Home > A Corrupted Election: Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right

A Corrupted Election: Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 15 February 2005
23 comments

Edito Elections-Elected Governments USA

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1970/

Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.

Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.

The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.

Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.

The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the "ways that would help to expose large-scale fraud." Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.
Grasping at explanations

Last November in the United States, as in Ukraine, the discrepancy between the presidential exit polls and the tallied count was far beyond the margin for error. At the time, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies hired to do the polling for the National Election Pool (a consortium of the nation’s five major broadcasters and the Associated Press), didn’t provide an explanation for how this happened. They promised, however, that a full explanation would be forthcoming.

On Jan. 19, on the eve of the inauguration, Edison and Mitofsky released their report, "Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004," which generated headlines such as MSNBC’s "Exit Polls Prove That Bush Won." But, the report does nothing of the sort. It restates a thesis that the pollsters previously intimated-that the discrepancy was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters." But the body of the report offers no data to substantiate this position. In fact, data presented in the report serve to rebut the thesis, and bolster suspicions that the official vote count was way, way off.

The report states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by chance ("sampling error"), and that a systematic bias is implicated.

With that statement the pollsters confirm the discrepancy we initially documented. The exit polls were based on more than 70,000 confidential questionnaires completed by randomly selected voters as they exited the polling place. The overall margin of error should have been under 1 percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than 5 percent-a statistical impossibility.

The pollsters report that the precincts were appropriately chosen for sampling, in that the aggregated official results from the sampled precincts accurately reflected the official statewide ballot counts.

In saying this, Mitofsky and Edison vindicate a key piece of their methodology-the representativeness of their samples. If the fault indeed lies with the exit polls, the range of possibilities for error is therefore narrowed.

Finally, they report that the source of error is, in fact, within-precinct error (WPE), the difference between official precinct tallies and the exit poll samples from those same precincts. On average, across the country, the President did 6.5 percent better in the official vote count, relative to Kerry, than the exit polls projected.

This admission further narrows the range of possibilities. If the polling data are accurate, the only remaining possibilities are "non-response bias" (i.e., Bush voters disproportionately did not participate in the exit polls) and/or errors in the official tally.

However, having gotten to this point in their argument, Mitofsky and Edison summarily dismiss the possibility that the official count was wrong. They reject the election fraud hypothesis because, they say, "precincts with touch screen and optical voting have essentially the same error rates as those using punch-card systems."

Indeed, they do. But this fact merely suggests that all three of these systems may have been corrupted. Indeed, there is little question about problems associated with both punch card systems (recall the Florida debacle in 2000) and mechanical voting machines, which are generally unreliable, vulnerable to tinkering and leave no paper trail. That’s why both systems have been slated for termination under the Helping America Vote Act of 2002.

Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.

Further, data that are underplayed in the report provide support for the hypothesis that the election was stolen.

First, the report acknowledges that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. And while that fact is consistent with allegations of fraud (if you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed), Mitofsky and Edison suggest, without providing any data or theory to back up their claim, that this discrepancy is somehow related to media coverage.

Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the president’s men would steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is small. Lo and behold, the report provides data that strongly bolster this theory. In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0-the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3).

Other report data undermine the argument that Kerry voters were more likely to complete the exit poll interview than Bush voters. If this were the case, then one would expect that in precincts where Kerry voters predominated, the cooperation rate would be higher than in pro-Bush precincts. But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds.
Corollary evidence

The exit polls themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election. Moreover, the exit poll discrepancy must be interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities during Election Day 2004. For many Americans, if not most, mass-scale fraud in a U.S. presidential election is an unthinkable possibility. But taken together, the allegations, the subsequently documented irregularities, systematic vulnerabilities, and implausible numbers suggest a coherent story of fraud and deceit.

What’s more, the exit poll disparity doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t count those voters who were disenfranchised before they even got to the polls. The voting machine shortages in Democratic districts, the fraudulent felony purges of voter rolls, the barriers to registration, and the unmailed, lost, or cavalierly rejected absentee ballots all represent distortions to the vote count above and beyond what is measured by the exit poll disparity. The exit polls, by design, sample only those voters who have already overcome these hurdles.

The thesis of the Mitofsky/Edison exit poll report and the headlines that it generated are curiously detached from the numbers in the report itself. Statisticians who have studied the exit polls find substantial evidence to support the thesis that the vote counts-not the exit polls-were inaccurate.

