Reply #36: They didn't give an average for all 1250

[Bill Bored]

so you can calculate it by weighting the average WPE in each band of partisanship in the table by the number of precincts in each. That's -6.7744% or something. Higher WPE than the -6.5.

That said, if the 210 precincts were mostly absentee and early voting, how do we also explain THIS statement, from the FAQ of some E-M rag or another. (I'm not sure which rag because someone PMed me with it, but it looks authentic. It's either from the Jan report or the methodology statements.)

"How do absentee votes affect projections?
In a number of states significant numbers of voters cast their ballots before Election Day. They either cast an absentee ballot or they vote at precincts set-up for voters in the weeks leading up to the election. These absentee/early voters cannot be included in the Election Day. Instead, they are interviewed by telephone shortly before the election. They are asked the same questions as voters interviewed in the exit polls. For the 13 states where absentee voters will be sampled by telephone their results will be combined with those of Election Day voters"

So they can't have it both ways. Either they threw these precincts away, or they combined them with the election day results, but didn't count them as precincts!

Have I mentioned how much I hate this exit poll stuff?

There are now 210 phantom precincts that were either included or excluded from election day results because they had a lot of absentee or early voting activity.

Again, see OTOH's post 30.

BTW, this is not an insignificant percentage of precincts: 210/1460=14.4%, but it's still only a fraction. And yet they had a sufficiently lower WPE than the 1250 used in the calculations to bring the total average from -6.7744 to -6.5. Since this change was caused by only 14.4% of precincts, their mean WPE must have been much less than 6.25%! Another weighted average calculation would show this. (Can we do this with medians?)

What this implies is that telephone polls of those who have already voted MAY BE a lot more accurate than exit polls.