Exit Polls

[Luke_Wilbur]

Now that the elections are finally over, let's look at one of the other losers: Exit polling. During Election Day, exit polls showed that Kerry was on his way to a clear-cut victory. What went wrong?

 

Did pollsters sample the wrong precincts?

 

Did voters lie (perhaps embarrassed to tell "the media" they were voting for Bush)?

 

Was it because most of the polling were done in mainly in urban centers.

 

Did those electronic voting machines do exactly what everyone had feared – skew the election?

 

The only the exit that that was true was Kerry's exit.

[Luke_Wilbur]

Maybe this explains it all...

[Guest Bill Walsh]

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.

 

Here is his statement at the National Press Club

 

I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession -- look at the precincts and the turnout, see who's turning out to vote," Mr. Gillespie said. "Don't build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be."

[Luke_Wilbur]

Read the excerpt below from CommonDreams.org

 

So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the "My Computer" icon, choose "Local Disk C:," open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder "LocalDB" which, Harris noted, "stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes." Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled "Central Tabulator Votes," which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel.

 

In the "Sum of the Candidates" row of numbers, she found that in one precinct Dean had received 800 votes and Lex Luthor had gotten 400.

 

"Let's just flip those," Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. "And," she added magnanimously, "let's give 100 votes to Tiger."

 

They closed the database, went back into the official GEMS software "the legitimate way, you're the county supervisor and you're checking on the progress of your election."

 

As the screen displayed the official voter tabulation, Harris said, "And you can see now that Howard Dean has only 500 votes, Lex Luthor has 900, and Tiger Woods has 100." Dean, the winner, was now the loser.

 

Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, "We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds."

 

On live national television. (You can see the clip on www.votergate.tv.)

[Guest Human]

I heard about that theory floating about, on the day of the elections, by a democrat whom gave me an earfull on how republicans such as myself were the ahems of the earth.

 

I always thought of myself as a nice "Ahem". Now if the democrats start to be nice to me then I WILL WORRY.