Reply #10: It's Not a Sample of the Actual Votes

[On the Road]

A lot of the people involved in this effort come from the statistical side and are looking only at the mathematics. There's a hidden assumption that a sample taken by exit polling is the same as a sample of the vote.

I come from an experimental psych background in which you couldn't possibly get away with publishing a claim that a poll, especially under these conditions, is the same as a sample of the actual vote. I worked on one issue that used to be hot when I was in college in which the whole controversy, extending over several hundred papers, had to do with eliminating response variables. People kept claiming that that results showed an effectm, and others were able to show the effect was caused by response variables. It's not easy.

It doesn't mean that there's no reason to be suspicious or that everyone should just forget the last election. What's not correct is the assigning of probabilities -- eg, "there is a one-in-600-million chance of the exit polls being this far off."

If you're hearing a deafening silence lately, I think it's partly because people sense this but don't know how to phrase it. Personally, I think it tends to bury a lot of more specific reports that are very troubling, and which are simply being stonewalled.

There are ways to use exit polls, for example, to show differences among different variables -- voting machine type, party control, etc. I've seen different sources, and for every report that claims a difference among machine types, for example, I've seen others showing no difference between paper and evoting.

The lockdown north of Cincinnati may have been used to alter ballots. That might show up in a larger exit poll discrepancy in that area. You still couldn't assign an exact probability, but that would be an effective use of exit polls. JMO