[EM] advocacy by means of exit polls

[Michael Poole]

RLSuter at aol.com writes:

> In a message dated 8/29/06, Michael Pooles writes:
>
>>> It makes no sense in this case to define "wrong" as anything other
>>> than a wrong count of how people actually voted. Therefore, the
>>> official results of an election are just as capable of being wrong
>>> as exit poll results.
>>
>> Sure, but in practice, the count that actually matters is the one that
>> is called "official" (perhaps after a court or political contest).
>> That is the count that third-party polls try to predict, and the one
>> that they are usually judged against.
>
> Matters to whom and for what purposes? Have you been paying
> attention to the controversies surrounding the multiple problems
> with the increasing use in the U.S. of electronic voting machines
> produced by poorly regulated private companies? Are you aware
> of recent studies showing the extremely easy hackability of some
> machines? Are you aware of the large discrepancies between
> different states and even different counties in the same states
> regarding how elections are administered? If you were living in
> Ohio in 2004, as I was, and observing the extreme politicization
> of the election process by the Republican secretary of state
> who was overseeing the process, and if you had paid attention
> to the investigations by independent researchers in the months
> after the election showing more than enough evidence of error
> and fraud to warrant skepticism of the accuracy of the results
> officially certified by the same secretary of state, who arbitrarily
> delayed a recount until after the legal deadline for official
> certification had passed (for many of the Ohio details, see
> http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005), your
> thinking about what "actually matters" surely would be very
> different.

To paraphrase: Since you are convinced that there was official bias in
favor of Republicans during that election, I should stop trying to
convince you that well-structured exit polls are comparable to
well-structure telephone polls.

You have almost convinced me to give up but first please consider
this: The US is not the only place that exit polls have shown serious
errors.  Emotion-driven appeals to authority are not convincing and do
not address the substantive accuracy of exit polls.  My original mail
was not trying to make a general point about official poll accuracy,
but about exit polls.

I agree that there are lots of problems with the newer electronic
systems.  I am glad my state uses optical bubble-scan systems rather
than systems like Diebold's.  Older systems, harder-to-use systems,
and purely electronic systems need to be fixed so that votes are
accurately counted.  Human sources of error must be remedied.  But
that is all a separate question of whether exit polls are inherently
more accurate than phone polls.

Michael Poole