According to the exit poll data compiled from 28 states where data was available, nearly every single race where there was a discrepancy between exit poll and final vote data went to Trump.Edison Research is the firm which conducts exit polls. The head of that firm, Joe Lenski, says that exit polls in foreign lands can be used to validate elections because they are designed differently from the exit polls used here. In truth, the differences are not so profound as Lenski would have you believe.
Especially noteworthy are the following states: Ohio (8.5 percent discrepancy), North Carolina (5.9 percent discrepancy), Pennsylvania (5.6 percent discrepancy), Wisconsin (4.9 percent discrepancy), Florida (2.6 percent discrepancy). In these states, each of which was considered essential for Trump to win the election, the discrepancies between exit poll data and final counts were enough to flip the state to Trump. In other words, had the final results roughly approximated the exit poll data, Clinton would have won each of these states (Ohio was essentially tied). Put simply, the variance in the final counts gave the election to Trump.
With that in mind, consider the fact that exit polls are by far the most reliable barometer of election outcomes because, unlike predictive polling, they measure what has already happened – a vote cast a minute earlier – rather than voter opinions about what they will do in the future. And while there has long been a corporate media campaign to discredit exit polling as inaccurate and invalid as a measure of election results, this baseless assertion is at odds with many experts whose PhDs and experience with polling and election integrity issues certainly carry more weight than the ravings of mainstream liberal media hacks.
And of course, if exit poll data were so wildly inaccurate, perhaps then the US Government should answer for why it uses precisely such data to verify and validate elections in the developing world.
Besides, why should we not validate our voting results with the same tools used to validate elections held in the developing world?
Perhaps Mr. Lenski should elaborate on why Edison exit polls “catch manipulations” in foreign countries, but simply cannot do so in the US? It’s unlikely Lenski would be able to answer the question truthfully because in doing so he’d reveal that this assertion is based on political considerations and complexities rather than methodological ones. Perhaps Lenski could also explain why he invokes the “margin of error” argument when he knows perfectly well that the results in Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Florida are well beyond the margin of error. Is this deliberate obfuscation? It certainly seems that way.We may fairly presume that Lenski is a well-educated man. Therefore, he must understand that he is engaging in a logical fallacy. When the exits disagree with the official tallies, his firm manipulates the exits numbers to make them conform -- and yet we are supposed to rest assured that the official tallies are accurate because the exit polling data offers confirmation.
That type of anti-reasoning is what logicians mean when they use the term "begging the question," a phrase which many people misunderstand. You beg the question when you offer an argument in which the answer you prefer is presumed to be true from the outset. Have you ever met a fundamentalist who told you that God must be real because the Bible says so, and we know the Bible to be accurate because it was written by God? That, my friends, is begging the question -- or petitio principii, if you want to be fancy about it. In a formal sense, little or nothing differentiates the fundamentalist's argument from Mr. Lenski's.
(Many people say "That begs the question" when they mean to say "That raises the question." I presume that my readers know better than to make that error.)
Let us not fear to cry foul in the face of this obvious evidence of election tampering. After all, the Republicans have no such qualms: Remember what Trump said before the election. And look at how the Republicans are now trying to undermine the vote for the governor of North Carolina.
A couple of posts down, I asked (vis-a-vis the suspicious exit polls): How do we get the word out? Well, Counterpunch is a good start. Next stops: Democratic Underground. TPM. HuffPo. MSNBC. The NYT and the WP.
As they used to say in 2008: Get this to Keith!
On a completely unrelated note: Here's a literary poser which I may have mentioned here before, although I don't recall doing so.
What is the secret relationship between The Epic of Gilgamesh (the first great saga) and The Exorcist?
10 comments:
I doubt there many wives too embarrassed to say they voted for Trump with their husband standing next to them. If anything, I could see wives who disagree with their husbands saying they voted Trump when they actually voted Clinton.
Draitser should understand there is no reason the white working class should be opposed to deporting illegitimate economic competition.
However as far as his main thrust which is to project rejection of the legitimacy of Trump's presidency (but not however to the benefit of Clinton as he makes clear)...are you not concerned that such potential long term destabilizing could benefit Russia?
