Well this item from Washington Posts’ “The Fix” blog today is rather troubling. It seems the the media consortium which previously ran Exit Polls on Election Day — the best indicator of fraud and failure in election results (as opposed to pre-election polling which is far less accurate) — is being scrapped in some 19 states, for the very first time, in the upcoming Presidential Election…
Dan Merkle, director of elections for ABC News, and a member of the consortium that runs the exit poll, confirmed the shift Wednesday. The aim, he said, “is to still deliver a quality product in the most important states,†in the face of mounting survey costs.
The decision by the National Election Pool — a joint venture of the major television networks and The Associated Press — is sure to cause some pain to election watchers across the country.
…
Here is a list of the states that will be excluded from coverage: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
That would seem to be an invitation to fraud in those states, since Exit Polls have traditionally served as a helpful check and balance against fraudulent or simply inaccurate election results, particularly for the almost 100% unverified election results that the media now count on to report results in all 50 states. Those results come from often-failed, easily-manipulated computer tabulators used across the entire country.
This news is disturbing, as you probably already noticed, for a number of reasons…
First, Democrats will be troubled to see that most of the states listed above are believed to be strongly Republican states, but keep in mind that Congressional and local races, even in such states, are often very competitive. The same is true for those few states mentioned above which are believed to be Democratic-leaning. So Republicans should be equally troubled by this news.
There will now be no simple way to check for red flags of fraud or simple mistabulation on Election Night without the media consortium’s Exit Poll data. (Though it should also be noted that the consortium has long refused to release raw data from their Exit Polls to the public, ever since raw data for Exit Polls in 2004 showed John Kerry winning handily in the bulk of the contested swing states, only to have computer reported election results purportedly show George W. Bush was the winner in those states.)
For example, to focus on just one of the states where Exit Polling is being scrapped, in South Carolina they use 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems across the entire state. There will be no data at all for use in finding red flags to compare to whatever the computers report the election results to be. And that’s very troubling.
But it’s not only states which use 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting systems which should be a concern to voters.
In Palm Beach County, FL last March, for example, it was only a post-election hand examination of a portion of paper ballots that revealed the computers had gotten the results of three elections wrong, naming two losing candidates to be the “winners” in two of those contests. The correct results were only determined after a court-approved hand-count of all of the paper ballots in the race, during which the company who manufactures and programs the computer tabulators, Dominion/Sequoia, admitted that all versions of their electronic voting systems have a bug that can result in the same inaccurate election results.
Those same systems used in Palm Beach County are still used in dozens of states across the country. In that case, unlike South Carolina, there were paper ballots to examine after the election, though most states do no hand examination of paper ballots at all either on Election Night or afterward. They rely instead only on the computer reported results which are either correct — or not. Who knows?
Exit Polling data might have helped to identify problem races in such states, but no longer in some 19 of them across the country.
It was Exit Polling during the Wisconsin Recall Elections in June which predicted a 50/50 tie in the Gubernatorial recall between Scott Walker and Tom Barrett. Yet, 30 minutes or so later, after all of the news nets had reported the incredibly close Exit Polling results gathered throughout the day, the computer results told us the winner was Walker by huge numbers.
Those questionable and completely unverified results (WI does no post-election spot-checks of any of the paper ballots cast in their state elections, and only a minimal check of Presidential races months after certification) led to a bi-partisan group attempted to hand-count paper ballots across the entire state. The group is still trying to count those ballots in many counties, even though where election officials are refusing to give them access to the ballots.
The Fix goes on to note…
Two other contests in the “leaning†Democratic category aren’t on the list: the U.S. Senate race in Hawaii and the governor’s race in West Virginia.
That is not good, and only makes the privatization of our formerly public election system even more opaque and difficult, if not impossible, for the citizenry to oversee. For those who might wish to manipulate the election system, it’s now a 30-second no-brainer and just a few keystrokes away for any election insider to flip results on computer systems with almost no possibility of detection, or even indication that results may be the very opposite of the voters’ intent.
Funding is the issue??? Surely we can come up with the money to make this happen! We cannot allow this to happen (can we?)
