Reply #7: not true

[chorti]

The exit polls were off in both cases. In Ohio many of the Northwest Ohio counties use punch cards. Yet the final exit poll shows Kerry winning Northwest Ohio, 52 to 47. I'm sure this exit poll was off by several points in Kerry's favor, because it is so far from the 2000 result. But the actual results from NW Ohio have Bush winning 56 to 43. This would mean that the exit poll is off by 9 points, which, even with a relatively small sample, would be beyond the 1% margin of error. Seven of the 25 NW Ohio counties used optical scan, one touch-screen, and 17 used punch-cards. (BTW, the penultimate exit poll had a 50-49 Kerry lead here, making the actual result closer to the margin of error of this uncorrected exit poll.)

There are not enough touch screen counties in Ohio to compare to regional exit polls, so you would need to look at other states, and, yes, I agree that in many of these the results seem to be off by 2 to 5 percent. In Ohio of the seven touch-screen counties, I would say that two of them (Ross and Auglaize) seem to have Kerry lower than expected, although you would never notice a one or two percent callibration error. You could argue that Mahoning came in lower than expected too.

Touch Screen Counties
............Gore+Nader....Kerry......Diff
Franklin ..... 51% ...... 54% ...... +3
Lake ......... 48% ...... 48% ...... --
Knox ......... 36% ...... 36% ...... --
Mahoning ... 64% ...... 63% ...... -1
Pickaway ... 39% ...... 38% ...... -1
Ross ......... 46% ...... 44% ...... -2
Auglaize .... 30% ...... 26% ...... -4

STATE ....... 49% ...... 49% ...... --