Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions

Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions
Full 51 State Early Exit Poll Data Released For The First Time
Wednesday, 17 November 2004, 10:45 pm
Article: Alastair Thompson
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00227.htm

    Scoop.co.nz is delighted to be able today to publish a full set of 4pm
exit poll data for the first time on the Internet since the US election.
The data emerged this evening NZT in a post on the Democratic Underground
website under the forum name TruthIsAll.

    The new data confirms what was already widely known about the swing in
favour of George Bush, but amplifies the extent of that swing.


    Click for big version
    Figure 1: Graph showing the "red shift" between 2004 US General
Election exit polls & the actual 2004 US Election results

    In the data which is shown below in tabulated form, and above in graph
form, we can see that 42 of the 51 states in the union swung towards George
Bush while only nine swung towards Kerry.

    There has to date been no official explanation for the discrepancy.

    Ordinarily in the absence of an obvious mistabulation error, roughly
the same number of states should have swung towards each candidate.

    Moreover many of the states that swung against Democratic Party hopeful
John Kerry swung to an extent that is well beyond the margin of error in
exit polls. Exit polls by their nature - they ask voters how they actually
voted rather than about their intentions - are typically considered highly
accurate.

    Last week in an analysis of a similar, but incomplete set of data, Dr
Stephen F. Freeman from the University of Pennsylvania calculated that the
odds of just three of the major swing states, Florida, Ohio and
Pennsylvania all swinging as far as they did against their respective exit
polls were 250 milllion to 1. (SeeÂ?"The Unexplained Exit Poll
Discrepancy" ­ Dr Stephen F. Freeman - .pdf format)

    Dr Freeman's academic paper contains a thorough description of why and
how exit polls are conducted (in some countries they use them to prevent
against vote fraud), and considers a number of hypotheses for why this
year's polls could have been so dramatically wrong. He concludes that the
reasons are unknown.

    CAUTIONARY NOTE: The data that is released today shows the 4pm data run
from the Edison-Mitofsky polling company. This run was based on 63% of the
full 13660 sample in the poll. However as we also have a set of data from
around midnight with which to compare this data, we can tell that the final
exit poll results were not that far different than these early results.
This in itself tends to suggest that the polling system did not have a
systemic bias in its early data as suggested by some commentators in early
reports on this puzzle.

    (For a more detailed description of the limitations of this data and
the claimed gender bias in the early data see.. EXTENDED FOOTNOTE ON THE
LIMITATIONS OF THIS DATA - By Jonathan Simon )

    *****************
    For more background and the latest news links on this news subject see
also Scoop's A Very American Coup Special Feature

    *************

    BACKGROUND

    Ever since the first analyses (See... "Faun Otter: Vote Fraud - Exit
Polls Vs Actuals ") showing the swing in favour of US President George Bush
between the exit polls and the actual results were published, the internet
has been swimming with rumour and speculation about what the results meant.

    These initial internet news reports were debunked in a report from the
CALTECH/MIT Voting Technology Project which was widely distributed to the
media in the days immediately following the election. The unnamed authors
of this report stated:

        "If we look at the 51 separate exit state polls, we see that 30
predicted more votes for Kerry than he actually got, while 21 predicted
more votes for Bush than he actually got. Therefore, at the state level,
the polls favored Kerry less than the sum of all the polls aggregated up to
the national level. Furthermore, if we do a statistical test to see whether
the differences between the exit polls and the official returns are
significant, only three out of 51 are.5 Therefore, while it is fair to say
that the exit polls predicted a significantly greater vote for Kerry
nationwide than the official returns confirmed, it is not immediately
apparent that any systematic biases are revealed when we take the analysis
down to the state level."

