http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110204V.shtml
QUOTE
An Election Spoiled Rotten
By Greg Palast
TomPaine.com
Monday 01 November 2004
It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked—overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.
John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until Tuesday night.
Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes.
The Urge To Purge
Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.
There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.
To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.
Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This is what the Lone Star State's current attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is, "unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism and ideological zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority, non-white voters.
From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.
But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that.
Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls
We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running to replace Katherine Harris.
In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).
And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on the “caging” lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of African-American neighborhoods.
Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.
Absentee Ballots Go AWOL
It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes—up to 15 million—will be counted is zip.
Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.
Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.
And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.
A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can
"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.
Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.
Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.
It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished—phffft!
There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way; suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among African American voters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.
The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media. The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or touch-screen touched.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD (www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm).
By Greg Palast
TomPaine.com
Monday 01 November 2004
It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked—overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.
John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted. He's also losing big time in Colorado and Ohio; and he's way down in Florida, though the votes won't be totaled until Tuesday night.
Through a combination of sophisticated vote rustling—ethnic cleansing of voter rolls, absentee ballots gone AWOL, machines that "spoil" votes—John Kerry begins with a nationwide deficit that could easily exceed one million votes.
The Urge To Purge
Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson just weeks ago removed several thousand voters from the state's voter rolls. She tagged felons as barred from voting. What makes this particularly noteworthy is that, unlike like Florida and a handful of other Deep South states, Colorado does not bar ex-cons from voting. Only those actually serving their sentence lose their rights.
There's no known, verified case of a Colorado convict voting illegally from the big house. Because previous purges have wiped away the rights of innocents, federal law now bars purges within 90 days of a presidential election to allow a voter to challenge their loss of civil rights.
To exempt her action from the federal rule, Secretary Davidson declared an "emergency." However, the only "emergency" in Colorado seems to be President Bush's running dead, even with John Kerry in the polls.
Why the sudden urge to purge? Davidson's chief of voting law enforcement is Drew Durham, who previously worked for the attorney general of Texas. This is what the Lone Star State's current attorney general says of Mr. Durham: He is, "unfit for public office... a man with a history of racism and ideological zealotry." Sounds just right for a purge that affects, in the majority, non-white voters.
From my own and government investigations of such purge lists, it is unlikely that this one contains many, if any, illegal voters.
But it does contain Democrats. The Dems may not like to shout about this, but studies indicate that 90-some percent of people who have served time for felonies will, after prison, vote Democratic. One suspects Colorado's Republican secretary of state knows that.
Ethnic Cleansing Of The Voter Rolls
We can't leave the topic of ethnically cleansing the voter rolls without a stop in Ohio, where a Republican secretary of state appears to be running to replace Katherine Harris.
In Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), some citizens have been caught Registering While Black. A statistical analysis of would-be voters in Southern states by the watchdog group Democracy South indicates that black voters are three times as likely as white voters to have their registration requests "returned" (i.e., subject to rejection).
And to give a boost to this whitening of the voter rolls, for the first time since the days of Jim Crow, the Republicans are planning mass challenges of voters on Election Day. The GOP's announced plan to block 35,000 voters in Ohio ran up against the wrath of federal judges; so, in Florida, what appear to be similar plans had been kept under wraps until the discovery of documents called "caging" lists. The voters on the “caging” lists, disclosed last week by BBC Television London, are, almost exclusively, residents of African-American neighborhoods.
Such racial profiling as part of a plan to block voters is, under the Voting Rights Act, illegal. Nevertheless, neither the Act nor federal judges have persuaded the party of Lincoln to join the Democratic Party in pledging not to distribute blacklists to block voters on Tuesday.
Absentee Ballots Go AWOL
It's 10pm: Do you know where your absentee ballot is? Voters wary about computer balloting are going postal: in some states, mail-in ballot requests are up 500 percent. The probability that all those votes—up to 15 million—will be counted is zip.
Those who mail in ballots are very trusting souls. Here's how your trust is used. In the August 31 primaries in Florida, Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore (a.k.a. Madame Butterfly Ballot) counted 37,839 absentee votes. But days before, her office told me only 29,000 ballots had been received. When this loaves-and-fishes miracle was disclosed, she was forced to recount, cutting the tally to 31,138.
