Reply #106: the stats and exit polls

[ngant17]

Exit polls are live interviews conducted with voters after they cast their ballots and leave polling places. These interviews are then crunched by a tallying system and put through a projection model to predict a winner, long before final vote counts are in. They have been pretty dependable in the past, at least before the anomolies of 2000, 2002 and 2004 started coming in.

A paper titled "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy" has been published by Dr. Steven F. Freeman, whose Ph.D. in organizational studies came from MIT and who holds professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and at an international MBA program founded by Harvard. According to Professor Freeman, the swing between exit poll and vote tally is an anomaly even if you take just the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. "The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million," he says. "The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one."

To recap, in states where there was no paper trail, the exit polls were at great variance with the vote outcomes. In other words, some states with no paper trail showed exit polls favoring Kerry, but Bush turned out to be the 'official' winner. With no way to verify the integrity and accuracy of electronic voting, it is not unreasonable to hypothesize that computer manipulation gave Bush victories through fraud.