Exit Polls, and Why the Primary Was Not Stolen From Bernie Sanders

[Fast Walker 52]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-the-primary-was-not-stolen-from-bernie-sanders.html

The background music of my life is the steady drumbeat of tweets about how Hillary Clinton stole the presidential primary from Bernie Sanders.

It’s there when I wake up in the morning. It’s there when I go to sleep at night. The constant thrumming of election fraud conspiracists is like the noise made by that board game in the movie “Jumanji.”

I didn’t write about this during the primary season, since I didn’t want to dignify the views of conspiracy theorists. But they’re still going.

The allegations are remarkably consistent. They go like this: Mr. Sanders did better in the early exit polls than he did in the final result. Therefore, Mrs. Clinton probably stole the election. The exit polls are a sufficient basis to make this determination, in the eyes of the conspiracists, because exit polls are used internationally to detect fraud. They’re supposedly very accurate and “well controlled” (where this phrase comes from, I don’t know). Furthermore, they say, the exit polls were right on the G.O.P. side — confirming the underlying validity of the methodology and raising suspicions about the Democratic vote count.

All of this starts with a basic misconception: that the exit polls are usually pretty good.

I have no idea where this idea comes from, because everyone who knows anything about early exit polls knows that they’re not great.
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The piece goes on, and gives good explanations for the discrepancy. I have heard endlessly about his exit poll thing and finally am happy to see a good explanation

[Gothmog]

1. The exit poll lawsuit is so bad that it is funny

[Cha]

2. Thank you, Fast Walker!

[Gothmog]

3. The claim that exit polls show voter fraud is really stupid

I know that some idiots are buying this theory and I pity them

[Fast Walker 52]

4. to be fair-- I used to really think Bush stole the 2004 election via electronic vote fraud

And I still wonder. But looking more into this primary election controversy, I see that exit polls really are useless for determining election fraud, unfortunately.

Of course, there are people really won't accept that the primary was honest.

Richard Charnin, who has done a LOT of this work, seems to be really deluded.

There's this guy too:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/28/alabama-democratic-primary-proves-new-york-times-nate-cohn-wrong-about-exit-polling/

But this interview he did was most interesting, and kind of settled my thoughts on how bad exit polls are for determining fraud.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/11/an-interview-with-lead-edison-exit-pollster-joe-lenski/