Had she worked it the other way, disappearing a few thousand votes instead of adding additional ones, there would be almost no way to figure out the fix (or was it a mistake?). Mail-in voter registration forms are protected by federal law. Local government must acknowledge receiving your registration and must let you know if there's a problem (say, with signature or address) that invalidates your registration. But your mail-in vote is an unprotected crapshoot. How do you know if your ballot was received? Was it tossed behind a file cabinet—or tossed out because you did not include your middle initial? In many counties, you won't know.
And not every official is happy to have your vote. It is well-reported that Broward County, Fla., failed to send out nearly 60,000 absentee ballots. What has not been nationally reported is that Broward's elections supervisor is a Jeb Bush appointee who took the post only after the governor took the unprecedented step of removing the prior elected supervisor who happened be a Democrat.
A Million Votes In The Electoral Trash Can
"If the vote is stolen here, it will be stolen in Rio Arriba County," a New Mexico politician told me. That's a reasoned surmise: in 2000, one in 10 votes simply weren't counted—chucked out, erased, discarded. In the voting biz, the technical term for these vanishing votes is "spoilage." Citizens cast ballots, but the machines don't notice. In one Rio Arriba precinct in the last go-'round, not one single vote was cast for president—or, at least, none showed up on the machines.
Not everyone's vote spoils equally. Rio Arriba is 73 percent Hispanic. I asked nationally recognized vote statistician Dr. Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College to run a "regression" analysis of the Hispanic ballot spoilage in the Enchanted State. He calculated that a brown voter is 500 percent more likely to have their vote spoiled than a white voter. And It's worse for Native Americans. Vote spoilage is epidemic near Indian reservations.
Votes don't spoil because they're left out of the fridge. It comes down to the machines. Just as poor people get the crap schools and crap hospitals, they get the crap voting machines.
It's bad for Hispanics; but for African Americans, it's a ballot-box holocaust. An embarrassing little fact of American democracy is that, typically, two million votes are spoiled in national elections, registering no vote or invalidated. Based on studies by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Harvard Law School Civil Rights project, about 54 percent of those ballots are cast by African Americans. One million black votes vanished—phffft!
There's a lot of politicians in both parties that like it that way; suppression of the minority is the way they get elected. Whoever is to blame, on Tuesday, the Kerry-Edwards ticket will take the hit. In Rio Arriba, Democrats have an eight-to-one registration edge over Republicans. Among African American voters...well, you can do the arithmetic yourself.
The total number of votes siphoned out of America's voting booths is so large, you won't find the issue reported in our self-glorifying news media. The one million missing black, brown and red votes spoiled, plus the hundreds of thousands flushed from voter registries, is our nation's dark secret: an apartheid democracy in which wealthy white votes almost always count, but minorities are often purged or challenged or simply not recorded. In effect, Kerry is down by a million votes before one lever is pulled, card punched or touch-screen touched.
Greg Palast, contributing editor to Harper's magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's Newsnight. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD (www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm).
Here's an interesting analyis:
http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/01/1713046.php
QUOTE
Exit Poll Data Does Not Match Pre-Election Polls
by Tim Lohrentz Thursday, Jan. 06, 2005 at 5:14 AM
plan-act@juno.com
The national exit poll data was adjusted during the early morning hours of November 3. This report reveals many inconsistencies in this adjustment, including a weighting process that leaves impossible results, such as 104% turnout of the Bush 2000 voters.
download PDF (101.9 kibibytes) http://www.indybay.org/uploads/preelectoralpolls.pdf
It is now well known that the final exit polls from the November 2 Presidential contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry were adjusted (weighted) once actual vote tallies arrived in order to match the reported vote. This paper will first demonstrate that the weighting process was invalid. In other words, it is mathematically impossible to match the exit polls to the reported results of the popular vote. Then this paper will compare exit poll results to pre-election poll trends over the last month leading up to the election and then provide some other clues regarding which states may have fraudulent results.
Weighting of the Exit Poll Is Impossible
The final fixed exit poll shows how the electorate of 2004 broke down compared to the voting in the 2000 election. And what it reveals is that in order for Bush to win, a virtually impossible thing happened: every single Bush voter from 2000 also went out and again voted in 2004. That is, no Bush voter passed away from 2000 to 2004 or for whatever reason, could not vote in 2004. It is perhaps the greatest electoral miracle that Karl Rove has ever performed!
A very large number of people voted – 122.6 million. The 'fixed' exit poll says that of these, 43 percent voted for Bush in 2000, 37 percent voted for Gore in 2000, 3 percent voted for Nader/Other in 2000, and 17 percent did not vote in 2000.
