The Right 2004 Election Conspiracy Theory

Usually we have to read between the lines to find the truth in a news story, but in this case it's best to read the last line first.

washingtonpost.com 
Report Acknowledges Inaccuracies in 2004 Exit Polls

By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 20, 2005; Page A06

Interviewing for the 2004 exit polls was the most inaccurate of any in the past five presidential elections as procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John F. Kerry, according to a report released yesterday by the research firms responsible for the flawed surveys.

I’m no conspiracy theorist (though I’ve worked for plenty) but I have to pause at this carefully placed propaganda.  A short article on page 6 about what internet chatter is treating as a major scandal hardly seems like aggressive reporting, especially in this story.  I’ve never seen a worse example of burying the lead.  In this story, it’s in the last sentence.

The exit pollsters emphasized that the flaws did not produce a single incorrect projection of the winner in a state on election night. But "there were 26 states in which the estimates produced by the exit poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry . . . and there were four states in which the exit poll estimates overstated the vote for George W. Bush," said Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research and Warren Mitofsky of Mitofsky International.

Not a single incorrect prediction – well, congratulations!  But wasn’t this the election where the needle moved hardly at all (hello New Hampshire) as practically all the states that went red or blue last time did the same thing this time?  All this, but no suprises?

The polling firms presented their findings in a much-anticipated report to the sponsors of the Election Day surveys, a consortium of news organizations that includes ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN and the Associated Press.

Throughout election night, the national exit poll showed the Massachusetts senator leading President Bush by 51 percent to 48 percent. But when all the votes were counted, it was Bush who won by slightly less than three percentage points. Larger discrepancies between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote were found in exit polls conducted in several states. At the request of the media sponsors, Mitofsky and Lenski are continuing to examine exit polling in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two critical battleground states where the poll results were off.

Return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, or at least a few months ago.  Election Night and the news anchors are squirming.  Bob Schieffer says on CBS, Dan, we’ve been here all night and so far every state is going the same way it did four years ago.  Meanwhile, while the world waits for Ohio, exit polls show a result that ends up being completely, totally wrong.  Why sugarcoat the exit poll debacle? Because the media remains invested in them.  Exit polls are a way to be first to the finish line, and no media outlet wants to be second.

The differences between the final exit poll results and the vote count revived criticisms of the exit polls fueled by consecutive election-night debacles in 2000 and 2002. They also fueled assertions that the exit poll results were accurate and that it was the vote count that was flawed or deliberately manipulated to deliver the election to Bush.

When were exit polls not a debacle?  Probably during those close, nail-biting elections of 1984 and 1996, when exit polls boldly announced re-election victories for popular presidents.  Four years ago, we heard similar charges.

The analysis found no evidence of fraud resulting from the rigging of voting equipment, a contention made repeatedly by those who question the 2004 vote.

I got a lot of those internet messages about voting fraud, Diebold machines and the Trilateral Commission (Ok, I made that last one up) but I didn’t put  much stock in them.  I’m sure there were problems, even some skullduggery, in Ohio, but not 60,000 votes worth.  Now, suspicious minds might want to go back to a story that was reported after the election, and which is the real truth here.  As I said before, you’re going to have to wait before you read it in this article.

Lenski and Mitofsky compared the exit-polling results with the final vote tally in 1,460 precincts where interviews were conducted and vote returns were available.

"Our investigation of the differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count point to one primary reason: in a number of precincts a higher than average within-precinct error most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters. . . . While the size of the average exit poll error has varied [in past elections], it was higher in 2004 than in previous years for which we have data," Lenski and Mitofsky wrote.

In other words, we reported that Kerry was winning, but he ended up losing, except more people told us Kerry was winning, so what we reported was still true, only it was false.  We were for it before we were against it.

But they acknowledged in the report that they remain at a loss to explain precisely why Bush supporters, or Republicans generally, were more likely to refuse to be interviewed than Kerry voters.

Hold it.  Could we have some documentary evidence that Bush supporters hid their light under a bushel while Kerry people were more talkative? How widespread was this phenomenon?  Some first person accounts of voters running screaming into their BMWs as exit pollers chase them with clipboards?

Their investigation identified other factors that contributed to errors in the 2004 exit polls. Interviewing in precincts where polltakers were required to stand farther away from the polls were less accurate than those where interviewers had easier access to voters leaving the polling places. Poor weather conditions also pushed down cooperation rates. They suspected that there were more young people working as interviewers in 2004, which they said was another potential source of error.

Stop the presses.  Here are some interesting new ideas which the reporters opt to save for the next to the last graf (which, remember, contains the deeply buried essential truth).  How many polltakers were standing how far away?  Is there data to support this?  And how about some more about this “it’s the kids’ fault” argument?  Were the college kids in Phish T-shirts genetically inclined to seek out similar life forms?

Adding to the confusion, programming errors were discovered and corrected in the afternoon of Election Day, and a technical problem severely disrupted access to the system for nearly two hours late on election night.

Aha!  Boing!  Finally we get the truth that readers of Slate and other sources started hearing about within 48 hours of the election. This lead is buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.  Bereft of life, this story has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible.  If you want to run after a juicy conspiracy theory, focus on the mysteriously timed computer glitch, which kept fresh information about the exit polls from the networks during the peak viewing hours of election night.  Who was served by rumors that Bush was behind? Somebody subpoena Roger Ailes please.