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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
New data gives ammunition to critics who believe the presidential election was stolen but still doesn't settle anything.
Jan 7, 2005 | Do Election Day exit polls prove that John Kerry actually beat George W. Bush? As Congress moved on Thursday to certify the electoral votes for the presidency, the polls -- which have fueled a great deal of skepticism over the legitimacy of Bush's win in the two months since the vote -- merit revisiting.
As we know, exit polls on Election Day generally pointed toward a Kerry win. The numbers, which weren't officially released by any of the media organizations that sponsored the polls but which nevertheless found their way to the Web during the course of the day, appeared to show Kerry slightly ahead in many battleground states as well as in the national popular vote count. To folks who suspect that Bush didn't actually win, those numbers are a key bit of evidence -- they provide a kind of moral authority to the movement, a reason to keep on fighting in Congress and in Ohio. But the argument has never had much force: Because much of what we know about the exit polls is based on leaks to Web sites and not on any kind of official release from media organizations, it's been difficult to place much faith in the polling numbers over the election results.
This week, though, Scoop, an online magazine based in New Zealand, released a stash of exit poll data that, on first glance, seems to strengthen the case of the people who question Bush's win. The documents appear to be the ones that the National Election Pool, the consortium of television networks that ran the poll, sent to subscribers (mostly newspapers) during the course of Election Day. It's unclear how Scoop came upon this information (the site didn't respond to requests). But the data more or less confirms what skeptics of Bush's victory have been saying all along -- that even late on Election Day, it looked as if Kerry had a good lead on Bush in the exits.
By examining a few of the dozens of documents obtained by Scoop -- which show, variously, the day's polling for House races and for the presidential race regionally and nationally, at three different times on Election Day -- we can get a good idea of how the race looked to news organizations as people went to the voting booths. At midday Eastern time, NEP interviewers had spoken to about 8,000 voters, 51 percent of whom said they'd voted for Kerry, 48 percent for Bush, and 1 percent for Ralph Nader. But there were some problems with those numbers: At that point in time, the NEP's poll (which can be seen on this PDF file) clearly included too many women -- 58 percent of the respondents were female, 42 percent were male, and the women who'd been interviewed preferred Kerry to Bush by 53 to 45 percent.
A more interesting set of numbers is available in this PDF file, which shows what the NEP knew later that evening -- at 7:33 p.m. Eastern time, when it had interviewed 11,027 people. By this time, the poll had a more natural distribution by gender -- 54 percent women, 46 percent men. Women still preferred Kerry to Bush, but what's interesting is that even at this late hour, with a better gender breakdown, Kerry still led Bush by a 3-point margin, 51 to 48. Because the NEP's exit poll included so many interviews, it had a relatively low margin of error -- only 1 percent. Kerry's lead in the poll exceeded that margin.
It isn't exactly earth-shattering news that the NEP had Kerry so far ahead of Bush at this late hour; many reporters who had access to the numbers (Salon was not a subscriber) have suggested that the polls showed Kerry winning, and Steve Coll, the managing editor of the Washington Post, disclosed the numbers in a an online chat on the paper's Web site. Still, the documents obtained by Scoop underline the starkness of the case -- as of the close of voting on the East Coast on Election Day, national political reporters and operatives in both campaigns had every reason to believe that Kerry was going to win and Bush was going to lose.
So what happened? Were the polls wrong, or were the election results wrong? Since the vote, a small group of pollsters, statisticians, mathematicians and political bloggers have been ruminating over these questions in great detail online, poring over all the available evidence to determine why the polls said what they did on Election Day -- and whether we should be mad at the NEP for screwing up the exit polling, or at Bush for stealing the election. Their work, while valiant, has not come to much, as they've been hampered by the secrecy of the NEP, which has offered vague suggestions that the poll was flawed but not any specific, comprehensive reasons for how and why the polls showed Kerry ahead. (Officials at the NEP, including its pollster, Warren Mitofsky, were not available to comment for this article. In November, Joe Lenski, one of the pollsters working on the exits, told me that the NEP would be conducting an in-depth study to determine if and how the poll failed; no such study has been released to the public.)
