Exit poll skullduggery

Exit polling was disastrously wrong

One of the big stories of Vote '04 was the Exit Poll Fiasco, the numbers that threatened to depress a nation of conservative voters and create a different outcome.

Personally the exit poll numbers were so depressingly weird we actually decided NOT TO BLOG on election afternoon. (If our traffic numbers were higher it would have made that a tougher call, but not much).

A couple of reports today are worth checking out. In one, Dick Morris (yeah, that Dick Morris) opines that evil forces were at work juicing the polling numbers in order to sway a Kerry victory (and he makes a plausible case.) He makes the following points:

• "the inaccuracies of the media’s polling deserve more scrutiny and investigation.
• "Exit polls are almost never wrong.
• "... Tuesday, the networks did get the exit polls wrong. Not just some of them. They got all of the Bush states wrong. ... To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."
• "At the very least, the exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong."

That's not likely to happen, as the Washington Post reports in New Woes Surface in Use of Estimates:

"In two instances on election night -- the results for Virginia and South Carolina -- the networks held off projecting a winner when voting ended because exit polls showed that the races were too close to call, only to see President Bush win easily in both states.
'The exit polls got it flat wrong,' asserted Charles Gibson yesterday on ABC's 'Good Morning America.' "

But here comes Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research, the firm that conducted the exit poll for the National Election Pool (a consortium of the major TV nets and the AP):

"No wrong projections [of winners] were made; the projections were spot on,' he said. 'The members used this data with sophistication and understanding of what data can and cannot be used for.'

In other words, "I don't know nuthin' about no exit poll problems." Going down with the ship, in full denial mode.

Lenski is blaming a computer glitch and irresponsible leaks to the media for the problem. This is disingenuous as the exit polls are always leaked on election day, and he knows it. And the polling is supposed to be "corrected" before it goes out on the wire.

This year was particularly dicey because the new Blogosphere fans the flames of rumor faster than ever before. It also self-corrects faster than the MSM (well, duh!). Within an hour of the first reports of bad Bush voter performance, the bloggers had contacted expert political analysts who were slicing and dicing the bad exit polls and pointing out that it was not a dead skunk stinking up America on Tuesday. "Be calm and get the base out to vote," was the operative word among conservative bloggers, radio talkies and party operatives.

Now the question is what to do about this little exit poll problem. Once again you can tie the scandal back to the MSM which has already covered itself in shame with forged Texas Air Guard documents, an attempted last minute Bush-whack fantasy on missing munitions in Iraq, just to hit the highlights, perhaps it is time for the American people to deliberately decide to cut the MSM off at the knees. Deny their funding. Cancel your subscriptions. Put channel blocks on CBS and any other traditional news outlet that prefers spin to truth. Ask Congress to ban exit polling, perhaps?

These people are not to be trusted. We've learned that the hard way.