Reminder: Exit Poll Conspiracy Theories Are Totally Baseless

[creeksneakers2]

http://www.thenation.com/article/reminder-exit-poll-conspiracy-theories-are-totally-baseless/


This is from the Nation which is a publication I would expect to support Bernie.

"The laziest iteration of these claims is that the exit polls have diverged significantly from the final vote tallies in many of the states Clinton won, and the same pattern isn’t evident in Republican contests. That’s simply untrue. The exit polls have been off in a couple of states, but for the most part they’ve fallen within the margin of error in both Republican and Democratic contests.

But the conspiracy-mongers aren’t really talking about exit polls. Their claims are based on obsessively parsing preliminary exit poll data that some media outlets publish when the polls close—the same data that political reporters always tell people to take with a big grain of salt because they’re notoriously inaccurate. (Most of their claims are based on the work of Richard Charnin, who runs a blog devoted to “JFK conspiracy and systemic election fraud analysis.” Charnin’s also a mathematician, as Tim Robbins notes, but as we’ll see, his calculations aren’t the problem.)

The writers hyping this stuff claim that those preliminary data are “unadjusted,” and therefore offer a true barometer of voters’ responses as they leave their polling places. They say that the preliminary data are then adjusted to conform to the official results. In the hour or so between when the polls close and the final exit polls are released, they say, votes have consistently shifted away from Sanders, and this indicates that pollsters are covering up election fraud. (That last bit is often left implied lest people consider how wide-ranging this plot must be.) And, central to the whole story, they say that looking at the way these data shift is a vital means of identifying potential fraud.

Every single part of that is 100 percent wrong."

[Blue Meany]

1. I love the Nation, but Joshua Holland needs to read up on international standards for election

before declaring people who have been studying elections for years "100 percent wrong." While I agree that discrepancies between exit polls and votes do not prove fraud, in the best practices recommended for internationally monitored elections they do raise a red flag that should trigger an investigation. Likewise, using the "second digit test" (Benford's law) to identify areas in which there are unlikely sets of vote totals, does not, in itself, prove fraud. But, again, it is a red flag that should trigger an audit and/or an investigation. But these investigations almost never take place. Indeed there are red flags all over the American electoral system--the barring of citizen vote counting monitors in many places; the absence of automatic recounts of close races, in many places; allowing elections to be run and monitored by partisans; the inability to do a recount with many machines. I could go on and on...Fritakis et. al. may tend towards conspiracy theories, but there is a real issue about why we not allowed to know with any certainty who actual won any particular election. That's a pretty important issue to brush off in such a cavalier manner.