Could the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official count have been due to chance or random error?
No, the discrepancy could not have occurred by chance.
The likelihood of the three most significant anomalies -- the dramatic differences between the official count and the exit-poll projections posted on Election Night in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, the three critical swing states -- occurring together and all favoring the incumbent, Bush, is about one in 660,000. These odds are calculated by multiplying the individual likelihoods from each state, which I have calculated from the exit poll data and which we explain much more thoroughly in the book. This is quite relevant, because it means that there must be an explanation for these irrefutable differences between the vote count and the exit polls.
Are we saying that this means that Kerry must have really won the election?
The evidence that Kennedy cites to cast doubts on the election results come from diverse sources. The exit polls have never been cited as primary evidence of fraud, but only as a reason to take that primary evidence to heart. The title of our book is posed as a question: "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?" In the book, we treat the exit poll discrepancy as, in the words of Rep. John Conyers, "but one indicia or warning that something may have gone wrong -- either with the polling or with the election." We agree with Conyers that the election results should bear greater scrutiny. The discrepancy is an undisputed fact. The question is, What caused it?
There are only two possible explanations for the discrepancy: 1) far more Kerry voters than Bush voters agreed to fill out the questionnaires offered by pollsters, or 2) the votes were counted incorrectly. In our book, we examine these two possible scenarios as thoroughly as possible.
How significant is the discrepancy?
Manjoo, like Blumenthal and Mitofsky, consistently understate the magnitude and improbability of the discrepancy. A close look at the Ohio results proves this. The official count in the 2004 Ohio election credited Kerry with 48.7 percent of the vote. The 10.9 percentage point disparity between the official count and the exit poll results in those same precincts indicates that Bush's exit poll results was 5.45 percentage points lower than his official numbers and that Kerry's exit poll result was 5.45 percentage points higher, or 54.2 percent. A layman's intuition may tell you that the difference between 48.7 percent and 54.2 percent is not large and you might be tempted to write it off "to chance."
But bell-curve mathematics tells us that the expected range, the polling margin of error, should have been within 47.1 percent to 50.3 percent; 95 percent of the area under the bell curve -- 95 percent of the possible results -- is within this range. And 99 percent of the time the result would fall between 46.6 percent and 50.8 percent. If, in fact, 48.7 percent of the voters in the surveyed Ohio precincts had cast their ballots for Kerry, there should be an even probability of his receiving 48.7 percent or less in the exit poll survey.
Yet the exit poll result falls at the 54.2 percent mark. This is well outside the area where all the probability is located. In fact there is virtually no chance that such a survey would produce a result higher than around 51.9 percent. And this is just one state. All told, 26 states had similar anomalous results. The odds are astronomical that the exit poll results could have been so far off in the same direction in so many states.
We reiterate that this does not prove that the official vote count was fraudulent. What it does say is that the discrepancy between the official count and the exit polls can't be just a statistical fluke, but commands some kind of systematic explanation: Either the exit poll was deeply flawed or else the vote count was corrupted.
How do we measure the discrepancy?
This is the most technical part of the analysis, and it is explained at some length in our book. The Edison/Mitofsky report includes a particularly useful statistic, what the pollsters called "Within Precinct Error" and what we called "Within Precinct Disparity," as "error" implies "mistake" rather than "difference." In order to understand the discrepancy between the exit poll results and the official count, the best measure is the rendering of the discrepancy within the precinct itself.
In the book, we compare 1) the exit poll results by state for Bush and Kerry, 2) each state's official vote tally for Bush and Kerry, and 3) their differential. For example, in Nevada, the official count for Bush is 50.5 percent. The official count for Kerry is 47.9 percent. The difference between the two, the official margin of victory for Bush, is 2.6 percent of the vote.
In Nevada, the exit poll result calculated for Bush was 45.4 percent. The exit poll result calculated for Kerry was 52.9 percent. The difference in these exit poll results is a 7.5 percent margin of victory for Kerry. The Nevada differential -- the shift between the official count result, a 2.6 percentage point win for Bush, and the exit poll result, a 7.5 percentage point win for Kerry, was a huge 10.1 percentage points, as reported by the pollsters.
Because it is based on the precinct-level exit poll results, we call this the "Within Precinct Disparity." This is the difference between how people said they voted as they walked out of the voting booth, and the way those votes were officially recorded.
In New Mexico, there was a 7.8 percentage point disparity; and in Ohio, 10.9 percentage point disparity. Given respective official victory margins of 2.6, 0.8, and 2.1 percentage points in these states, we can say with a very high degree of certainty that exit poll results indicate a Kerry victory. Had Kerry won these states (or even just Ohio), he would have won the presidency.
Have the exit pollsters provided a "clear and convincing explanation" for the exit poll discrepancy?
No, they have not. Manjoo relies on a "hypothetical completion rate of 50 percent for Bush voters and 56 percent for Kerry voters" mentioned in the Edison/Mitofsky report to "explain" the discrepancy. Unfortunately, what I said to Kennedy is absolutely true: "The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it, but actually contradicts it." All independent indicators on poll participation suggest not lower, but higher response rates among Bush voters. One of these is that response rates are higher, not lower, in precincts where Bush voters predominated as compared to precincts where Kerry voters predominated. In precincts where Bush got 80 percent or more of the vote, an average of 56 percent of people who were approached volunteered to take part in the poll, while in precincts where Kerry got 80 percent or more of the vote, a lower average of 53 percent of people were willing to be surveyed.
Next page: Absence of scrutiny does not make a democracy function; democratic processes do