Exit polls: breaking news

Exit Polls Legacy blog posts

Two late breaking updates that I did not want to get lost in the very long previous post on the Unexplained Poll Discrepancy paper, although both are highly relevant.

The first is news from the USA Today‘s Mark Memmott that the National Election Pool (NEP) intends to withhold exit poll results until later in the day in future elections.  Money quote:

Sheldon Gawiser, chairman of the polling consortium’s steering committee and NBC’s director of elections, said Wednesday that in future elections, no data will be sent to the networks and AP until at least 4 p.m. ET. The "first wave" of data that bloggers posted this year, he said, was just too raw to be valuable to "people who don’t know what they’re dealing with."

Second, and even more relevant to what we’ve been discussing, blogger Mayflower Hill posts an exclusive interview with Warren Mitofsky.  Using the method of analysis MP anticipated, Mitofsky explains that his data show no evidence of fraud involving electronic voting machines.  Money quote:

One possibility he was able to rule out, though, is touch screen voting machines that don’t leave any paper trail being used to defraud the election. To prove this, he broke down precincts based on the type of voting machine that was used and compared the voting returns from those precincts with his own exit polls. None of the precincts with touch screen computers that don’t leave paper trails, or any other type of machine for that matter, had vote returns that deviated from his exit poll numbers once the average 1.9% non-response bias was taken into account.

The interview includes much that confirms items in the previous post.  Read it all.  (And if you’re here today via Kaus or Today’s Paper’s, welcome, and please don’t miss the previous post!).

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.