Something Stinks When Exit Polls and Official Counts Don't Match [View all]

[Coyotl]

Last edited Wed Nov 16, 2016, 09:27 PM - Edit history (3)

Something Stinks When Exit Polls and Official Counts Don't Match

A discussion with an exit poll expert reveals an electoral house of cards.
By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet November 14, 2016

Media exit polls in last Tuesday's election suggested Democrats were going to win the White House and the Senate, yet the reported vote counts brought a GOP landslide. While theories abound about what happened, election integrity activists say the exit poll descrepancy underscores the need for a far more transparent and accountable process. AlterNet's Steven Rosenfeld interviewed Jonathan Simon, a longtime exit poll sleuth and author of Code Red: Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century. Simon explains why exit polls are a critical clue in the breakdown of the voting process.

Steven Rosenfeld: Let's start by telling people about your involvement with election integrity and tracking exit polls.

Jonathan Simon: I've been working in this field which we call election forensics for about 15 years, since the 2000 election. Certainly things kicked in with the 2004 election and the exit polls there. I was actually the person who downloaded the exit polls that were left up on the CNN website which then made it possible to compare the unadjusted exit polls—and we can explain that in a bit—but comparing the exit polls with the vote counts and show through all those disparities that there was reason to suspect possibly manipulation of the vote counts.

It has deep roots and basically looking at every election since has found varying, but at the same time, fairly pervasive patterns of what we call the "red shift" and where the exit polls are to the west of the vote counts. We track that, we record it and we attempt to analyze it and get some sort of handle on what has caused it as a phenomenon. Then we look at all sorts of forensic data, accumulative vote share, tables and hand counts where we can find them. I've always been particularly conscientious about trying to take whatever baseline we're using and validate that baseline, so that if we have an exit poll for instance, we try to make sure something that has been skewed by over-sampling one party or over-sampling people of color or something to that effect and validate it by that.

We try as carefully as we can. I've been doing this pretty steadily now for the last 15 years along with some of my colleagues, and I would be the first to acknowledge that there is a lot of smoke there and there's a lot of probative value to this work, but that bringing it forth as ironclad proof is very problematic. So we're stuck at a place where I pivoted to is looking at the risk involved in having a computerized, privatized, unobservable vote counting system and just taking on faith that that system is not being manipulated when there is such a obvious vulnerability (on which the experts strongly agree) of the system to malfeasance and manipulation. That is where I've tended to go, is to look at that risk rather than screaming fraud from the rooftops and claiming proof.

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This is the red shift between exit polls and vote tally in the battleground states.
These are the states that had to be rigged according polls before the election.

8.444% Ohio 18
5.935% North Carolina 15
5.543% Pennsylvania 20
4.826% Wisconsin 10
2.576% Florida 29



Michigan (16) exit polls were accurate, but 12,000 votes would flip the state at last update. http://www.270towin.com/ at 306-232 with MI undecided.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=forums&srcid=MTI5Njc1MzU0MDY5ODE2MjQ5OTQBMTE4ODAyMjM5Mzg0MTU0NTczNjgBQTV0T0ZCc1BCQUFKATAuMQEBdjI&authuser=0

http://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president