http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/...lls/index.html
Report suggests changes in exit poll methodology
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Exit polls overstated John Kerry's share of the vote on November 2, both nationally and in many states, because more Kerry supporters participated in the survey than Bush voters, according to an internal review of the exit-polling process released Wednesday.
The report said it is difficult to pinpoint precisely why, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit poll than were Bush voters. "There were certainly motivational factors that are impossible to quantify," the report said.
Problems with the numbers first surfaced on Election Day, when exit polls showed Kerry with a 3-point lead nationally and an edge in some key battleground states. Those exit poll results were leaked and became widely known through the Internet.
CNN did not air those inaccurate results or post them on its Web site, and CNN's projections of winners on election night were accurate.
Nationwide, Bush got about 3.5 million more votes than Kerry.
The discrepancies stemmed from problems in interviewing voters at the 1,480 randomly chosen precincts where exit pollsters were stationed, not from how those precincts were selected or the way the data were processed, according to the 75-page report.
The report recommends a number of steps to deal with the problem, including better training for interviewers, as well as continued research aimed at boosting participation in the polls.
The report was issued by Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research, the polling firms that conducted the polls on behalf of the so-called National Election Pool, a consortium of six national media organizations (AP, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC).
To prevent leaks in future elections, the news organizations have agreed not to access the data until 6 p.m. ET.
The report found that the exit polls offered no evidence of widespread fraud.
"Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment. Our analysis of the difference between the vote count and the exit poll at each polling location in our sample has found no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen and optical scan voting equipment," the report found.
The new report shows that exit polls overstated Kerry's support in 26 states, while estimates overstated Bush's support in four states. The problem is not new -- in every presidential election since 1988, exit polls have overstated support for Democrats nationally -- but the discrepancy in 2004 was more pronounced than in previous years.
The report identified several factors that may have contributed to the discrepancy, including:
# Distance restrictions from polling places imposed upon the interviewers by election officials at the state and local level.
# Weather conditions, which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations.
# Multiple precincts voting at the same location as the precinct in the exit poll sample.
# Interviewer characteristics, such as age, which were more often related to the errors last year than in past elections.
The pollsters said they plan to further investigate the recruiting and training procedures, the interviewing rate calculations, the length and design of the questionnaire, as well as characteristics of both the interviewers and the precincts chosen to be surveyed.
"Even with these improvements, differences in response rates between Democratic and Republican voters may still occur in future elections," the report reads. "However, we believe that these steps will help to minimize the discrepancies."
In addition to the information included in this report, exit poll data from this election are being archived at the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut and at the Ins ute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and will be available there for review and further analysis. A description of the methodology of the exit polls is posted at www.exit-poll.net.
From 1992 to 2002, exit polls were conducted by Voter News Service (VNS), whose exit polls in 2000 led to the networks' decisions to declare Al Gore the winner in Florida. In 2002, VNS was unable to deliver any exit poll data to the networks, resulting in the decision to disband it.
Last edited by Useruser666; 01-20-2005 at 11:14 AM.
"Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment. Our analysis of the difference between the vote count and the exit poll at each polling location in our sample has found no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen and optical scan voting equipment," the report found." ..........................................Well imagine that! I can't wait for Dan to come in here and discount this!
I would like to hear some other opinions about this article.
Sorry, User, I was laughing at the probable response of the resident tin-hat crowd...
This article actually makes sense.
You can go to that website www.exit-poll.net. I was reading up on it.
Bump! Come on Dan, what's your take?
Bump, Bump! Daaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnn???????
exit pole report sounds like the le of a bad porn flick
kitten,
I was thinking more along the lines of like a " ty-bar expose".
either that or a happy ending video
Bump again. I'm waiting for a response to this article.
Bump again. Come on Dan. You posted tons of articles about this and now I'd like to hear what you have to say on this one.
Dan's waiting for the demoratic underground response
Trouble is, CNN did post what it is now calling 'inaccurate' exit poll numbers on its website.CNN did not air those inaccurate results or post them on its Web site, and CNN's projections of winners on election night were accurate.
I glanced over the report and couldn't really find any reasons to come to this conclusion.
The report can be found at www.exit-poll.net if you want to take a look at it.
It seemed to me that there logic was that since Kerry was leading in the exit polls and the official tally declared Bush the winner then the exit polls oversampled Kerry voters. Well, no ....or the official tally is wrong. The logic seems obviously circular to me.
One cannot use the offical result as evidence for oversampling of Kerry voters! Even if it sounds reasonable. It may actually be true but there needs to be an argument for it not merely a circular hypothesis.
There was a 5.5 percent difference from the exit polls to the election results (exit polls 3% for Kerry, vote 2.5% for Bush). Exit poll respondents are chosen as every nth person leaving the polls. They can either fill in the exit poll or not.
Suppose there is a 50% probability of anyone filling out an exit poll, all other things being equal. The Kerry voter has a 1.0625 "self-selection factor" (.51/.48) according to the above data, while the Bush voter has a 0.95 self-selection factor. So, in a sample of 1000 voters asked to fill in the exit poll, this would imply about 265 Kerry voters responded positively, but only about 235 Bush voters did.
