Manjoo and the pollsters feel justified in ignoring these indicators based on fanciful possibilities put forward by a aggressive defender of the election, political scientist Mark Lindeman. Manjoo writes:
"For instance, in the Bush strongholds -- where the average completion rate was 56 percent -- it's possible that only 53 percent of those who voted for Bush were willing to be polled, while people who voted for Kerry participated at a higher 59 percent rate. Meanwhile, in the Kerry strongholds, where Mitofsky found a 53 percent average completion rate, it's possible that Bush voters participated 50 percent of the time, while Kerry voters were willing to be interviewed 56 percent of the time. In this scenario, the averages work out to the same ones Kennedy cited."
Unfortunately, even beyond the fact that there is no evidence at all to support the suppositions, Lindeman is flat-out wrong in his calculations. Claiming that the average of a 59 percent response rate for Democratic voters and a 53 percent response rate for Republican voters is 56 percent (59 plus 53, divided by two) neglects the fact that we know that there are at least four times as many Republican voters as Democratic voters in this sample -- because it comes from the set of precincts identified by the pollsters as precincts where 80 percent or more of the voters voted for Bush.
The correct calculation would be that the response rate among Kerry voters had to be at least 68 percent to balance out four times as many Bush voters responding at a 53 percent rate.
Data in the Edison/Mitofsky report informs us of the WPD rates by precinct partisanship is a whopping 10.0 percentage points in these Bush strongholds (as compared to virtually zero in the Kerry strongholds). US CountVotes analysts reconciled these two sets of numbers (the math is not difficult, but more than I'll take on here, although I do explore this in the book), and calculated that response rate among Kerry supporters would have to be about 84 percent in Bush strongholds to reconcile the numbers.
All of which might leave you wondering why so many Democrats would be willing to stick out their necks when they're in enemy territory, surrounded by Republicans, but not willing to respond to the poll in friendlier territory, where their response rate is only 56 percent. Of course, the converse dilemma presents itself in Kerry strongholds.
What about the historic overrepresentation of Democrats in the exit polls?
Democratic overrepresentation, or overstatement, in the exit polls is the same thing as Democratic undercount in the vote tallies. And, as we point out in the book, a Democratic undercount is historically established. The undercount is the votes that are discarded, such as overvotes, undervotes and uncounted provisional ballots. In each presidential election a documented 2 to 3 percent of total votes are discarded.
What about flaws in the exit polls?
The pollsters do say in their report that the exit poll results were not due to "sampling error," which means that they did choose the right representative precincts for the state and national surveys. Manjoo cites the "interviewer characteristics" the report examines as another source of exit poll error. The report sorts and evaluates poll results by examining interviewer characteristics of the poll-takers: completion rates, age, gender, level of education, date of hire, amount of training, and interactions between poll-takers. The pollsters conclude that the disparity is greater under four conditions:
Now, in no way can we rule out the possibility of interviewer effects, but we do point out, first, that this explanation is at best unlikely to provide a complete explanation for the discrepancy. It is significant to note that discrepancies were high for all interviewer characteristics (for example, the disparity is higher when the interviewer is farthest away, but even when the interviewer was inside the polling place there was a 5.3 percentage point disparity). So even if it is right to attribute polling error to interviewer characteristics, it is unlikely that such error could account for all of the discrepancy.
But none of these correlations explain the disparity between the exit polls and the official count. It's understandable that there might be more errors when the interviewer is farther away from the polls, but these errors should balance out, sometimes favoring Kerry, sometimes Bush.
The exit pollsters assume that groups with lower mean Within Precinct Disparities (WPDs) are most accurate. But the data belie that assumption. In fact, interviewers with advanced degrees had lowest miss rates and lowest refusal rates, suggesting that their results are likely the most accurate. And those with the least education had the highest absolute error, meaning that their results were all over the place. Their results were the least accurate.
The flip side to this lack of a "clear and convincing" polling explanation is that the exit pollsters have failed to explain or even consider many indicators highly suggestive of fraud: The 10.0 percentage point WPD in Bush strongholds is an astounding number in and of itself. It means that in precincts where according to the official count Bush received 90 percent and Kerry 10 percent, exit polls indicated that, on average, Bush would get 85 percent and Kerry 15 percent. In other words, in Bush strongholds across the country, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly.
And this is just one in a series of indicators of fraud. An analysis of state-by-state differentials in WPD indicates that discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities, and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints.
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I appreciate the efforts of Rolling Stone and Salon to bring this issue to public attention. Given the many transgressions and statistical improbabilities in the 2004 presidential election, we have an obligation to question it. And those responsible have an obligation to investigate.
Absence of scrutiny does not make a democracy function; democratic processes do. In the case of the 2004 presidential election, the absence of reporting on the election controversy has left the public highly suspicious. A Zogby Interactive online poll one month after the election revealed that 28.5 percent of respondents thought that questions about the accuracy of the official count in the election were "very valid," and another 14 percent thought that concerns were "somewhat valid." In other words, 42 percent of all Americans had immediate concerns about what had happened on Nov. 2, 2004. So long as the suspicions are left to fester, the role of elections to confer legitimacy on elected officials has already been lost.
About the writer
Steven S. Freeman co-authored "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count" (Seven Stories Press) with Joel Bleifuss, editor-in-chief of In These Times magazine.
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