Reply #37: BAD methodology? maybe this way by design...

[nashville_brook]

Mitofsky openly admits "weighting" the exit poll to the actual vote. i remember discussing this on Nov 3 -- it makes no sense -- but it's part of their standard operating procedure for getting an "accurate" exit poll.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._presidential_election_controversy,_exit_polls

from wikipedia

Because final published exit polls in America are matched to vote counts, they cannot be used to determine election fraud. However, in the 2004 election, pre-matched exit polls were leaked onto the internet. The exit poll results of one major consortium of news organizations, the National Election Pool ("NEP"), were based on interviews with voters in 49 states (omitting Oregon because its system of voting by mail eliminated the traditional polling place). The NEP results available during the day on Election Day showed Kerry leading Bush. These discrepancies led to charges that the exit polls were more accurate than the official counts, for various reasons. The co-director of NEP, Warren Mitofsky, said he suspected that the difference arose because "the Kerry voters were more anxious to participate in our exit polls than the Bush voters." <4> . Other academic analysts conclude that such explanations are poorly supported. It is also possible that women are either more likely to participate in a poll, or more likely to vote early. In the early polls women represented 58% of the sampled voters, but by poll closing only represented 52% of the voters as reported by local governments, so women were likely oversampled in the early polling. The 52% figure is consistent with historical turnout numbers. Blacks may also have been undersampled, since black turnout increased 25%, much greater than the increase in turnout by other groups.

(Reliability of Exit Polls as a predictor of election popular vote is discussed below #Reliability of Exit Polls. They are said to be consistently very accurate, often within fractions of a percentage point, across many elections and many countries, including USA)