Reply #16: Let's see.

[Imnottelling]

I checked your link and don't know what polls the person is using, the polls margin of error, or the sample size.

However....

From http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0411/S00142.htm#a they given exit poll results for Wisconsin as K:B = 49.2%: 48.8% with a sample size of 2223 which gives a margin of error of ~1.1%. The reported election results were K:B = 50.2% : 49.8%.

So it seems that Bush and Kerry did exactly as expected in Wisc. from the exit poll within the margin of error....Bush didn't do BETTER in the exit poll than the reported result. You alays have to consider the error, e.g. if the reported result would have been K:B = 49.2%: 48.8% it would've been coicidence that it was exactly right. I suppose the exit poll should be written more correctly as K:B = (48.2 to 50.2)%: (47.8 to 49.8)% with ~68% confidence. Or in physics, we sometimes write K:B = 49.2(1.1)%: 48.8(1.1)% where the number in the paratheses is one standard deviation.

According to scoop we also have,

New Mex. with K:B = 50.1% : 47.5% with 1951 respondents which gives a MOE ~ 1.2. The reported results, according to cnn.com, is K:B = 49.6% : 50.4%. We see that Kerry's total was within is margin of error. However, Bush's total was 2.42 standard deviations higher than the exit polls suggested....that's a very large deviation, meaning that it is highly improbable, i.e. less than a 1/100 of randomly happening.

New Jersey results essentially match the exit polls, however, scoop states that "data was obtained too late and highly contaminated with actual tabulation results" as it was obtained at 12:50am EST on Nov. 3rd. The results I'm quoting for Wisconsin and New Mexicon were obtained at 12:21am EST and 12:24am EST on Nov. 3rd, respectively.

So, I would say that, according to the polls that I have seen, Bush did NOT do better in the exit polls than he did in the reported results for Wisc, and New Mexico. New Jersey, as far as I know, is unknown.