Citizen Exit poll in FL goes off smoothly, awaits alleged results before revealing data.

[Stevepol]

FLORIDA VOTERS SIGN SWORN STATEMENTS AS TO HOW THEY VOTED

by MJ Creech
February 4, 2008

I just participated in a citizen exit poll in the state of Florida, and I do mean throughout the state of Florida. Ten counties in Florida were covered, in at least one precinct, by citizen pollsters, with more than one precinct covered in larger cities. I don’t have the exact numbers yet since I am typing this without internet, under a canvas canopy in the jungles of a campground near the Sarasota-Tampa area. The Little Manatee River is floating lazily nearby, Spanish moss draped over huge live oak trees, palm shrubs everywhere. Eat your heart out, snow laden states; Florida is the place to conduct exit polls for Presidential primaries, especially those early ones. Florida’s was January 29.

Florida was one of those states where the delegates won’t count for the Dems, since they moved up their primary to Jan. 29. According to the official election—not sure how many absentees or provisionals are included yet—McCain and Clinton “won,” if you trust the official results… which “trust issue” is exactly the point of doing citizen exit polls. Professional pollsters are hired by mainstream media, CNN and the other big networks, and there is ample evidence that they change their poll results to reflect the official reported election results, and do not care a whit for using their polls as a check, or verification, of those official results.

snip . . .

We don’t have the comparisons to the official Florida results, by precinct yet, due to the slowness of the official tally report. Our hand-counted written poll results were done on election night, or, in the case of larger precincts, by the next day. BUT due to machine malfunction, official precinct results are delayed!. We didn’t want to release the exit poll data before the official precinct results were made public, so that the official results could NOT be changed to match them! On the other hand, with a high turn-out of exit poll participants, we are more likely to be correct as a sample, AND we just might have more votes for a particular candidate than their optical scan machine tally shows. We are waiting to release the exit poll tallies until the officials are finished jimmying around with the official tallies, so that they don’t UN-RIG the precincts we did. Isn’t that an interesting exercise to be conducting in the “greatest democracy in the world”?

But I will tell you this. Besides covering a good sample of Florida counties, I witnessed something of a miracle in the precinct I participated in. Voters, in fact the majority, were actually filling out the poll—it could also be called a survey—AND printing their names at the top and signing a statement swearing, affirming, or attesting that they voted the way they did. This form was drawn up by people with law degrees, Mark Adams being the mastermind, to stand up in court to PROVE fraud, if the official count differs significantly, especially if the candidate winning was not the one to receive the majority of votes. Perhaps citizen exit polls have been done with affidavits before (not sworn before a Notary Public, but sworn by signing the statement), but I can’t recall one, and I don’t think such a widespread canvassing--with affidavit-- has ever been done, in the history of citizen election activism.

snip . . .

The article goes on to point out how important the Ron Paul supporters were to the process.

A tremendously exciting article and maybe a sign of things to come as more and more citizen groups get involved in trying to restore democracy to the country.


Link:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_mj_creec_080204_florida_voters_sign_.htm