Reply #39: The validity of his posts has been refuted

[qwghlmian]

in numerous posts on that board. TIA blithely ignores the refutations and plows along. He and his followers are "true believers" and facts do not sway them.

For example, TIA constantly claims that the "pristine" (his word), unweighted exit polls have historically been the ultimate in accuracy. That is plain wrong. He also claims that exit polls in the US are designed to predict the outcome of the election. That is also plain wrong. I could go on, but those are just two examples. Here, read the following

1. The "astonishing accuracy" of exit polls:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64906-2004Nov20.html

"The networks' 1992 national exit poll overstated Democrat Bill Clinton's advantage by 2.5 percentage points, about the same as the Kerry skew."

"I learned early in my Washington Post career that exit polls were useful but imperfect mirrors of the electorate. On election night in 1988, we relied on the ABC News exit poll to characterize how demographic subgroups and political constituencies had voted. One problem: The exit poll found the race to be a dead heat, even though Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the popular vote by seven percentage points to Dubya's father."

2. The purpose of the design of US exit polls:

http://election04.ssrc.org/research/InterimReport122204.pdf

"Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the United States are not suitable for use as point estimators for the share of votes that go to different candidates."

...

"Nevertheless, some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale (state or country) are accurate or whether fraud might be involved in an election.10 A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different. To validate results in specific precincts or from particular machines, the designs would have to incorporate larger numbers of interviews with voters leaving the polls for precision."