A couple of things to keep in mind about exit polls, or at least the ones that were leaked. The first is that they are fairly shallow samples. With a national sample size of 12,000 you're talking about an average of 240 individuals per state which is about 1/4 the normal sample size used for political polls. That blows up the margin of error by a factor of 2 to plus/minus 7% - 10% instead of the usual 3 1/2% - 5%. And given that the early results were based on a fraction of the planned 12,000 interviews, the margin of error may widen by another factor of 1.5x to 2x. Second, early results are going to be heavily biased towards the individuals who vote early. That may or may not be a problem depending on whether those people are representative of the overall population. In this case they were heavily weighted towards Democratic women, who as a group, tended to vote more heavily towards Kerry. So if you combine the two, you have a result that is biased towards Kerry and has a huge margin of error, i.e. you got nothing. I haven't looked at it personally, but its my understanding that the final exit poll results were reasonably consistent with the actual results. Which ironically is what they were designed to do rather than as some kind of real time forecasting tool :-) --rick Ryan Ware wrote: >On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 15:20:43 -0600 (CST), Fred H Olson ><fholson at cohousing.org> wrote: > > >>The controversy continues about the recent election >>(See, for example, "Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked" >> http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm ) >>and there is an open source angle / possible remedy: >> >>The Open Voting Consortium (OVC) is a non-profit organization dedicated >>to the development, maintenance, and delivery of open voting systems for >>use in public elections. http://openvotingconsortium.org/ >> >>PS sorry about posting twice about Fedora Core 3 the other day, I >>erroneously concluded that old address for the list that I sent to first >>was not working. >> >>Fred >> >>-- >>Fred H. Olson Minneapolis,MN 55411 USA (near north Mpls) >>Communications for Justice - My new listserv org. UU, Linux >>My Link Page: http://fholson.cohousing.org Ham radio:WB0YQM >>fholson at cohousing.org 612-588-9532 (7am-10pm Central time) >> >> > >>From the article >""This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the >board as they were on election night. " > >Why so much stock in exit polls? People can lie. Pollsters can lie. >Personally I believe no exit polling should be allowed at all. Or if >it is, it may not be broadcast until after the polls have closed >across the entire country. > >"I suspect foul play." So do I, but from different people than the >articles author. > >_______________________________________________ >TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org >Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery >tclug-list at mn-linux.org >https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list