Apparently, the pollsters at Mitofsky and Edison have found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy. Unfortunately, their patrons in the media find it correspondingly preferable to latch onto a non-confrontational thesis, however implausible, than to even suggest the possibility of foul play.

A comprehensive analysis of the Edison/Mitofsky report has been posted here.
http://www.uscountvotes.org/ucvAnal...

Forum posts

  • Why won’t the media report this?

    Our country and futures are going down the drain while most people are oblivious to the horrific lies and fraud going on right before our eyes!

    Eventually the truth comes out. Republicans should realize their reputations will forever be ruined by the appalling corruption, highway robbery and deceit going on in this country. By their silence, Republicans are condoning the behavior and policies of this fascist regime. They are ALL very, very guilty of evil.

    • You want to know why the Media won’t report it: look up who owns the media now. it isint the democratic party, its the Republicans. And further, the power assosiated with the Republican Party extends to other areas, which the democats have tried to stay away from, most noteably religion. This, is yet again another mechinism that insulates the Republican party from culpability. Thus, good luck getting the truth out. The only semi-safe place to find the truth now is on the internet.

    • >Why won?t the media report this?

      Haven’t you seen weapons of mass deception: http://www.wmdthefilm.com

      >Our country and futures are going down the drain while most people are oblivious to the horrific >lies and fraud going on right before our eyes!

      Yes, your absolutely correct, so if you haven’t dumped your dollars yet, it’s a good time to start thinking about it. You didn’t really think we would last forever did you?

      >Eventually the truth comes out.

      It’s already out, but when 5 companies(thanks to clinton/reagan) own everything you see, hear, and read...it makes containment and damage control very easy.(especially if they are shills for the pentagon)

      >Republicans should realize their reputations will forever be ruined by the appalling corruption, >highway robbery and deceit going on in this country.

      That already happened with Nixon, but people tend to forget.

      >By their silence, Republicans are condoning the behavior and policies of this fascist regime. They >are ALL very, very guilty of evil.

      Shhhh, can you hear it?, the silence is deafening. So deafening, it’s got everyone buying "support our troop" magnets made in china. Look around, you are drowning in fascism. One doesn’t discover how free they are...untill they challenge that freedom. Welcome to our nightmare: the bushtrix.

      306584.jpg

    • Come to Canada.

    • In 2000, I knew the election was stolen by the Supreme Court. 2004 was no different, the methods were just refined. The evidence of coruption is everywhere, but the courts, the states and the Congress have been packed with outlaws. The extremes will tell you that the only law that exists, is what they say it is. It is up to the rest of us to obey. If the facist cartel doesn’t close the border and round up all the "dissenters" ( soon to be known publicly as enemy combatants) I will be happy to move to Canada. Got any idea how to streamline this process? Is there anyone in BC who might like to adopt me? I can bring talent and treasure and possibly start a business. ( psychlpc@yahoo) I left Medicine for health, now it appears I will be leaving the U.S. for sanity, and for freedom. I read today that the right-wing Repub.s are tossing money into the politics of Canada, hoping to widen the gap between "them" and "us". The only "them" that seems to exists, are the people who refuse to understand the concept of "we" the people. I hope that the government in Canada can see through this effort to divide a nation and continue to offer equality and secure the reality of acceptance insted of division. Sociopaths rarely make good leaders, they lie, cheat, steal (the second election), blackmail and will do anything to gain and retain power. Prisons have been built, the railcars have been fitted with shackles, the troops are ready. This is the New World Order in the process of oppressing the people of entire nations. What has been happening in Iraq, is a proving ground, and the same thing is happening in the U.S., by cutting the rights of women and children and taking the food from the table. God help the un-wealthy. C. All_is_one

    • What happened with Nixon in the early 70’s is minimal compared to what is going on in this century. The widespread corruption and evil should not be so easily forgotten.

      And more shocking stories come out every day. For example:

      The fake reporter who asked ‘soft’ questions during WH press conferences…turns out he is a GAY (porno) prostitute using a pseudo name!! The guy is suspect for illegally leaking information that exposed an undercover agent. [How could he have access to this information?]

      The billions of dollars missing (stolen) in Iraq. Now Bush has the audacity to ask for more billions.