Translating this into numbers means that of the 122.6 million voters in 2004, 52.6 million voted for Bush in 2000, 45.4 million voted for Gore in 2000, 3.7 million voted for Nader/Other in 2000, and 20.8 million did not vote in 2000. Really?
In 2000, Bush received only 50,456,169 votes. So 104 percent of Bush's 2000 base returned to polls, compared to 89 percent of Kerry's base. This is impossible! And this is important, because the exit polls show that Kerry won new voters, Kerry won voters who did not vote in 2000 (54 to 45), and Kerry overwhelming won voters who voted for Nader or someone else in 2000 (71 to 21). Also, the exit poll shows that Bush and Kerry swapped about an equal number of voters in 2004 -- ten percent of Gore voters went for Bush in 2004 while nine percent of Bush (2000) voters went for Kerry in 2004.
So the only way that Bush won the election in 2004, was by having a better turnout of his base. His turnout was so good, that it was mathematically impossible! First, obviously some Bush voters passed away from 2000 to 2004. Let's be conservative and say that only 2 percent of Bush's 2000 voters died between 2000 and 2004 - that is, just over 1,000,000. That leaves us with at most 49,450,000 potential Bush-2000 voters. This means that even if every single Bush voter from 2000 returned to the polls in 2004, it could only be 40.3 percent of the electorate, not 43%. And even that assumption is highly unlikely.
The fixed exit polls are trying to convince us of a Bush win based on a mathematical impossibility.
Equally important, once you change the weighting of the poll, the whole thing, all the questions, need to be re-weighted. This can not be explained by the margin of error. Once you do the re-weighting, the reported results will be outside the margin of error of the exit poll. In other words, the national popular vote total is impossible. It is far outside the possible margin of error of the national exit poll survey.
Finding the Clues – Where Did Fraud Occur?
The exit polls were manipulated to produce at least three results. One is to get the exit polls to match the "actual" Bush margin of victory in key battleground states, the second is to match results in non-key states where the reported vote did not match the initial exit poll in order to boost Bush’s popular vote “mandate” and the third was to get the exit polls to show that there was not a major swing toward Kerry during the last 24 hours. The latter was necessary because if Kerry really had been winning 60 or 65 percent of the undecideds on election day (the people who made up their mind on the day of election), then it would be really hard to explain how Bush wound up winning both the popular vote and the electoral college. Instead, the exit polls were fixed to state that nationally Kerry won the voters who decided on the day of election by a scant margin of 52 to 45. The exit pollsters had a major challenge though – if they fixed the exit polls in the same way for all the states, it would be too obvious that something was amiss.
The first question is how legitimate are the results in the key battleground states that Bush ended up winning. According to the exit polls, the reason that Kerry lost Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada, and Florida is not that he didn't close well but rather that he was coming from so far behind. For instance, among voters who made up their minds in the last week, we see that Kerry was winning the undecided vote quite well – anywhere from a low of a 56 to 43 margin in Iowa to a high of a 59 to 38 margin in New Mexico.
Clearly the problem was not the lack of a strong finish on Kerry’s part. Rather, according to the fixed exit polls, the problem was that Kerry was too far behind and had too much ground to make up. Of voters who made up their minds more than one month before the election, Kerry lost big: He was so far behind by the time of the first debate on September 30, he could not make up the difference. According to the exit poll data, his deficit one month out ranged from seven points down in New Mexico to 12 points down in Florida.
But was Kerry really that far behind with a month to go? In order to analyze this question, pre-election polling data was examined. Some caution is in order because the pre-election surveys are worded to tease out responses that may not be very solid. But at least a similar bias should be shown in all states. The polling data from the state-wide polls of likely voters carried out between Sept. 15 and Oct. 2 (one month to 7 weeks before the election) was examined and compared to the data above from the exit poll. The state-wide pre-election polls showed a virtual tie in New Mexico and a four point lead for Bush in Iowa and a five point lead for Bush in Ohio, Nevada, and Florida. More importantly, the November 2 exit poll data was underestimating Kerry’s percentage one month out from the election by 4 to 7 points, with the highest totals being New Mexico and Florida.
