Salon: Exit polls in 2004 were wrong; Bush won

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/15/exit_polls/index.html

No exit
A persuasive new theory explains why Kerry beat Bush in Election Day exit polls. Just don't expect those still crying "fraud" to believe it.

By Farhad Manjoo

June 15, 2005 | "May I be the first to say 'Mr. President'?" Bob Shrum, one of the John Kerry's chief campaign advisors, beamed to the senator shortly before the East Coast polls closed on Election Day 2004. Shrum's excitement, if premature, was understandable. Kerry's aides realized the race would be close, but during much of Election Day they were buoyed by positive exit poll results flowing out of key states -- Ohio, critically -- showing their man headed for a win. It wasn't only Kerry's people who were excited by the exits. The poll numbers, which weren't officially released during the vote, but which floated around online as freely as Paris Hilton's sex video, seduced just about everybody on the left into thinking a new day had dawned.

In the end, of course, Ohio went red and liberals were blue. But even before Kerry offered his concession, some on the left began pointing to the exit polls as proof that George W. Bush stole the election. To this day, they claim that the exit polls -- which are compiled through interviews with voters just after they've cast their ballots -- tell us that most Americans attempted to vote for John Kerry. What is off, they say, is the official vote count, corrupted by paperless electronic machines and other methods of chicanery.

Exit poll results were just one item in a long bill of election-fraud particulars that folks began passing around in the aftermath of the election. But over the past seven months, the exits have proved more enduring to the election-was-stolen movement than many of the other early indicators of fraud. Lefty bastions like Democratic Underground are aflame with discussions purporting to prove how the exits show Bush didn't really win.

But a clear consensus among experienced pollsters is finally emerging on what happened with the exits. Last month, at an annual conference of opinion pollsters in Miami Beach, Warren Mitofsky, the veteran pollster who conducted the exit poll for the networks, offered a detailed and convincing explanation of what went wrong with the polls. The reason the exits were off, Mitofsky said, is that interviewers assigned to talk to voters as they left the polls appeared to be slightly more inclined to seek out Kerry voters than Bush voters. Kerry voters were overrepresented in the poll by a small margin, which is why everyone thought that Kerry was going to win. The underlying error, Mitofsky's firm said in a report this January, is "likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."