Reply #96: Your fourth paragraph states::

[euler]

"And I have to repeat that this only makes sense. What good is demographic information that is WRONG about white Catholic single mothers voting for Bush, or for Kerry (or any other demographic)?"

You seem to be asking: If exit polls aren't accurate, why bother ?

Start here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64906-2004Nov20.html

A snip from the story:

<snip>

I learned early in my Washington Post career that exit polls were useful but imperfect mirrors of the electorate. On election night in 1988, we relied on the ABC News exit poll to characterize how demographic subgroups and political constituencies had voted. One problem: The exit poll found the race to be a dead heat, even though Democrat Michael Dukakis lost the popular vote by seven percentage points to Dubya's father. (The dirty little secret, known to pollsters, is that discrepancies in the overall horse race don't affect the subgroup analysis. Whether Dukakis got 46 percent or 50 percent didn't change the fact that nine of 10 blacks voted for him, while a majority of all men didn't. The exit poll may have under- or over-sampled either group, producing an incorrect national total, but the within-group voting patterns remain accurate.)

</snip>

In this one paragraph we can learn 2 things:

1. Some exit polls are not accurate. More proof that exit polls are not necessarily accurate can be found here:

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/have_the_exit_p.html

2. To the people and corporations that pay for exit polls, the poll is useful whether or not the percentages are accurate. Exit polls aren't done (in the US) to prove or disprove fraud. They are done so that MSM can make statements like "nine of 10 blacks voted for Kerry, while a majority of all men didn't."

Incidently, unlike the US, exit polls in Europe are designed in a way that makes it possible to monitor election fraud using the exit polls. Exit polls in Europe, use a true random sample of respondents.

Read more here:

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/what_about_thos.html