The state-wide pre-election polls conducted five to seven weeks before the election would suggest that the exit poll data is off – that it consistently was over-estimating the margin between Bush and Kerry among voters who decided more than one month before the election who they were going to vote for. In the three states with the most polls done – Iowa, Ohio, and Florida – the exit poll over-estimated the Bush lead by 4 to 7 percentage points. Most significantly, in Florida the exit poll gave Bush a margin of 56-44 among voters who decided at least 30 days out. Yet the pre-election polls conducted between Sept. 15 and Oct. 2 suggest that Bush had only a 4 or 5 point lead then.
One can argue that Bush voters who responded to the exit poll made up their minds earlier than Kerry voters, so that there is a built in bias in these polls. This argument would say that the difference in pre-election poll data and exit poll data simply reflects that a number of Kerry voters told pre-election pollsters in September that they were going to vote for Kerry but then (collectively) told exit pollsters on November 2 that they actually made up their minds sometime during the last month before the election. This is possible.
One way to test out this argument is to look at the five closest battleground states where Kerry won. How much bias was there in the pre-election polls in those states? The same methodology was used – gathering the data from all the state-wide polls of likely voters and finding the average for Bush and Kerry. On average there was no bias in the polls. Only one state, Michigan, had a bias similar to the five battleground states won by Bush, although the bias was smaller than in any of the five “red” states. On the other hand, Wisconsin showed the opposite bias. There, either the pre-election polls were over-estimating the Bush lead 30 days out or the exit poll was over-estimating Kerry’s support one month before the election.
This is worth repeating – in the five battleground states won by Kerry the November 2 exit poll data matched the pre-election polls regarding voters’ inclination more than one month before the election!
by Tim Lohrentz Thursday, Jan. 06, 2005 at 5:14 AM
plan-act@juno.com
The national exit poll data was adjusted during the early morning hours of November 3. This report reveals many inconsistencies in this adjustment, including a weighting process that leaves impossible results, such as 104% turnout of the Bush 2000 voters.
download PDF (101.9 kibibytes) http://www.indybay.org/uploads/preelectoralpolls.pdf
It is now well known that the final exit polls from the November 2 Presidential contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry were adjusted (weighted) once actual vote tallies arrived in order to match the reported vote. This paper will first demonstrate that the weighting process was invalid. In other words, it is mathematically impossible to match the exit polls to the reported results of the popular vote. Then this paper will compare exit poll results to pre-election poll trends over the last month leading up to the election and then provide some other clues regarding which states may have fraudulent results.
Weighting of the Exit Poll Is Impossible
The final fixed exit poll shows how the electorate of 2004 broke down compared to the voting in the 2000 election. And what it reveals is that in order for Bush to win, a virtually impossible thing happened: every single Bush voter from 2000 also went out and again voted in 2004. That is, no Bush voter passed away from 2000 to 2004 or for whatever reason, could not vote in 2004. It is perhaps the greatest electoral miracle that Karl Rove has ever performed!
A very large number of people voted – 122.6 million. The 'fixed' exit poll says that of these, 43 percent voted for Bush in 2000, 37 percent voted for Gore in 2000, 3 percent voted for Nader/Other in 2000, and 17 percent did not vote in 2000.
Translating this into numbers means that of the 122.6 million voters in 2004, 52.6 million voted for Bush in 2000, 45.4 million voted for Gore in 2000, 3.7 million voted for Nader/Other in 2000, and 20.8 million did not vote in 2000. Really?
In 2000, Bush received only 50,456,169 votes. So 104 percent of Bush's 2000 base returned to polls, compared to 89 percent of Kerry's base. This is impossible! And this is important, because the exit polls show that Kerry won new voters, Kerry won voters who did not vote in 2000 (54 to 45), and Kerry overwhelming won voters who voted for Nader or someone else in 2000 (71 to 21). Also, the exit poll shows that Bush and Kerry swapped about an equal number of voters in 2004 -- ten percent of Gore voters went for Bush in 2004 while nine percent of Bush (2000) voters went for Kerry in 2004.
So the only way that Bush won the election in 2004, was by having a better turnout of his base. His turnout was so good, that it was mathematically impossible! First, obviously some Bush voters passed away from 2000 to 2004. Let's be conservative and say that only 2 percent of Bush's 2000 voters died between 2000 and 2004 - that is, just over 1,000,000. That leaves us with at most 49,450,000 potential Bush-2000 voters. This means that even if every single Bush voter from 2000 returned to the polls in 2004, it could only be 40.3 percent of the electorate, not 43%. And even that assumption is highly unlikely.
The fixed exit polls are trying to convince us of a Bush win based on a mathematical impossibility.
