November 10, 2004
GOP Wants to End Exit Polls
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
As a BuzzFlash Reader said: "Gee, let's make it REALLY easy to cheat..."
RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they're not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct.
GOP Wants News Organizations to Abandon Exit Polls (subscription req'd)
By Doug Halonen, TVWeek.comAfter early exit polls in Tuesday's election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.
In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. "I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession -- look at the precincts and the turnout, see who's turning out to vote," Mr. Gillespie said. "Don't build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be."
Mr. Gillespie conceded that the exit polls weren't reported directly by major news organizations themselves. "But with the Internet today, we're kidding ourselves, aren't we, to think that everybody in America doesn't know what the exit data is showing?" he said.
He also said he was personally affected by the early reports, discouraged by what he was seeing. "But I've been through this before," he said. "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day. In 2002, the exit returns were wrong on Election Day. And in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day -- all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."
Gillespie's implication that the final tally was correct, but the exit polls were wrong implies that our voting process is flawless and the people building our voting machines are nonpartisan and only interested in seeing a fair election.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the seriousness of the widespread problems we have with our voting systems or the highly compromised partisans running our voting machine companies knows a truly fair election is not possible.
Why would the GOP want to eliminate exit polls? Because it's the last semi-independent check of an election's accuracy and the only way to quickly determine if the votes cast for a candidate match those counted by the machines.
Sheldon Drobny: "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 polls, 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.'"
If the GOP eliminates exit polls before true verifiable voting is in place, there will be nothing left to warn us when our vote is stolen.
Lastly, note that Gillespie only refers to the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections -- all the major elections since George W. Bush dropped onto the national political scene -- as "being skewed against Republicans." There is a very good reason the exit polls showed more people voted for Democrats -- they did.
As Greg Palast said, "...the exit polls are accurate."
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS