Illegitimate election

A key source for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responds to criticism of his analysis of the 2004 election

By Steven F. Freeman

Read more: Opinion, Farhad Manjoo

June 12, 2006 | Because Robert F Kennedy Jr. based much of the discussion in his Rolling Stone article on interviews with me and on a close reading of my new book, coauthored with Joel Bleifuss, "Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count," and because Kennedy cites in his thorough footnotes many of the same key sources we worked from, I feel compelled to address directly several statements that Farhad Manjoo makes about the exit polls, both in his original Salon article and in his response to Kennedy's response to that article -- statements that are either incorrect or based on misunderstandings about exit polls and the 2004 results.

We regret that Manjoo did not request an advance copy of our book before writing his article. Had he done so, I'm confident that many of the basic errors he made could have been avoided.

Are exit polls usually accurate?

Yes, they are. On Nov. 2, 2004, Manjoo's source Mark Blumenthal, the Mystery Pollster, had this to say: "I have always been a fan of exit polls. Despite the occasional controversies, exit polls remain among the most sophisticated and reliable political surveys available." Properly done exit polls are highly accurate. Given the large sample size in U.S. exit polls, they ought to be accurate within 1 to 2 percentage points of the official count.

The 2004 Election Day exit poll was a well-funded effort conducted by the most experienced pollsters in the business, and it represented a broad spectrum of media interests, from Fox to CBS. The sample included 114,559 respondents in the 50 state exit polls, conducted at 1,480 precincts throughout the nation. A subsample of these was selected to provide a sample representative of the U.S. electorate for the national exit poll: 11,719 Election Day voters and 500 absentee and early voters. The National Election Pool, NEP, a consortium of six news organizations (ABC, AP, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC) pooled resources to conduct a thorough survey of each state and the nation. NEP in turn contracted two respected firms, Joe Lenski's Edison Media research and Warren Mitofsky's Mitofsky International, to conduct the polls.

Prior to 2000, no one even debated the accuracy of exit polls. Scholars, practitioners and critics all agreed. In 1987, Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote that exit polls "are the most useful analytic tool developed in my working life." Political scientists George Edwards and Stephen Wayne, in their book "Presidential Leadership: Politics and Policy," put it this way: "The problems with exit polls lie in their accuracy (rather than inaccuracy). They give the press access to predict the outcome before the elections have been concluded."

An exit pollster himself for more than 20 years, St. Louis University professor of political science Ken Warren has never had an error greater than 2 percent, except one time -- in a 1982 St. Louis primary. In that election, massive voter fraud was subsequently uncovered.

Do the exit polls indicate a Kerry electoral victory?

Yes, as Kennedy reported, they do. Manjoo references a report I had written shortly after the election to refute Kennedy's claim that exit poll data indicated a Kerry victory in Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

At that time, the only data available (and these were hard to come by!) were screen shots preserved from the CNN Web site on Election Night (before the data were "corrected" so as to conform to the count). Whether these data indicate a Kerry victory was a matter of debate, but as any of Manjoo's experts should have known, these data have been superseded by the more detailed data released later by the National Election Pool exit pollsters. The detailed 77-page report was released on Jan. 19, 2005, Bush's Inauguration Eve. Reporters who filed stories on it that night had no time to review it properly; they could only summarize the report's conclusion. Their stories appeared under misleading headlines such as MSNBC's "Exit Polls Prove That Bush Won." In fact, the report makes no such claim.

Manjoo -- though not his triumvirate of expert sources -- may be partly excused for his ignorance on this matter. The National Exit Pool unnecessarily complicates the data through secretive processes and misleading terminology. Despite requests from U.S. Congress members and faculty at leading research universities, the National Exit Pool has refused to release or even permit independent inspection of these data that would allow an investigation of suspected fraud. We only had access to "uncorrected" "early" exit poll data because of blogger leaks and a computer glitch. The National Exit Pool intended to, and eventually did, replace these CNN.com numbers with data "corrected" so as to conform to the official count, and implied that the Election Night CNN numbers were merely "early" results, rather than what they really were: end-of-day data reflecting the entire surveyed population.

Next page: Manjoo consistently understates the magnitude and improbability of the discrepancy