Reply #144: Please re-read my posts. Your reference doesn't relate to any of them.

[Fly by night]

My relevant posts are 14, 26, 47, 60, 92 and 121. I know what weighting of polls means and I know what voting information is used to weight polls. As I have said repeatedly, if the purpose of exit polls (as you state) is to assess the voting patterns of socio-demographic sub-groups (and not to predict the winner faster than counting the votes allows), there is no information available from the final voting results to re-weight anything having to do with socio-demographic characteristics because votes are cast anonymously and without any identifying information provided by the voters. However, if the purpose of the exit polls is to predict the winner of the race quickly, re-weighting the raw exit poll data from precincts to account for the differential turnout in, and size of, those precincts (which would impact the final results of the race) makes sense and is done. You're not re-weighting the exit polls based on who won -- you are re-weighting the raw exit polls using the final reported vote counts in the precincts to account for the differential turnouts at, and the size of, those different precincts. That is the principal "weighting" that occurs using the final vote to adjust raw exit poll data. It's not who wins, but who turns out (and in what numbers, and where) that is how the exit polls are adjusted.

I have now said this more times than should be necessary to debunk your arguments regarding the primary purposes of exit polls and to clarify the weighting procedures that must occur to make the raw exit polls more reflective of the final vote (not the final result, but the final vote). You don't adjust the exit polls to reflect the final vote -- you adjust the raw exit poll numbers to reflect the differential turnout within, and the overall size of, the different precincts (and by extrapolation, to all those precincts for which the sample precincts are assumed to be representative), both of which should improve the accuracy of the "weighted" exit poll data for predicting the winner, absent any untoward influence on the "reported" vote.

That is and will remain my final attempt at saying the same thing in as many ways as I can tonight. I will understand if you still cannot understand that which you do not want to understand. Understand?