“VIDEO: GOP Caught Training Poll Challengers in Illegal Voter Suppression Tactics”
http://www.progressnownm.org/blog/2012/10/gop-trains-poll-workers-to-suppress-votes.html
Three out of the four states Rove says are required to win the senate races are on the excluded exit poll list. Nebraska, North Dakota and Virginia.
“Rove’s analysis of the Senate races was technical and masterly. The Republicans need four seats to gain a majority, and Rove said he feels “really good†about Nebraska and is optimistic about North Dakota, even though Democrats have a strong candidate in former state Attorney General Heidi Heitkamp. “We’re deeply engaged†there, Rove said. In Wisconsin, former Governor Tommy Thompson “has an excellent shot to win—he has a quirky, cross-party appeal.†Virginia is going to be tight and will likely mirror the way the state votes in the presidential race. Of those, Rove declared, “we can win three”.â€
http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/69276-exclusive-inside-karl-roves-billionaire-fundraiser
the WaPo article says polling will be done, just not the demographic breakdowns.
Like I have been saying for a year now, this election WILL be stolen.
No longer will we have any honest elections in this once great nation. It is all gone down the drain to the sewer of corruption and manipulation of the political machines!
I repeat, from the article:
“Voters in the excluded states will still be interviewed as part of a national exit poll, but state-level estimates of the partisan, age or racial makeups of electorates won’t be available as they have been since 1992.”
Cheating worked for Dumya. Exit polls showed Gore winning easily in Florida. Jeb! prevented exit polls 4 years later with Kerry. The GOP is doing everything in their power to steal the election AGAIN.
With billions of dollars being spent, there is absolutely NO reason not to make sure that everyone votes and the votes are counted accurately. We wouldn’t tolerate this from any 3rd world country.
Linda wrote: “We wouldn’t tolerate this from any 3rd world country”. Unfortunately, we are on our way to being a banana republic, if not 3rd world.
“We wouldn’t tolerate this from any 3rd world country”
Unfortunately, our history is increasingly the saga of the widening difference between what we say we are as opposed to the reality of how we act.
That would be terrible enough, for us alone, but we routinely use our woefully unfulfilled image as the excuse to destroy others across the world who, we claim, (also) fail to live up to our image of ourselves.
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/why-did-the-networks-cancel-exit-polls-in-19-states/
The decision to eliminate 2012 election exit polls in 19 states by the National Election Pool is a blow to Election Integrity. Unadjusted state exit poll data have been a major component in calculating exit poll discrepancies.
Of course, we don’t get to see the unadjusted exit poll numbers until months or years after the election. But having the data for just 31 states means that it will no longer be possible to compare the total weighted average of the state polls to the official recorded share.
The full set was required in the 1988-2008 unadjusted state-exit-polls statistical reference to show that in the six presidential elections, the Democrats won the average unadjusted state and national exit polls by a 52-42% margin. Their recorded margin was just 48-46%.
These states will be excluded: Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. This worksheet/graph displays 2008 recorded vote and exit poll statistics for each state.
Although not battleground states, they are still required to calculate the total weighted average National Vote Share. In fact, the unadjusted exit polls in these states showed that Obama did much better than the recorded vote indicated.
These are strong GOP states. But without the exit polls, we cannot estimate if the official, recorded votes are legitimate when we have nothing to compare them to.
Romney expects that Obama will win the overall popular vote, just like Bush expected Kerry would win in 2004. But there could not have a repeat of 2000 when Gore won a popular vote majority. It’s one thing to steal votes in close battleground states in order to capture all-important electoral votes.
But how would it have looked if Bush lost the popular vote a second time? So his vote was padded; Kerry’s landslide margins in big Democratic states like New York and California were cut by approximately one-third. And, of course, no one would bother to check these Kerry strongholds. The focus was on Ohio.
Is the corporate media preparing for 2004 redux?
The pollsters will continue to provide the National Exit Poll, a subset of the state polls which includes just 20% of the state respondents. But as it is standard operating procedure, the poll will be forced to match the recorded vote. It’s a moot point, since we are not going to see the unadjusted, pristine poll numbers until long after the election, if then.
