No exit polls coming today

[Godhumor]

Just curious, if you prefer watching the races with or without them?

Personally, I think it makes the races themselves more exciting to watch, and we don't have to deal with how non-predictive of final results exit polls actually are.

[dchill]

2. Hillary supporter, I'm guessing?

[Joe the Revelator]

3. I hate exit polls. Count the votes.

[NurseJackie]

4. I often wonder how many of those who participate in exit polling will INTENTIONALLY LIE ...

... just for the personal satisfaction (for lack of a better word) of screwing around with the pollsters.


Go, Hillary! We love you!

[malthaussen]

9. Same would apply to any poll, though.

I don't disagree, I've long thought that a good proportion of poll respondents are just trolling. But one works with the tools at hand.

-- Mal

[aaaaaa5a]

5. Exit polls are traditionally horrible

They are good at determining who the electorate is, what they look like and their motives. But they are terrible at determining the results.

[99th_Monkey]

6. Exit polls are an internationally-recognized tool for detecting election fraud.

Why wouldn't we want them?

.. besides that they always show Bernie doing better than Hillary,
and it's downright embarrassing?

[AtomicKitten]

7. Absolutely correct; to claim otherwise is straightup ignorance.

http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00KGWR.pdf

Exit polls are widely acknowledged to be one of the most important elements in helping to ensure an honest election. But this is true only if the poll is conducted with appropriate methodological rigor, if the processes are transparent, and if the data made available. Sadly, this is not the case for the media-sponsored exit polls; and it will be even less so in the future. Hence, the importance of an independent exit poll.

1. About Exit Polls

When properly conducted, exit polls should predict election results with a high degree of reliability. Unlike telephone opinion polls that ask people which candidate they intend to vote for several days before the election, exit polls are surveys of voters conducted after they have cast their votes at their polling places. In other words, rather than a prediction of a hypothetical future action, they constitute a record of an action that was just completed. Around the world, exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections. The United States has funded exit polls in Eastern Europe to detect fraud. Discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia.

Exit polls can remove most sources of polling error. Unlike telephone polls, an exit poll will not be skewed by the fact that some groups of people tend not to be home in the evening or don’t own a landline telephone. Exit polls are not confounded by speculation about who will actually show up to vote, or by voters who decide to change their mind in the final moments. Rather, they identify the entire voting population in representative precincts and survey respondents immediately upon leaving the polling place about their votes. Moreover, exit polls can obtain very large samples in a cost-effective manner, thus providing even greater degrees of reliability.

The difference between conducting a pre-election telephone poll and conducting an Election Day exit poll is like the difference between predicting snowfall in a region several days in advance of a snowstorm and estimating the region’s overall snowfall based on observed measures taken at representative sites. In the first case, you’re forced to predict future performance on present indicators, to rely on ambiguous historical data, and to make many assumptions about what may happen. In the latter, you simply need to choose your representative sites well. So long as your methodology is good and you read your measures correctly, your results will be highly accurate.

1.3. Using Exit Polls to Ensure Election Integrity

Despite the 2002 meltdown and attribution of error in the 2000 and 2004 US exit polls, there is a worldwide consensus that a highly transparent exit poll is one of the best means available to ensure an honest election.

When Mexico sought legitimacy as a modernizing democracy in 1994, Carlos Salinas instituted reforms designed to ensure fair elections. A central feature of those reforms was exit polls. In the 2000 election, the Televisa television network, partly in an attempt to ensure against vote fraud, hired Mitofsky to conduct Mexico’s exit polls. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the first time in the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-two-year history that it lost an election.

In established democracies, exit polls play a central role both in ensuring election integrity and in quickly projecting results. In Germany, the entire process is totally transparent. The minute the polls close, television stations publish exit-poll projections conducted by independent firms. The exit-poll results provide independent data that can be compared to the official tallies. They also provide the nation with an immediate projection of the winner and mitigate the need for a rapid count. (Like most democracies, Germany, despite its technological prowess, votes by hand-marked ballots, counted in full public view by volunteer representatives of the political parties.) This highly transparent system provides good evidence of just how reliable exit polls are. In three recent years for which data are available, exit polls for both the German national elections and the German elections for the European parliament have averaged results within 0.44 percentage points of the official results. (Freeman & Bleifuss 2006: Appendix A.)

