his honesty, specifically relating to the lead up to the Iraq war, it gets worse...57% say that Bush deliberately misled the country making the case for the war, and only 35% felt that the information he gave was accurate. Consumer confidence was reported to be at its lowest level since March 2003, before the Iraq war. And speaking of Iraq--- the President has hit yet another new low in the August Ispsos http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=2747
Poll with a meager 38% approval on his handling of Iraq,
Could be there’s some truth to the old adage—“Rules are meant to be broken.” Especially lately...
Mining for Data
USCountVotes http://uscountvotes.org/ is an organization that is on a mission. To count. Edison-Mitofsky polling firm has admitted the need to investigate the exit poll data from the past election in order to explain the gross errors in predictions. From a company who brags about being in the 1% margin of error range.... after 3000+ elections polled. So USCountVotes wants to go one step further to solve the mystery. They have assembled an impressive panel of Ph.D.’s, Mathematicians and Computer Science professors in order to do a “thorough mathematical analysis of the 2004 election results.” They intend to analyze a database of precinct level election results for the entire United States.
As the grumbling about exit polls became more vocal, the demand for the release of the raw data, the undoctored polls, joined the chorus. The largely puzzled public hungered to learn what could have gone so wrong. In December of 2004, Congressman John Conyers, leading the House Judiciary Committee investigation, demanded Mitofsky hand over the data to his committee. Mitofsky balked, saying the information was actually owned by the TV Networks, not him, and therefore he couldn’t release it without their permission. Conyers the Tireless then requested the Media http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/1044 to release the data. And a single spokesperson denied that request stating they were still “analyzing the data,” and didn’t want to release it until they were done.
Time to pause again. Six weeks after the election, and they’re still “analyzing.” OK. So? Can’t you release the data to the country’s lawmakers for the concerned public to see, and continue to “analyze” at the same time? Or is there only one copy to go around and CNN, MSNBC, Fox, ABC - they all just share it? Conyers requested the data.. .the raw data, not any study or analysis of it. Just the numbers, Ma’am. And the media effectively withheld it from the American people, the voters, and their representatives. For 6 months...and counting. The exit poll data has still not been released for viewing by a US Congressional committee.
Stonewalling and secrecy by the Media and Mitofsky keep the raw data out of anyone’s reach, perhaps just long enough for people to forget about the inconsistencies and get on with the Michael Jackson story. As long as Mitofsky and his compliant media refuse to play Show and Tell with our polling information, we’ll have to resign ourselves to working with the snippets of data that we do have.
One more time, because I think it’s relevant-- and for the sake of nostalgia:
In 1945, the Supreme Court declared that:
“the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” and “— a free press is a condition of a free society.”
Analyze This
Many professional analyses, studies, and reports have been done on the subject of the 2004 Exit Poll discrepancies. Below is a limited sampling for further consideration.
The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy
In "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy," Dr. Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D. MIT, says,
"As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."
The odds of those exit poll statistical anomalies occurring by chance are, according to Freeman, "250,000,000 to one." That's 250 MILLION to ONE. Freeman believes it was the vote counts, not the exit polls, which were inaccurate in 2004.
He concludes the paper with this:
"Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."
Other Studies and Analyses
Research and Commentary - by Steve Freeman http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep.htm
The United States or Ukraine?: Exit Polls Leave Little Doubt that in a Free and Fair Election John Kerry Would Have Won both the Electoral College and the Popular Vote - by Dr. Ron Baiman. Cites odds as high as 150 million to one for the final results swing to Bush’s direction being random occurrence. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2004/997
Examination of the " red shift " - by Dr. Webb Mealy, PhD.; from the exit polls to the Bush vote, showing the swing states with the most electoral votes had the largest red shift swings towards George W. Bush - all swung towards Bush with the exception of Wisconsin. http://www.selftest.net/redshift.htm
47 State Exit Poll Analysis - by Jonathan Simon http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm
Commentary by Political consultant Dick Morris http://www.hillnews.com/morris/110404.aspx
Methinks MIT Doth Protest Too Much
"Exit Polls Bush Vote Underestimated " - Cal Tech/ MIT http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0411/S00140.htm
The above document demonstrates the attempt by an anonymous Cal Tech/ MIT team to minimize and discredit the exit poll studies showing the anomalous Bush red shifts. Now that you’ve read this paper and likely some of the referred links, you will surely be able to spot the holes in this study...it’ll be a good exercise to see what you’ve retained. And to see just how they appear to try to obfuscate the real problem. Here is one section of the MIT paper [emphasis mine]:
“The electronic vote stealing speculations takes the opposite tack; of lumping all paper systems together. Therefore, for the remainder of this paper, I treat voters who use punch cards, hand-counted paper ballots, and optically scanned ballots http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_os.htm as all voting on “paper.” Because the logic of the vote stealing speculations extends to mechanical lever machines, it is tempting to lump lever machines and DRE’s together, as well. However, for the sake of retaining a bit of clarity, I keep them separate.”
There is a convenient omission of the ELECTRONIC TABULATOR http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/GEMS.htm in this entire discussion yet again! That poor tabulator just gets left out of every serious vote fraud conversation by the status-quo crowd. Excuse my shouting but it needs to be screamed from the hilltops for people to get it through their heads that paper ballots, optical scan ballots, all ballots get counted electronically unless you have the city clerks counting by hand. And that the electronic tabulator that these people are pretending doesn’t even exist is the most likely and easiest target of any malicious tampering.
The optically scanned http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_os.htm electronically counted ballots were some of the most controversial in the election - so why did the MIT team swiftly eliminate them from the “electronic” discussion and just casually toss them in with hand-counted paper ballots, thereby unnaturally skewing all their data?
Do you suppose it’s possible that the MIT guys are not aware of this?
See here where they got a little too cute and in doing so inadvertently revealed some of their motives. Find the red herring in the argument [again, emphasis mine]
Second, the Blue Lemur analysis mischaracterizes the voting machines used in all but one of the “electronic states” and misses the complexity of voting machine usage in all states. New Hampshire only uses traditional paper ballots or optical scanners. http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_os.htm
Categorizing it as an electronic voting state is simply an error. Similarly, the bulk of Ohio’s ballots were cast using the old, discredited punch cards. The confusion here is probably due to the fact that Ohio had originally planned to use DRE’s in 2004, but then demurred when the “voter verified audit trail” controversy came along. While roughly half the ballots cast in Florida and North Carolina were cast on DRE’s, the other half were cast on optically scanned paper ballots. http://www.diebold.com/dieboldes/accuvote_os.htm Certainly, if the vote had been hacked electronically, the effects would have been more subtle in these states than in New Mexico. Finally, only 1/4 of Pennsylvania’s ballots were cast on electronic machines.
Granted, nearly half of the Keystone State’s ballots were cast on the old mechanical lever machines, which have potential hidden programming problems of their own. Nonetheless, the only electrons involved in voting in Pennsylvania are in the incandescent light bulbs in the booths.
---and in the TABULATORS!
Now remember Ohio’s vote was largely tabulated electronically by Triad. Remember there are the two critical stages – the Casting and the COUNTING. And--It’s the COUNTING, stupid!!
And now I will stop shouting.
“Is it a coincidence that within the last 5 or 6 years the Exit Polls have all of a sudden gotten unreliable and wrong, which just happens to coincide with the introduction of electronic voting machines?”
-Chuck Herrin, IT Auditor
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