That just seems like too big a difference to attribute to something as nebulous as "Kerry enthusiasm" or "Bush reticence". Among other things, I have never know Republicans, especially Bush supporters, to be the types to hide their light under a bushel basket. Quite the reverse, actually. In fact, the more logical argument could be made that there were more Kerry supporters sampled because there were more Kerry supporters at the polls, but that would be too easy.
Dan,
This report was done by the people who conducted the exit-polls you use as the basis for all of your arguements towards voter fraud. Who else would be a better authority on questioning the exit-poll results than the people who actually ran them? You Dan? Or do you think this report is somehow a "right-wing" conspiracy?
This is from their web site:
What is the Margin of Error for an exit poll?
Every number estimated from a sample may depart from the official vote count. The difference between a sample result and the number one would get if everyone who cast a vote was interviewed in exactly the same way is called the sampling error. That does not mean the sample result is wrong. Instead, it refers to the potential error due to sampling. The margin of error for a 95% confidence interval is about +/- 3% for a typical characteristic from the national exit poll and +/-4% for a typical state exit poll. Characteristics that are more concentrated in a few polling places, such as race, have larger sampling errors. Other nonsampling factors may increase the total error.
Now unless this mean voter fraud I think your arguement is unjustified. Read the following statement from the report.
We have not discovered any systematic problem in how the exit poll data
were collected and processed. Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment. Our analysis of the difference between the vote count and the exit poll at each polling location in our sample has found no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen and optical scan voting equipment. We say this because these differences are similar to the differences for punch card voting equipment, and less
than the difference for mechanical voting equipment.
Our detailed analysis by polling location and by interviewer has identified several factors that may have contributed to the size of the Within Precinct Error that led to the inaccuracies in the exit poll estimates. Some of these factors are within our control while others are not. It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters. There were certainly motivational factors that are impossible to quantify, but which led to Kerry voters being less likely than Bush voters to refuse to take the survey. In addition there are interactions between respondents and interviewers that can contribute to differential non-response rates. We can identify some factors that appear to have contributed, even in a small way, to the discrepancy. These include:
• Distance restrictions imposed upon our interviewers by election officials at the state and local level
• Weather conditions which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations
• Multiple precincts voting at the same location as the precinct in our sample
• Polling locations with a large number of total voters where a smaller portion of voters was selected to be asked to fill out questionnaires
• Interviewer characteristics such as age, which were more often related to precinct error this year than in past elections
We plan further analysis on the following factors:
• Interviewer training and election day procedures
• Interviewing rate calculations
• Interviewer characteristics
• Precinct characteristics
• Questionnaire length and design
We also suggest the following changes for future exit polls:
• Working to improve cooperation with state and local election officials
• Improvements in interviewing training procedures
• Changes in our procedures for hiring, recruiting and monitoring interviewers
Damn! Dan beaten down with his own whip!
Not agreeing or disagreeing with anyone here but....
Didn't you get what Dan was saying?
I'm going to assume that's going to be a no, because he was saying that they used the results which were fraudulant to verify their data, which of course would give you a result like that.
Dan thinks the company report is flawed because the data they are using is illigetimate. So posting and highlighting the report conclusions isn't going to prove a point.
One cannot use the offical result as evidence for oversampling of Kerry voters! Even if it sounds reasonable. It may actually be true but there needs to be an argument for it not merely a circular hypothesis.
Manny,
Maybe you need to read the report. The pollsters are saying the difference in the actual vote and the exit-polls were entirely possible and they show no evidence of fraud or vote rigging. Any errors they encountered are within the range of probability. Look at this statement again:
Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.
Are those not the allegations Dan has posted about a hundered times here? All of the talk about how the exit polls don't match the official vote count and how that proves the official vote count was fraudulent is proven untrue by this report. The report states in detail how the data they collected was different from the official vote and why. After going through the data they now know there were no descrepencies that show voter fraud.
Chris,
Read slowly.
Dan is saying they used a method that will get you incorrect results to make the conclusions they did in the report.
So how are you going to use the results of that report to convince him of anything when he discounts the evidence you use?
Well see Manny that's the problem. Dan only will believe what Dan wants to believe. These people are professionals pollsters and what is Dan? Dan had been arguing that this poll had proven that the official election was a fraud. Now that this report comes out from the creators of that poll saying there is no eveidence to support that theory, Dan is up a creek without a paddle. Now the poll is the fraud in this?
There is no circular logic. The report states that the differences found between the exit-polling and the official count can be explained to the variables it lists(I listed them previously). Then it also states that there are some variables that are impossible to quantify. These are the reasons for the irregularities between the two tallies, not voter fraud.
Well that's great, and I never agreed or disagreed.
I was merely pointing out that you ignored what Dan said.
I don't like polls period because they can influenced so easily.
I saw WOAI reportting that their poll shows Bush still having a 56% approval rating.
Well yeah when you poll Texas voters.
But across the country his approval rating is hovering at about 50%.
So yeah, if more Kerry supporters were participating then that would throw the poll off big time.
Let the voters vote then announce the results.
Isn't the Exit Pole how firemen get to the truck?
You owe me a new keyboard...
I didn't ignore what Dan said. the article I posted clearly states the answer to his line of questioning. He also referenced the report itself, which I have read through, and was the first to refernce in this thread.
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