Hunting The Muse

Mystery Pollster and Exit Pollster Explain Polls

The Mystery Pollster covers the Freeman Paper. He knows a lot more than I do and I had a couple of things wrong, but it's a good read. He was in direct contact with the exit pollsters.

Finally, I understand completely the frustration of Democratic partisans with the election results. I'm a Democrat too. Sure, it's tempting to engage in a little wishful thinking about the exit polls. However, to continue to see evidence of vote fraud in the "unexplained exit poll discrepancy" is more than wishful. It borders on delusional.

Also:

So to summarize: Absent further data from NEP, you can choose to believe that an existing problem with exit polls got worse this year in the face of declining response rates and rising distrust of big media, that a slightly higher number of Bush voters than Kerry voters declined to be interviewed. Or, you can believe that a massive secret conspiracy somehow shifted roughly 2% of the vote from Kerry to Bush in every battleground state, a conspiracy that fooled everyone but the exit pollsters - and then only for a few hours - after which they deliberately suppressed evidence of the fraud and damaged their own reputations by blaming the discrepancies on weaknesses in their data.

Please.

Finally, someone scored an interview with Warren Mitofsky. Excerpt:

I'll add, though its somewhat public knowledge at this point, that Warren agrees with the conventional wisdom explaining how certain bloggers reached the wrong conclusions. The data that was reported on election day had not been "weighted" for turnout yet. Once an accurate projection of overall voter turnout is made, the raw data that the exit pollsters collect is plugged into a complicated methodological system that I won't begin to pretend to understand. The point is, though, that a sort of "correction" is made to the raw numbers that everyone saw on Wonkette and other sites. The bloggers who ran those numbers either didn't know about the system of "weighting" the exit polling data, or didn't bother to point it out.

In short, we're waiting on the explanation for the 1.9% Kerry bias in the exit polls, but there are very reasonable theoretical explanations for it - which means we're nowhere close to having reasonable cause to believe the exit polls prove fraud.

Posted by Curt at November 19, 2004 05:41 PM