Brad Blog on NH Primary... just posting for commentary, not angry feedback

[Windy]

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5535#more-5535

BLOGGED BY Brad Friedman ON 1/10/2008 2:47AM
Chris Matthews: Raw EXIT POLL Data 'Indicated Significant Victory' for Obama in NH
'Was Ahead an Average of 8 Points, Even in Our Own Exit Polls'

Even the Exit Polls showed that Obama should have won, according to Chris Matthews on Hardball today. It's the first specific indication that we've seen that the raw, unadjusted Exit Poll data, which only corporate mainstream media folks, not mere mortals, are allowed to see, confirmed all of the pre-election polling which predicted an Obama win.

He introduced his segment today this way (video at right):

MATTHEWS: So what accounts for Hillary Clinton's victory in New Hampshire? What we don't know is why the victory is so much different in fact, then the polling ahead of time, including what we call the Exit Polls were telling us. Obama was ahead in those polls by an average of 8 points, and even our own Exit Polls, taken as people came out of voting, showed him ahead. So what's going on here?
Good question. And one that we asked, verbatim, all night long last night.

"Why were the polls taken, of people coming out of the booth, so off?," Matthews tries to ask his guests again and again. And again.

All of them twisted and turned and contorted and grappled and speculated, coming up with every possible unverifiable, backwards-engineered explanation, save for the one that must not be named. The 600 lb. canary in the virtual living room...the fact that no human being has bothered to check what was actually on NH's vast majority of ballots (80%) which were "counted" by error-prone, hackable Diebold optical-scan machines, all controlled by one bad, horribly irresponsible private company, who has no business being anywhere near a public election...


We've yet to see that raw Exit data ourselves, as mentioned. But we're working on it. Even while we're still working on getting the never-released raw data from 2004, when the Exit Polls were done then, as now, by Mitofsky/Edison.

(BTW: They disavow their own Exit Polling from 2004. So, naturally, the MSM news consortium hired the same folks to do the job again in 2008. Perhaps it was the company's apparently spot-on Exit Polling in Ukraine, in December of 2004, cited as evidence of fraud by George W. Bush and Colin Powell, that the challenger should have won, rather than the incumbant, as the election results announced, in contradiction of the Exit Polls...but don't get us started.)

And yet, as all the talking heads continue to use data from those post-election-adjusted Exit Polls, as speculative reasons why Clinton was announced the winner ("higher than expected female turnout" "voters who make less than $50k"), Politico's Roger Simon, at the end of the Hardball segment, asks the question about NH '08, that we've been asking about 2004 for years: "If the exit polls got the results wrong, why do we think they got the demographics right?"

Did anything go wrong in New Hampshire? Who knows? The Pre-Election Polling indicates it may have. The unadjusted Exit Polling, at least according to Matthews, indicates may have. But until we realize we need to actually count ballots --- openly and transparently --- in our American elections, we expect these same questions and nightmares will continue, over and over and over, for a very long time to come...

[papau]

1. Brad is the fellow who worked to defeat HR811 & its election audit in 08 requirement - I do not take

seriously any comments he makes, or his friend Bev Harris makes, about what is needed to give confidence that the election vote counting can be accepted without the bullshit of implying fraud with no evidence.

[hlthe2b]

2. Quoting Tweety Matthews, no less... As I posted in the previous

several times this specific bradblog posting has appeared in an identical thread: even though Craig Crawford has repeatedly corrected him, showing him that Obama's predicted percentage from exit polls mirrored his actual percentage, Chris will not correct his assumptions. It was Hillary's percentage that was higher than expected. This argues against the "bradley effect" AND it suggests the discrepancy in exit polling respondents was with respect to Hillary support. Somehow after the beating the media had given HRC, I am not suprised that even female non-supporters might not have decided to vote for her at the last minute and that antagonism felt for the MSM and pundits might have extended to the inquiring pollsters.

If the exit pollsters fail to get a thorough, unbiased distribution of voters exiting the polls and thus missed a subgroup that is more likely to vote for Hillary, this would be the result.... Exit polls are a sample, after all. Again, with emphasis, if the sample misses a subgroup that is distinctly different from those one does capture (e.g., more likely to vote for HRC), then this would be the result. Hiring non-professionals (students) to do the exit polling, as was the case, it is not surprising the media would get such biased (non-representative) exit polling results. I do this for a living in health research, so I certainly see the issues clearly, having been likewise suckered with the results of sloppy sampling design or survey conduct.

I am not supporting Hillary, btw, but remain uncommitted. So, before the long knives come out to attack, think again...