Reply #65: more specifically

[Fortunato]

Kerry - 50.78%
Bush - 48.22%

This is about a 2.5% difference.

If you take the national vote counts from November (I don't know the current "official" vote tally) of about 60 million for Bush and 56.5 million for Kerry (a difference of 3.5 million), however, you'll see the percentages flipped:

Bush - 51.5%
Kerry - 48.5%

Incredible, huh?

Examine what the votes WOULD have been, if the exit polls were dead on:

Kerry - 59,160,000 votes
Bush - 56,180,000 votes

Or, in other words, Kerry wins by almost 3 million.

Somehow, by random chance (*cough*), 3 million votes flip-flopped.

Even with a standard margin of error (closing the spread a bit), this is pretty insane. The sample of 13,000, taken both by phone and from pollsters at the physical sites, was far too large to introduce so much error.