Equally important, once you change the weighting of the poll, the whole thing, all the questions, need to be re-weighted. This can not be explained by the margin of error. Once you do the re-weighting, the reported results will be outside the margin of error of the exit poll. In other words, the national popular vote total is impossible. It is far outside the possible margin of error of the national exit poll survey.
Finding the Clues – Where Did Fraud Occur?
The exit polls were manipulated to produce at least three results. One is to get the exit polls to match the "actual" Bush margin of victory in key battleground states, the second is to match results in non-key states where the reported vote did not match the initial exit poll in order to boost Bush’s popular vote “mandate” and the third was to get the exit polls to show that there was not a major swing toward Kerry during the last 24 hours. The latter was necessary because if Kerry really had been winning 60 or 65 percent of the undecideds on election day (the people who made up their mind on the day of election), then it would be really hard to explain how Bush wound up winning both the popular vote and the electoral college. Instead, the exit polls were fixed to state that nationally Kerry won the voters who decided on the day of election by a scant margin of 52 to 45. The exit pollsters had a major challenge though – if they fixed the exit polls in the same way for all the states, it would be too obvious that something was amiss.
The first question is how legitimate are the results in the key battleground states that Bush ended up winning. According to the exit polls, the reason that Kerry lost Iowa, New Mexico, Ohio, Nevada, and Florida is not that he didn't close well but rather that he was coming from so far behind. For instance, among voters who made up their minds in the last week, we see that Kerry was winning the undecided vote quite well – anywhere from a low of a 56 to 43 margin in Iowa to a high of a 59 to 38 margin in New Mexico.
Clearly the problem was not the lack of a strong finish on Kerry’s part. Rather, according to the fixed exit polls, the problem was that Kerry was too far behind and had too much ground to make up. Of voters who made up their minds more than one month before the election, Kerry lost big: He was so far behind by the time of the first debate on September 30, he could not make up the difference. According to the exit poll data, his deficit one month out ranged from seven points down in New Mexico to 12 points down in Florida.
But was Kerry really that far behind with a month to go? In order to analyze this question, pre-election polling data was examined. Some caution is in order because the pre-election surveys are worded to tease out responses that may not be very solid. But at least a similar bias should be shown in all states. The polling data from the state-wide polls of likely voters carried out between Sept. 15 and Oct. 2 (one month to 7 weeks before the election) was examined and compared to the data above from the exit poll. The state-wide pre-election polls showed a virtual tie in New Mexico and a four point lead for Bush in Iowa and a five point lead for Bush in Ohio, Nevada, and Florida. More importantly, the November 2 exit poll data was underestimating Kerry’s percentage one month out from the election by 4 to 7 points, with the highest totals being New Mexico and Florida.
The state-wide pre-election polls conducted five to seven weeks before the election would suggest that the exit poll data is off – that it consistently was over-estimating the margin between Bush and Kerry among voters who decided more than one month before the election who they were going to vote for. In the three states with the most polls done – Iowa, Ohio, and Florida – the exit poll over-estimated the Bush lead by 4 to 7 percentage points. Most significantly, in Florida the exit poll gave Bush a margin of 56-44 among voters who decided at least 30 days out. Yet the pre-election polls conducted between Sept. 15 and Oct. 2 suggest that Bush had only a 4 or 5 point lead then.
One can argue that Bush voters who responded to the exit poll made up their minds earlier than Kerry voters, so that there is a built in bias in these polls. This argument would say that the difference in pre-election poll data and exit poll data simply reflects that a number of Kerry voters told pre-election pollsters in September that they were going to vote for Kerry but then (collectively) told exit pollsters on November 2 that they actually made up their minds sometime during the last month before the election. This is possible.
One way to test out this argument is to look at the five closest battleground states where Kerry won. How much bias was there in the pre-election polls in those states? The same methodology was used – gathering the data from all the state-wide polls of likely voters and finding the average for Bush and Kerry. On average there was no bias in the polls. Only one state, Michigan, had a bias similar to the five battleground states won by Bush, although the bias was smaller than in any of the five “red” states. On the other hand, Wisconsin showed the opposite bias. There, either the pre-election polls were over-estimating the Bush lead 30 days out or the exit poll was over-estimating Kerry’s support one month before the election.
This is worth repeating – in the five battleground states won by Kerry the November 2 exit poll data matched the pre-election polls regarding voters’ inclination more than one month before the election!