Don’t Trust the Exit Polls
Later today, several major news outlets, blogs, etc. will start reporting that Sen. Barack Obama has a healthy lead in virtually every single major battleground state. Do not assume these polls to be correct: exit polls are highly unreliable.
Four years ago, media all over the world jumped on the exit polls, claiming that Sen. John Kerry beat President George W. Bush. As we all know now, this was not the case.
The reason for the difference is that Democratic voters are more likely to participate in exit polls than Republican voters. In a memo sent out by the McCain campaign today, they say that only 35% of McCain voters said they are likely to participate in an exit poll. 46% of Obama voters said the same: 11% is a gigantic difference in elections.
Instead, we will focus mostly on the actual vote count here at PoliGazette. We will report the exit polls, of course, but we will point out time and again that they are unreliable.
If you want to know who won today’s election, wait until they start actually counting the votes.
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Fortunately, Sean, we don’t have to rely on made up contentions about ingrained personality traits, we can look at actual facts. Like the fact that in every election since 1988, the Democratic share of the vote has been overestimated by the exit polls, and that the internal evaluations of the pollsters determined that this is likely due to a discrepency between the likelihood of Democratic voters to participate in relation to the likelihood of GOP voters to do so.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/19/exit.polls/index.html
Exit polls as Indicators of election fraud? That’s the worst way to detect election fraud, I can’t believe you would even say this.
Everyone knows that Exit polls are flawed.
1) Obama supporters are 20% more likely to participate in exit polls.
2) Obama supporters vote early in the day, McCain supporters come home from work and vote, hence exit polls and early in the day polls are inaccurate.
3) Early voting was pretty much tied for McCain and Obama, and they don’t poll everyone, anything can happen.
4) Pollsters usually poll Democrats over Republicans (they weight them to make it fair, but this can be inaccurate).
5) Pollsters poll in cities more often than rural areas.
The biggest problem with exit polls is what everyone seems to be overlooking: Voters often simply lie to the poll-takers. The reasons vary widely, but there is simply no reason to trust that voters tell the truth when asked who they voted for.
Indeed, among those of you who have criticized my endorsement of Obama — how do you know I actually voted for him???
Haha, Jason- I’ll hold out hope that that wasn’t just a joke.