The Director of Elections for ABC News, a member of the consortium that runs the exit poll, said the aim “is to still deliver a quality product in the most important states,†in the face of mounting survey costs, partially due to the continued rise in the number of cell phones which increases the cost of phone surveys.
He says that “the decision by the National Election Pool — a joint venture of the major television networks and The Associated Press — is sure to cause some pain to election watchers across the countryâ€. He’s right about that.
But how much is transparency in our elections worth?
Seems like someone should commission exit polls, starting with close important races, like in ND.
In 2004, when the raw poll data could have helped prove fraud, and the Consortium sat on it, I realized every cycle we need a something like a non-profit or a Congressional Budget Office to do a robust federal election exit poll.
Bill(at #4&7) is right. They’re still polling those 19 states, just not all the demographics.
Isn’t that a vitally relevant point to this discussion? To the thrust of the initial post? Is the demographic stuff vital to the integrity of the national exit poll or is it just as accurate without it? When we’re talking about the accuracy of German exit polling over the years, are all the demographics involved or not? Brad? Richard?
And it sounds like from what Richard says that sometime after elections the raw exit polls are available? Is that true? I didn’t know that, if it is. That seems kinda important. I thought the deal was we, the people, never got to see the unadjusted exit polls anymore. Is that incorrect? Do we get to see them? If so, when?
David Lasagna:
They are no longer exit polling the states. They are just polling for the the National.
I have created this database of the 1988-2008 unadjusted state and national exit polls.
The data source is the Roper archive (University of CT).
What we don’t have is the exit poll data breakdown by precinct. But the state numbers are all we need
to prove systemic election fraud beyond ANY doubt.
In EVERY election.
Click the link in this post to view the 1988-2008 spreadsheet database.
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/election-fraud-an-introduction-to-exit-poll-probability-analysis/
Thanks, Richard.
So if I’m understanding reality correctly, what you’re saying is–there still is exit polling done in those 19 states but it’s not done for the purpose of and with the necessary methodology for acquiring meaningful results for the state itself, but rather thrown into a big national pot where you don’t know which numbers come from where? Something like that?
Bill said @7:
It’s certainly less than crystal clear, at the moment, what that means. But, I take it to mean they will somehow use data from the scrapped states as part of an overall Obama/Romney popular poll.
So they may have Obama/Romney numbers for that state, but without partisan breakdown, etc.
My interpretation of that then would be that, let’s say, Obama beats Romney in one state, according to both the Exit Poll and Election Results, and yet a Republican Senator wins the state. Did he/she really win it? We won’t have the partisan breakdowns of anything to help analyze if the Senatorial race results are believable or a red flag.
That’s one very simple, very general example (there is often much more that can be gleaned, in much more specific ways, from the Exit data), but just trying to help explain what will no longer be available, even with those states somehow being polled in some general manner for inclusion in national numbers.
Okay, thanks, Brad. I thought it sure seemed not completely clear, yet.
Uh oh, Romneylans are now thinking this election is close enough to steal …
Dick Cheney told Hannity this week that exit polls were proven unreliable in 2000 and 2004. The Bush campaign was losing on election night 2004 as results came pouring in. So Cheney called in to media that night, such as the Hannity Show, and put a positive spin on what was happening because he said you have to “keep up appearances”.
Hear AUDIO: http://chirb.it/2eHHyt
Can the results be hacked easily? I get that from what has been written and by that demo video several years ago. So why not hack a whole lot of results and really make them unbelievable, like 95% to the winner. And do this for many, many results so this will bring light and suspicion to ALL the results. Then maybe the electorate sheeple will wake up to the fact that this is going on.
Hi Brad,
I left a comment a few days ago but don’t see it here? Basically said the polls were worthless once they started “adjusting” them to reflect the officially reported results. Why do any polls if you are going to manipulate the result. In some cases, I recall the differences being up to 8% or so, and they still adjusted to a difference of nearly zero. How can any self-respecting polling firm engage in such practices? How can ALL of them do that? What is THEIR explanation of the reason, do you know?
A party that has to revert to voter fraud, attempts to limit early voting, eliminating exit polling, computer hacking etc. is NOT in favor of democracy. These people are fascists and should always be referred to as such.