Lesson 1 from Last Night...Exit Polls and Polls

[Bullet1987]

A lot of the exit polling from last night was dead wrong. I remember someone posting 1st and 2nd wave exit polling leaks from MyDD and TPM last night and feeling good about Obama's chances. Lo and Behold...it was off on MA and NJ and a lot of other states as well.

If you're an Obama supporter, the polls in general were dead wrong. When they're all over the place the way they were...there's no way of telling who is right or who is wrong. So why put so much emphasis on them the way we do on DU? I don't get the obsession. SUSA seems to have been the MOST correct, but they've been dead wrong in the past. How reliable are they really? Zogby was dead, in the face, wrong last night...but he's been spot on in previous contests. How reliable is he really? Point is, polls are NOT the word of God. They don't gurantee anything...even trends can be wrong. That's something people talk up a lot on this board...who has the trend and upward momentum? Well Zogby must have been following some ghost trends...because he sure as HELL was wrong last night. This can happen to ANY polling firm, so just because SUSA was right last night doesn't mean they will be in future contests.

[mapleboard]

1. No one questions the count on proven hackable e-vote machines!

Why do you question the exit polls and not the count?

[Zynx]

3. The exit polls were off in a lot of states. Their samples are often no larger than pre-election

polls. There is enormous room for error.

[billyskank]

2. Exit polls used to be really reliable.

Unlike other kinds of polls, exit polls have a simple question: who did you vote for? For this reason exit polls have hitherto been very reliable.

Now exit polls are producing wild swings away from the recorded result. I can't help but smell a rat.

[grantcart]

4. they don't factor in the absentee vote which is gtting larger

[JukeJointJohnny]

5. Re: "they don't factor in the absentee vote which is gtting larger"

What is it about absentee voters that makes exit polls not representative of their votes? if 51% of exit polled voters say they voted for Obama and 41% for Clinton, then what is it about Clinton voters that you would have to say makes them so much more likely to vote absentee than Obama voters -- enough to reverse Clinton's deficit??? Frequent, significant deviations of announced results from exit polls raises the probability that fraud may have occurred. Why are these deviations more frequent in precincts using voting machines than in precincts with paper ballots? Is there something about using these voting machines that makes voters more likely to lie to exit pollsters?