I've had an ongoing email exchange with the California editor of the LA Times about their non-existent to tepid coverage election abuses, and this is his latest response.
He finally got to the point of saying he COULD NOT explain the very belated coverage of black voter disenfranchisement in Florida except to say it was too low on someone's to do list.
In discussing the difference between the Ukraine and here, he mentions suspicious turnout levels of 98% were a bigger factor than the exit polls although exit polls became the signature of the story since it was the piece that came out first. I seem to remember 100% plus turnout figures in some precincts. Does anyone have the specifics and authoritative sourcing on that?
You can see more of this exchange on my blog:
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/
From: David Lauter(LA Times California editor)
Subject: RE: exit polls and evoting
Date: May 26, 2005 8:01:22 PM PDT
To: yurbud, aka Professor Smartass
I have no idea why we were so late in covering the story about black voters in Florida. If I had to guess--and this is only a guess--I'd guess the usual answer, which is never particularly satisfactory: it was on someone's list to do, and they just didn't get to it fast enough. No one (including us) ever likes that answer, but generally when we're late on stories, that's what it is. There's always a lot to do and never enough people to do it all, and sometimes folks just make bad decisions on what to do first.
You asked which pollsters I think are reliable -- there are actually several. Gallup is generally pretty good, so are the three major media polls (CBS/NYT, WashPost/ABC and our own LATimes Poll). Mason/Dixon does a lot of polls for local TV stations around the country and tends to do them with small samples to make them inexpensive. As a result, they're often not very good. Zogby got a big reputation because he was very close to the mark on the 1996 Clinton/Dole election, and Republicans, in particular, thought he was great because he didn't have Clinton as far ahead as some others did. But his overall track record is very mixed, and his methodology is questionable. (If you're interested in the details, there was a good profile of Zogby in the New Yorker back in the fall; it's available from the magazine's web site). No one's right all the time and even a blind pig gets a truffle every now and then.
As for the exit poll issue. The Ukrainian exit poll showed Yuschenko with a 54%-43% lead -- and those were final results, not preliminary -- as compared with the official results that showed Yanukovich with the victory margin you noted. But that was hardly the whole of it. There was widespread evidence of significant irregularities. To give just one example of many, there was the district in the Donetsk region that reported a turnout of more than 98% (compared with 75% in the first round of voting) and an overwhelming margin for Yanukovich. The exit poll came first and therefore got the headlines, but it was concrete evidence of widespread, large-scale fraud that brought about the reversal of the election. The election was more than six months ago now, and lots of people--including reporters from this newspaper and others--have spent huge amounts of time examining it. No one's come up with anything in Ohio (or other states) that comes close to the sort of irregularities that were glaringly apparent in Ukraine within days.
Does that conclusively prove that nothing was amiss? No. You can't ever prove a negative. There's always a chance there's something that everyone's overlooked, or something so well hidden that no one's found it despite extensive searching. But I doubt it. In such things, I'm a staunch believer in Occam's razor.
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