Such accuracy is not unique to Germany. In the May 2005 British national election, a first-time exit-poll initiative was right on the mark. The poll predicted Labour would have a 37% share of the vote, against the Tories with 33% and Liberal Democrats with 22%. The official count was Labour 35.3%, Tories 32.4%, and Liberal Democrats 22%.
The United States and international agencies have funded exit polls throughout the former Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe as a way to ensure clean elections. When exit polls in March 2000 and again in March 2004 closely matched the official count in Russia, the international community and Russians themselves were reassured that, whatever their feelings for Putin, the electoral system worked; he had gone before the people to approve of his presidency, and they had ratified it.

Discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Serbia, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, and most recently in Ukraine. In 2003, George Soros’s Open Society Georgia Foundation hired Global Strategy Group to conduct an exit poll for Georgia’s parliamentary election. The exit poll projected a victory for the main opposition party. When the sitting government announced that its own slate of candidates had won, supporters of the opposition stormed the parliament. With support from both the United States and Russia, they forced President Eduard A. Shevardnadze to resign.

Using exit polls to help expose fraud is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during the 2004 elections in Ukraine. In Ukraine, exit polls in the November 22, 2004, runoff election indicated that Viktor Yushchenko would defeat the incumbent Viktor Yanukovych. Yet in the official count Yanukovych prevailed with a narrow victory. Following international protests and a national uprising, a new election was called. In testimony before the House International Relations Committee, Senator Dick Lugar (R.-Ind.) called on the State Department to help ensure that the new election would be fair. “I urge the Department to provide the funds necessary, as quickly as possible, to assist the Ukrainian people in their goal of free and fair elections. Specifically funds will be used to support election observers, exit polling, parallel vote tabulations, training of election commissioners, and voter education programs.”

In testimony before the same committee, Ambassador John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, said the Bush administration helped fund exit polls because they could be used to expose fraud. “The United States government has worked consistently throughout 2004 to promote a free, fair campaign and election in Ukraine,” he said. “We have tried to ‘raise the bar’ for fraud by focusing our assistance in ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud (such as parallel vote counts and independent exit polls).” And he pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the November 22, 2004, Ukraine election was stolen. He said, “It is impossible to know what the real numbers were, but a large-scale (20,000 respondents), nation-wide anonymous exit poll conducted by a consortium of three highly respected research organizations (partially funded by the United States Government) projected Yushchenko the winner.” The results of the December 23, 2004, repeat election bore Tefft out, as a victorious Yushchenko, battling the effects of an assassination attempt by poisoning, was elected to office.

[NWCorona]

13. It drives me crazy when I hear people bash exit polls

They are essential for fair elections. Especially with the move to paperless ballots.

People need to wake up!

[99th_Monkey]

14. Thanks HassleCat for all that great back-up information.

As I recall, exit polls only became "unpopular" once they exposed election fraud during
recent presidential elections, 2004 in particular, and ever since. This changed the course
of history, giving the election to Bush, not President Kerry.

Zogby used to do excellent exit polling and got drummed out of business by the "nothing
to see here" establishment politicos and pundits, who spun a narrative that suddenly --
once exit polls showed election fraud -- exit polls suddenly became "unreliable" due to
"voters willfully buggering & lying" about their votes.

Utterly preposterous, yet .. that's how it all went down, and this travesty has still not
been addressed .. rather it's been dispatched to the dustbin of supposed "conspiracy theories".

Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.

Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.

The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.

Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.

The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the “ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.” Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/1970

[AtomicKitten]

18. Wrong cat, but you're welcome.

[99th_Monkey]

19. Oopsie. my bad

sorry.

[kath]

11. Thank you for this, and to AtomicKitten, who correctly says that to claim otherwise is IGNORANCE.

[Zynx]

16. That's only in the big picture. Basically to make sure that wholesale vote stealing doesn't happen.

Marginal differences of 3-4%, not so much.

[99th_Monkey]

17. When elections are won/lost by .03%, as in Iowa; 3-4% makes ALL the difference. nt

[malthaussen]

8. Personally, I don't think elections should be "exciting."

They aren't entertainment, they aren't sporting events. I seriously believe that this interpretation undermines the process.

-- Mal

[LonePirate]

10. Without exit polls, how can I start a conspiracy about vote flipping or voter disenfranchisement?

My weekend is now ruined!

[Spazito]

12. LOL!

[grossproffit]

15. My husband is less than truthful to exit pollsters.