Go looking for actual big city vote totals and you're likely to hear that they're really not possible to break out since votes are counted by the counties. That's correct for 40% of the big city population but for 60%, you can get discrete big city totals. You just go to state and city boards of elections web sites and read the totals. When you do that for the majority of big city voting, guess what? The 2004 big city turnout increase was only 13% over that of 2000
Actual Big City Voting Totals for 2000 and 2004
From state and local board of elections data (see footnotes)
This 66% turnout increase and all those white "ghosts" made a real difference in how the exit polls explained the 2004 election results.
Comparison of 2004 big city totals using the pollsters 66%
and 13% based on the 60% sample of actual big city results
Using the 2000 big city vote total from that exit poll, we start with 9.2 million votes. The 66% turnout increase gives Bush nearly 5 million more votes compared to the actual figure of a 13% increase in big city turnout. That's what allowed Bush to "win it" in the big cities.
Why did the exit pollsters use 66% when the actual vote totals in the chart above were available election night or the next day? All the media consortium's pollsters had to do was get on the internet or turn on the television in the New York City area to get a turnout sample from a city of 8 million people. In fact, all the network consortium had to do was call up a few of their affiliates in the big cities listed above.
All of this was pointed out in considerable detail in two articles in 2007 (see links below). Since that time, have the exit pollsters and the media consortium changed their final poll to correct the clearly demonstrated error in big city turnout for 2004? Have they apologized to the public for this obviously inaccurate finding? Of course not. Had they done so, they would have demonstrated that the 13,000 plus national sample on Election Day confounded the reported results of the election.
It would have been a bold statement that there something very wrong with the 2004 election results, i.e., the election was almost certainly stolen.
Don't bet on the exit polls to do anything other than ratify an election based on deliberate discrimination that systematically eliminates poor and minority voters, flawed voting machines subject to tampering, and vote counting that takes place in secret, conducted by private vendors with strong Republican sympathies.
END
Permission to reproduce part of this entire article granted with attribution of authorship, a link to this article, and acknowledgement of images, where indicated.
* This analysis uses data from the final revised national exit poll issued the afternoon of Nov. 3, 2004. The first graph and other figures presented come from the 2000 and 2004 national exit poll, with the exception of the chart of the actual vote counts in the 13 big cities listed. The sources for those figures are indicated in the footnotes section of "Election 2004: The Urban Legend."
N.B. This article is a summary of "Election 2004: The Urban Legend" by the author, based on original research by internet poster anaxarchos, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude.
For the whole story, see:
Election 2004: The Urban Legend, Michael Collins July 13, 2007
Notes from the Underground, Michael Collins Aug. 22, 2007
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