      This one has not received much publicity, but it makes perfect sense: SOME JUST VOTED FOR FOOD, see http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/index.php?id=1228 :

      “Two of the food dealers I know told me personally that our food rations would be withheld if we did not vote.” “Many Iraqis … said they had to sign voter registration forms in order to pick up their food supplies.” What would you choose--- a chance of getting blown up by the insurgents if you went to vote or the real possibility of slowly starving to death if you didn’t vote?

      These stories have to make it into public view. They cannot be suppressed forever.

  • The can not count. Basta! Sooner or later all international scientists will stop to come to this
    fascist country and so they are already in trouble.

    Look to the face of this idiotic president. He can hardly speak his native language.

    The next election will not turn out better.

  • Americans do not wanting to know that their system has been corrupted - they hold themselves to the highest standards when it comes down to democracy, and it is much too painful for them to look in the mirror and see that they have become one of the ugly. It’s complete denial, and it will lead to further degradation. Just look at what have ended with. My condolences to the American people.

    • We do know that our Election system is rigged! We have had to live with a person who was not elected in 2000 and 2004, but it will all be coming to a head soon. People are not going to sit back and watch this "horror show"!
      As stated earlier people have a short memory and early 1970’s seem to have been forgotten, including the fact that alot of Bush’s cabinet/Cheney/ etc...were apart of Vietnam. They have always been losers! They ARE much worse than Nixon. They boldly advertise what they are going to do and screw the majority ie)change Social Security.
      Starting with 9/11, which happened on their watch, lies about WMD & Sadam/ AlQuaida connection/incompetence in Iraq(leading to alot of unneccesary deaths),stolen elections 2000, 2002, 2004,Valerie Plame leak, Protecting criminals (Delay), alienating numerous other countries, running up the defecit, putting more people into poverty, record job losses, torture policies, witch hunts ie)Dan Rather, paid propaganda ie)Armstrong Williams et al) and on and on.....
      Europe....We don’t want G.W., we didn’t vote for G.W., please rescue us!!

  • The American people deserve better. We’ve worked our asses off to build our country from nothing to what it is today. Americans are good hardworking people, but unfortunately highly naive. Our government porports freedom, and so we have trusted it. Now it is turning on us, our society is going to shit, and the biggest problem our country seems to want to address is what to do with all the gays. We should be focusing on how to secure our freedom. I fear that it is too late. Democrats rolled right over on this one and let it happen. The forces involved are too powerful and they cannot be stopped by any means but utter failure of their ideology.

    Here me now, elite.

    YOu cannot build yourself a paradise out of the bones of the working class. If you weaken the base of the pyramid, you too will fall. YOur plans are unsustainable. You are doomed to failure.

    Don’t step on me on your quest for millions.

    • I will say up front that I am a conservative that voted for Bush (twice) and have been reading the comments on your web site. Why won’t anyone give their names here? Also you guys are into the conspiracy theories side of things. If anyone has committed election fraud, it is the Dems and you should check on yourselves first before going after anyone else!

      And if Clinton was so good, why didn’t Gore get elected?

    • To "I will say up front that I am a conservative...":

      "You’re either with us, or you’re against us!" Remember who said that? And since you’re against all of us, why don’t you heed that very sage advice of your esteemed ’Big Dick’: "Go fuck youreself!"

      You conservatives are all alike because none of you realizes that as much as you crow about your chosen War Criminal winning two American elections, you can’t prove that he won any election any better than the true Americans of this Nation can prove that he didn’t. It’s people like you who buy something for cash, but don’t get a cash receipt - and then expect everybody else to vote without proof that their vote counted because your ’Home Boys’ are the ones doing the counting of the vote by using their trumped-up machinery. If you really believe Bush won any election, then I would be happy to sell you all that ski resort real estate with chalets that I own in Crawford, Texas. It has just your kind of people, there, for neighbors - people who tell you anything and everything you will ever want to hear - people who will massage your ego nearly as much as you massage your........well, suffice to say, you should get a grip on yourself because no one else will ever be interested.

      If stupidity were painful, the world would be filled with your screams and the screams of people just like you!