    This report was subsequently quoted in a November 12th New York Times
front page article ("Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly
Buried") that purported to debunk Internet conspiracy theories and
misconceptions about the 2004 election, including those about the exit
polls. The New York Times stated:

        A preliminary study produced by the Voting Technology Project, a
cooperative effort between the California Institute of Technology and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, came to a similar conclusion. Its
study found "no particular patterns" relating to voting systems and the
final results of the election.

        "The 'facts' that are being circulated on the Internet," the study
concluded, "appear to be selectively chosen to make the point."

    However CALTECH/MIT's analysis had already been proved flawed on
November 11 when Scoop.co.nz published the first iteration of a set of data
that was fortuitously captured by VerifiedVoting.org activist Jonathan
Simon in the early minutes of Nov. 3 (SeeÂ? "47 State Exit Poll Analysis
Confirms Swing Anomaly"). Dr Freeman's report was also based on this data.
However Jonathan Simon had not managed to capture data for all states -
hence the hunt for the full set of data continued.

    Interestingly after the Simon data was widely circulated in the
blogosphere the authors of the CALTECH/MIT report edited their footnotes
(see footnote 2 & compare with the version cited above & hosted on Scoop)
making it clear that the source of their data was the publicly available
Exit Poll reports on CNN.com which were "rebalanced" in the early hours of
Nov. 3. This data which has effectively been recast to fit the final
results cannot really be termed exit poll data at all and has been the
source of a great deal of confusion.

    *************

    The complete set of New 4pm Edison & Mitofsky 2004 General Election
exit poll data follows in tabulated form (sorted in descending order of the
magnitude of the "red shift"):

(SEE website for chart)

    *****************

        EXTENDED FOOTNOTE ON THE LIMITATIONS OF THIS DATA
        By Jonathan Simon

        Always keep in mind that this 4pm exit poll data is the early
sweep, skewed for women (58% to 42%) and therefore towards John
Kerry/Democrats.

        While this sample may have been accurate for the time of day
measured (more women voting because of workforce composition and
schedules), it constituted only one component of the full exit poll (63% of
the sample), which consisted of two additional sweeps which reflected
increased participation of men in later hours.

        Thus the later updates (c. 12:20 a.m.), which impounded all three
sweeps but was posted before contamination with tabulated data, is the best
results we have at this time for comparison with the final results.

        The first sweep has been singled out as having poisoned the whole
barrel; but this is ridiculous - you simply need to make a slight
adjustment to the final gender breakdown (@ 12:21 a.m.), if you believe
that to be skewed, which has very little effect on the results (read on to
see exactly how this works in terms of actual numbers).

        That is, whether or not the first sweep had some distortion
relative to our expectations for that time of day - it all amounted to very
little, and is easily and inconsequentially adjusted for in the long run.

        Let's see how it works. Take Florida with the 54% women/46% men
exit poll sample that was supposed to be "way" off - you get the following
for the full sample of respondents (men and women): 49.8% Bush, 49.7%
Kerry.

        If we adjust the sample to 52% women/48% men (probably about
right), you get the following for the full sample of men and women: 49.9%
Bush, 49.6% Kerry - that's right, a whole glaring 1/10th of one percent
difference.

        If we go "all the way" to a 50% women/50% men sample, now it's
50.0% Bush, 49.5% Kerry, a whole 'nother 1/10th of a percentage point.

        The reason for this is that the gender gap is just not that
dramatic and neither is the gender departure from a perfectly weighted
sample.

        In fact, if we want to get Bush up to a whole 1% lead, we'd have to
take an exit poll sample of 55% men / 45% women.

        But Bush "won" Florida by 5% (52% to 47%), a "red flag" discrepancy
from the exit poll, however the poll is weighted by gender. Here's a fun
fact: to get the exit poll results to equal the tabulated outcome, you'd
have to sample all men, that's right 100% men / 0% women, just like the
good ol' days before they passed that blasted 19th Amendment.

        The argument has also been made that the early (morning/afternoon)
exit poll sweeps were gender weighted 58% women/42% men, thereby
invalidating the exit polls in general.


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