Election fraud watch

What about the intra-Election Day, unweighted exit polls? Didn't those show Kerry winning? Actually, we have no idea. The polls may have showed Kerry on top in key states, but they may have also overstated Bush's margins in other states, Joe Lenski, who ran the exit polling for the media, told me. It's true that because sites like Slate and MyDD posted leaks, we have some clues that the polls were showing a very slight Kerry advantage -- but these leaks aren't a very firm basis on which to question the entire election. "And you can't trust all the leaks," Lenski added.

There is a claim that we know what the exit polling said because various news Web sites, including CNN's, inadvertently posted raw, unweighted exit poll information late into Election Night. For instance, see these two screenshots of CNN's Web site, the first showing Kerry doing very well in the exits shortly after midnight, and the second showing a sudden Bush surge. Some have claimed that the first image shows the raw survey data, and the second is the re-weighted sample. But that's probably not right.

As Mark Blumenthal, the Democratic pollster who runs the blog Mystery Pollster, notes, exit polling data is not re-weighted all at once -- it's done live, as the results come in, in different precincts at different times. "The exit pollsters weight their sample to match incoming actual results for each sampled precinct as actual returns become available," he writes. "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." All of the exit polling data that's currently in the public domain, then, is useless, and people -- like Dick Morris -- who make claims about why and how the polls were wrong are simply guessing.

Because we don't know much about the exit polling data, it's difficult to believe the argument offered by many readers that the exit polls on Election Day were largely consistent with the final results except in states that use electronic voting machines. Many readers pointed to this chart, which seems to show that states using paperless machines swung for Bush, while those with paper ballots agreed with the exit polls and went for Kerry.

But the chart isn't reliable. First, we don't know where the exit polling data is from. Second, the chart is just plain wrong on the technology used in many states: Only a handful of areas in Ohio used electronic machines; most voters there voted on punch-card systems, not e-voting, as the chart states. Similarly, just half of the voters in Florida use touch-screen systems -- the other half, as discussed, vote on paper-based optical scan machines. More generally, in most states voting equipment varies by county, so it's not accurate to characterize the entire state as voting one way, as the chart does.

As I said above, none of this is to say that there weren't any problems on Election Day -- or that activists should stop looking for problems. Election Protection, the nonpartisan group that sent thousands of volunteers into polling places to protect citizens' rights to vote, has asked all its volunteers to contact the media and congressional investigators with their accounts of what went wrong that day. Their stories are needed; I've spoken to a number of these volunteers, and a few reported seeing shocking incidents of ineptitude and possible fraud. An investigation is necessary, even if such an investigation does not -- as it probably won't -- call into question the final results.

In addition, some inquiry into what went wrong with the exit polls is also necessary. Thankfully, Lenski told me that such a probe is currently underway; there are many theories for why the polls might have skewed toward Kerry, Lenski said, but he's not ready to conclude anything just yet. At some point, though, he said we'll be able to find out what happened, and what the polls actually said.

At the same time, while it's important to keep working for cleaner, fairer, more trustworthy elections, it's also important to recognize that elections will always be messy. Elections are run by people, and people sometimes make stupid mistakes, and they're lazy, or they're biased and perhaps even looking to steal an election.

It's our job to keep these people in line. And we shouldn't accept the kind of ineptitude we saw in this election. It's simply unacceptable, for example, that Warren County, Ohio, locked down its vote-counting building on Election Day, or that voters across the country had to stand in line for hours in order to vote.

Unfortunately, many people who responded to my article assumed I was abiding these mistakes, that I was settling for mediocrity. "Your position disgusts me," one reader wrote. "We're not supposed to accept anything but the best we can do, and this is still light years from the best we can do. Please, shake off your apathy and strive for the unattainable perfection of our system in your every breath as all Americans should do."

To this -- at least to the latter part -- my response is simple: I agree.

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