      And about listing my real address: I’m damned finicky about not having assholes like you arriving on my doorstep because I’ve had nerve damage and I really don’t control my trigger finger nearly as well as I once did - and you wouldn’t want to be shot in the ass just by accident, now, would you? That wouldn’t sound good to all your ’gooooooood asshole buddies’ down at the bar if you had to tell them that you got shot in the ass while running from some nerve-damaged liberal, now, would it?

      Yankee Blue Veteran

    • "Conserative" Republicans are willing to sit by, even worse give a thumbs up to waste and fraud and war/war profiteering not only by corporations but by their elected officials (Tom DeLay), yet they don’t care even slightly about education, health care, the elderly and the children who are now cut off, or that their Social Secutiry taxes are stolen....what exactly are your priorities?

      The Bush legacy: that politics and crime have become synonymous.

    • 1st of all, after the votes were finally counted after the 2000 election, Gore had more votes, no matter what standard was used. The Bush legal team had the supreme court stop the recount when it became apparent that Bush’s tiny lead was evaporating fast.
      2nd, all the scientific evidence pointing to election fraud in 2004 is overwhelming, simply overwhelming. And all the right can say in support of the election process, which they now own, is "move on, get over it, you lost."
      The people who still believe the election was fair and accurate are fools or worse.

  • Great reporting! It is so valuable to keep repeating these tired tales of abuse of power. These accounts will be the life blood of the eventual movement to dismantle the Empire of the United States of America, to cast off the terrible burden and terror of imperial US rule over so many of our communites across the North American continent, and the oppression and terror spawned by the United States around the world.

    All politics is about resources. In the long run Bush’s pursuit of oil in the Middle East at the expense of our nations citizens, young and old, and our environment, will cost the United States its viability, its reason for being. The silver lining here is that Bush unwittingly (an ironic adverb to associate with the man) accelerates the destruction of the government from which he derives his power.

    Every citizen must discard the prejudice that the media is on the side of the people. The media is at the top of the social hierachy, their sporadic dissent is part of the deception, not even a grasp at respectibility. The media in the US is the propaganda arm of the US government.

    john visher

    • the media-whores who have made all this criminality possible (from 911 to wars to election fraud to stealing everyone’s social security to prop up a failing economy - etc etc) are just as culpable as the criminals (politicians and behind the scenes players - listening shultz?) who perpetrated all these monstrosities that have gradually dismantled a once-great nation and reduced it to a voracious plunderer of other people’s resources - a pirate of the high seas - killing, lusting after power and wealth - the words "out of control" do not do the sentiment justice.

      its time to single out the players - ARREST THEM FOR TREASON AND LOCK THEM UP NOW! NOW! NOW! before its too late to reclaim the United States Of America from the grip of fascist thugs.

    • THE Media is responsible for all of the whoe’s in the U.S. now! They do not report news, they MAKE news they want to report. The true stories ie)historic challenge of electors in Jan., numerous exit poll discrepancies Nov. 2004, and lawsuits in Ohio, on and on, do not get covered.
      They control what the people believe.
      BOYCOTT THE MEDIA, this is the only way out of this mess.

    • Maybe just a few bullets to some of the players heads might do the job.

  • Unless serious election reform is passed (which isn’t likely under the Republicans) you can expect more "faulty" exit polls in 2006. And it is not just chance that these "faulty" exit poll began to appear at the same time as e-voting.

    • We will be lucky if the Republicans don’t make a law banning Exit Polls, without these we would have only had suspicions that the majority of us would never have voted this moronic criminal in.

    • Let me be blunt: Anyone who votes in ANY election in the US, without having the 2004 mess fully investigated, is a MORON. Our votes DO NOT COUNT. The aparatus of government will "elect" whomever they see fit. IT IS UP TO AMERICANS TO PROTEST, RESIST AND REFUSE TO VOTE. Maybe voter turnout of less than 10% will get somebody’s attention.

    • This is true. Political Scientists say that when the voter turnout is less than 25% the whole validity of the "democratic" system goes under. So if you really want to help change this country you will not vote and you will teach others that this is THE ONLY thing that will give the people a voice. To boycott these phony elections is the only path to real democracy. Voting in rigged elections only gives the process validity. It puts the stamp of legitmacy on a process that is like a lottery that is fixed. When the winner has already been determined the losers are the suckers who show up and engage in allowing themselves to be used to add to the total count of participants. When very few participate, the truth will come out, but not until.

    • The Republicans in Congress are already working to end exit polling