[EM] advocacy by means of exit polls

[Michael Poole]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax writes:

> At 03:28 PM 8/27/2006, Michael Poole wrote:
>>There are well-known cases where exit polls get the margins wrong
>>(e.g. Phillipines 2004) or even the results wrong (e.g. USA 2004).
>
> I'd hardly call USA 2004 a "well-known case" of this. As Mr. Suter
> pointed out, serious controversy still exists regarding that
> situation. In the absence of some kind of verification, we really
> can't know for sure which occurred: error due to faulty polling, error
> due to actual deviation between voter actions and voter poll answers,
> or error due to vote fraud or other tabulation problems.

Since you and Mr. Suter clearly share some confusion over what "wrong"
meant, let me clarify it to mean any divergence from the official poll
results.

Whether the difference is intentional or accidental, or which counting
of public preference is less representative, is absolutely irrelevant
when it comes to determining what different results other methods
might reach: some discrepancy exists between the collected data and
the official results, and (ceteris paribus) this "margin of
discrepancy" is closely comparable between exit polling and phone
polling.

By which I meant to point out that, to get results as useful as you
are likely to ever get, you do not necessarily need to convince exit
pollsters to do things your way.  Phone pollsters could work as well.

Michael Poole