Exit Polls: Rewriting History

Another look at the magical changing exit polls by The Centre for Research on Globalization:

At 7:32 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting the following exit poll data for Ohio. Women voters (53 percent of the total) favoured Kerry over Bush by 53 percent to 47 percent; male voters (47 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 51 percent to 49 percent. Kerry was thus leading Bush by a little more than 4 percent. But by 1:41 a.m. EST on November 3, when the exit poll was last updated, a dramatic shift had occurred: women voters had split 50-50 in their preferences for Kerry and Bush, while men had swung to supporting Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent. The final exit polls showed Bush leading in Ohio by 2.5 percent.

At 7:32 p.m., there were 1,963 respondents; at 1:41 a.m. on November 3, there was a final total of 2,020 respondents. These fifty-seven additional respondents must all have voted very powerfully for Bush—for while representing only a 2.8 percent increase in the number of respondents, they managed to produce a swing from Kerry to Bush of fully 6.5 percent.

In Florida, the exit polls appear to have been tampered with in a similar manner. At 8:40 p.m. EST, CNN was reporting exit polls that showed Kerry and Bush in a near dead heat. Women voters (54 percent of the total) preferred Kerry over Bush by 52 percent to 48 percent, while men (46 percent of the total) preferred Bush over Kerry by 52 percent to 47 percent, with 1 percent of their votes going to Nader. But the final update of the exit poll, made at 1:01 a.m. EST on November 3, showed a different pattern: women voters now narrowly preferred Bush over Kerry, by 50 percent to 49 percent, while the men preferred Bush by 53 percent to 46 percent, with 1 percent of the vote still going to Nader. These figures gave Bush a 4 percent lead over Kerry.

The number of exit poll respondents in Florida had risen only from 2,846 to 2,862. But once again, a powerful numerical magic was at work. A mere sixteen respondents—0.55 percent of the total number—produced a four percent swing to Bush.

What we are witnessing, the evidence would suggest, is a late-night contribution by the National Elections Pool to the rewriting of history.

Exit polls must be important, otherwise Ed Gillespie (RNC chairman) wouldn't be demanding they be eliminated from future campaigns.

Of course, some folks have a different opinion:

There's a huge difference between polling what WILL happen and polling something that has already happened. The reliability of polling something that has already happened is highly reliable vs. predictive polls, like Gallup or Zogby, which is very risky. The reliability can be, not plus or minus 4 percent as we see with predictive poplls, but rather a much more reliable plus or minus one half or one tenth of one percent with exit polls, because those are based on asking people who already voted. I would even say that if the exit polling were done in the key precincts of Florida and Ohio, which it was, then these results should be practically “bullet proof.”