Who Can Really Say?

Compare and contrast.

First, Greg Palast, the voter fraud gadfly:

Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. At 1:05 a.m. Wednesday morning, CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. The exit polls were later combined with?and therefore contaminated by?the tabulated results, ultimately becoming a mirror of the apparent actual vote. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.

So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.

Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]

Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.

Apologies to all the gadflys out there.

Next, the Mystery Pollster:

Remember two things: First, the weighting of exit polls to match actual results is not new, but a standard procedure used since the early days of exit polls. Second, the weighting to actual returns does not occur all at once but continuously, precinct by precinct, over the course of election night. The exit pollsters weight their sample to match incoming actual results for each sampled precinct as actual returns become available. Thus, the exit poll results get continuously updated in what bloggers might call ?real time.? Some of the online postings may reflect that updating; some may not. We have no way of knowing. There is also one more step: The sampled precincts are still just a sample, so even when all the sampled precincts have been weighted to the actual result, sampling error may cause the survey to differ from the statewide result. At that point, near the end of vote counting, the exit pollsters will apply another overall weight so that the vote on the survey matches the actual statewide result.

Although the data now in the public domain is not much help, the raw data puts the exit pollster in a strong position to evaluate some of the speculation about vote fraud. If, for example, someone tampered with tabulations from touch screen voting machines that lacked a paper trail, then an analysis of the poll data should show a greater discrepancy in precincts with such machines.

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One last thought: I said I am dubious that this data will show evidence of vote tampering. Why? No pollster ever wants to be wrong, to have their numbers called into question. Yet, fair or not, that is exactly what people are saying about last week?s exit polls.

The NEP officials who ran this year?s exit polling, Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, are people I greatly respect. They are not partisans, but extraordinarily skilled survey methodologists. Mitofsky, along with a small team of colleagues at CBS, helped invent the exit poll almost 40 years ago, along with many other methods and models still in use by survey researchers today. Although no one is infallible, Mitofsky is deservedly a legend in the field of survey research. Yet despite that stellar standing, last week?s perceived glitch still threatens his reputation and the continuing livelihood of his collegues.

So apply a bit of common sense: If Mitofsky has evidence that his exit poll was right but the vote tally was wrong, do you believe for a minute that he would suppress it? I certainly do not.

Aside from whichever candidate one supported and whether or not that candidate won, the best thing about this election is that it won't be tainted by the likes of Palast although he's giving it his best shot.

Palast is pretty sad, which is to say that were he funny and a filmmaker he'd give Michael Moore a run for his money. Right Dan?