This discrepancy between Trump's votes and exit poll results is easily explained. There are many people who are embarrassed to admit that they voted for Trump. Certainly in my case, if an exit poller showed and asked who I voted fore I would nave said Jill Stein. No question about that. Who on the left would ever admit they voted for Trump. But I do know that many did.
Leading up to this election an Italian from Rome said he rarely heard anyone admit that they had voted for Berlunsconi. However in his first election for President he carried Rome. Now how did that happen?
"This discrepancy between Trump's votes and exit poll results is easily explained. There are many people who are embarrassed to admit that they voted for Trump."
Myth.
You have constructed a short story in your head, and then you presume your fiction to be the truth, even though you have no evidence. You could as easily say that voters lied about voting for Trump because they were afraid that Godzilla would eat them.
Do you really think that voters in small red counties in Wisconsin are much bothered by this alleged embarrassment factor? I should imagine that a female Clinton voter is more likely to be afraid to say in front of her crimson-necked beer-swilling husband that she voted for Hillary.
At any rate, you don't know how exit polls work. Those polled are handed a form which they fill out IN SECRET. The exit pollsters don't know the candidate who got that person's vote unless the polled personage insists on bragging about it.
So where is the embarrassment?
You haven't a leg to stand on, Theodore.
BTW: I don't know how elections are run in Italy, so I cannot know for sure that those elections were clean. Perhaps you know more about that situation.
I am pretty certain that Edison Research is the same group that conducted the 2004 polls.
In 2004 Edison Media and Mitofsky International had been hired to conduct exit polls for the nation's major broadcasters and the Associated Press (the US National Election Pool (NEP)). They released the results of their extensive, nation-wide exit polls to their clients at 4 pm on election day. Their data indicated that Kerry would win by 3%.
Exit polls are so accurate that the discrepancy between the final vote count and the exit polling is almost always within 0.1%. In Ohio it was over 2% points. Such findings in a third world country would be seen as proof of vote-rigging.
Edison/Mitofsky refused to release their raw data for investigation, citing commercial confidentiality. They claimed that exit polling overstated Kerry's share of the vote in 26 states by more than one standard error and to Bush in 4 states. But these numbers were simply not credible to other professionals and Edison/Mitofsky stand condemned as being politically compromised.
Statistical reports from experts Dr. Steven F. Freeman (University of Pennsylvania, 2004) and Professor Ron Baiman and eleven colleagues (University of Illinois at Chicago's Institute of Government and Public Affairs, 2005) were damning: on the best interpretations the chance of the exit polls/ voting pattern discrepancies ranged from 1 in 1240 to 1 in 16.5 million.
The major US broadcasters (which were politically sympathetic to Bush and the Republicans) were unsettled by public criticisms of the polling discrepancies and had Edison/Mitofsky (their paid pollsters) conduct a private review which -- surprise! surprise! -- found their own polls to be accurate.
Kerry was robbed.
When I did exit polling, it was done by giving clipboard to person to be exit polled. They would fill it out in private and then came lace the ecit ballot in a ballot box. It was private.
Someone's working on a plan http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/activists-urge-hillary-clinton-to-challenge-election-results.html?mid=facebook_nymag
So now we have to compare exit polling where there were paper ballots only vs exit polling where there machine ballots only. I would be really intrigued to know how that went.
If there was a discrepancy, it could be enlarged. Meaning IF paper ballot locations had much more accurate exit polling than machine ballot locations, then yes, put me down for machine fraud of some type.
Are you talking about Pazuzu ? --- D
D: Correct! Or half-correct.
The bad guy in the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is the demon Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest and all-around evil mofo. The bad guy in "The Exorcist" is the demon Pazuzu. In ancient Sumerian mythology, Humbaba and Pazuzu are brothers.
joseph: I suspect that Trump's decision not to go after Clinton is meant to cajole her into NOT challenging the election results. Of course, Trump doesn't understand that it is Congress, not the President, who appoints a special prosecutor.
The story you cite is very important, and I will soon devote a post to it.
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