In 2000, exit polls were attacked because results indicated that Gore had defeated Bush in Florida by more than seven percentage points. Yet, though Bush won the state, even the president's supporters generally acknowledge that a plurality of Florida's voters intended to vote for Gore. "Anomalies" such as flawed ballots and counting processes disproportionately disqualified Gore votes.
In 2002, exit poll results were never reported or released at all because the pollsters "lost all confidence in the polls," perhaps due in part to discrepancies with official counts in a slew of surprising Republican victories that enabled the GOP to gain control of the Senate.
In 2004 exit polls were especially attacked because the Presidential election exit poll results differed from "actual" results like literally never before. In Ohio, a state that would have given Kerry the White House, exit poll results deviated from official results by eleven percentage points, that is to say, exit poll data indicates that Bush did not win by 120,000 votes, but rather lost by 500,000.
Foreign nations aside, pollsters and political scientists who have spent their career analyzing election results are highly resistant to any suggestion that the official tally is questionable. The official count is their North Star, without which their analyses are lost. In fact, when they are "wrong," they try to "correct" their data and analysis so as to conform to the official numbers. Moreover, in today's political climate, any suggestion of the possibility of a corrupted count will be attacked as a partisan bias, and if exit pollsters are perceived as partisan, they will never see another media contract.
For my part, I have never treated exit polls as an absolute measure for predicting election results. Moreover, no one I know has said that the discrepancy itself indicates that Kerry must have really won the election. Rather, the evidence that cast doubts on the election results come from diverse sources. The exit polls have never been cited as primary evidence of fraud, but only as a reason to take that primary evidence to heart. US Representative John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the foreword to our book says the discrepancy is "but one indicia or warning that something may have gone wrong -- either with the polling or with the election."
The discrepancy is an undisputed fact. The question thus becomes, "What caused it?" Those who defend the election say that Bush voters must have participated in the polls at a lower rate than Kerry voters did. This presumption has never been substantiated by any data or even coherent theory. In fact, the data that has been made available by the pollsters not only fail to validate the presumption, they undermine it entirely.
All indicators on poll participation suggest not lower, but slightly higher response rates among Bush voters. For example, if Bush voters were responding at lower rates, then response rates should be lower in precincts where Bush voters predominated as compared to Kerry precincts. The opposite is true. Response rates in Bush precincts are slightly higher, not lower.
Whereas we could find no evidence regarding lower participation of Bush voters, we observed more than a dozen indicators of a corrupted count. I'll mention just two of them. First, consider: If you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed. In this case, the 11 swing states where the election was close. As it turns out, even though there is no reason why exit polls should be more or less accurate in key states, the discrepancy is significantly higher in the swing states than other states and significantly higher yet in the three critical battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.
If fraud were afoot, it would also make sense that the president's men would steal votes in their strongholds, where they control the machinery of government and few people would be in a position to challenge the result. Lo and behold, we learn that in those precincts where Bush won 80 percent or more of the vote, the average disparity between the exit poll predictions and the official count was a whopping 10 percentage points. In these Bush strongholds, Kerry received only about two-thirds of the votes that voters said they cast for him.
Sakin: One of the main problems in the 2004 election was with DRE [voting machines] recording votes inaccurately. You wrote that there was no way for officials to check the machines after the fact to ensure the quality of the vote count. Mark Crispin Miller charges in his book "Fooled Again" that the internal logs could have been checked, but elections officials refused to do so. Can internal logs show how someone voted, or only how the machine recorded a vote?
Freeman: In principle, internal logs show only how the machine recorded a vote. A Princeton group demonstrated last week that in 1 minute's time they could modify the software in a voting machine in a way that left no trace, and even erased itself, automatically restoring the original software after the election was ended.
Machine experts may, however, be well able to detect some kinds of fraud. It depends on the skill and care with which the voting machines were hacked. After a 2-year lawsuit in Alaska, machine records from the 2004 election have recently been released, and they reveal massive disparities with the totals recorded at the county level.
That is why some election integrity advocates requested machine logs and access to machines. Statistical analysis and polling data suggest large anomalies in precincts throughout the country. For example, in Snohomish County, Washington there was an unusual situation wherein two thirds of the residents voted on paper and one third on machines. We learned that the Democratic Gubernatorial Christine Gregoire won on paper (a result confirmed by the recount); but that Republican Dino Rossi won big on electronic voting machines, bigger yet in precincts where machines were serviced shortly before the election, and by 50% on machines which had to be removed for overt malfunction. That elections officials permit voting machine companies to refuse access to machines even when presented with such damning evidence, begins to illustrate the extent to which our election system has been degraded and corrupted.
Sakin: On the same subject, Diebold and other DRE manufacturers are unwilling to share their programming codes under the rubric of these codes being "proprietary information." Are there any manufacturers offering machines which offer their codes in the public domain and if so, are they getting any state contracts?
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