Bloggers blamed for misleading poll information

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1103eln-exit-poll-blogs03-ON.html

Associated Press

NEW YORK - News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry, but also blamed bloggers for spreading news that gave a misleading view of the presidential race.

The exit poll data was delivered at several points Tuesday to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and the Associated Press by the National Election Pool, a company formed in the wake of the networks' blown calls on election night 2000.

The first wave showed Kerry with a lead of three percentage points in Florida and four points in Ohio - both battleground states won by President Bush when the votes were actually counted, giving the president his margin of victory. advertisement

"Once one part of it is in question and is wrong, it kind of puts the whole thing in question," said Marty Ryan, Fox News Channel's executive producer for political coverage. "It was disappointing. ... During the primary season, it worked very well for us, we were happy with it. But that was not good last night."

And since the bloggers can fight back least...

By taking away eyeball time that the corporate press sells to advertisers the semi-professional and amatuer bloggers theaten the livelihood --er-- six figure salaries of those who have made it to corporate presshood.

In fact, one corporate writer actually begged us to do so.

Money real taking away eyeballs from corporate press is what scares the news media and they will try to adapt to whomever is takin g away eyeballs the most.

You don't have to have a blog to do so, just get out on the mixed message boards and into mixed chats.

Do what we do best, get the facts, make jokes, be concerned, but out there were we can change minds too, because that not only scares the corporate press, it scares Karl Rove.

We need to reach people more one on one because our party isn't able to match the Rovian mind control machine that depends heavily on close personal thought manipulation. I firmly believe that telling people the truth dispells a lot of that propaganda because I'm seen what happens when we can get our message out to the mixed boards without being swamped by paid right wingers

We need to start this week on the next election telling people our side.

Two birds with one stone.

"It was disappointing. ... During the primary season, it worked very well for us, we were happy with it. But that was not good last night."

and the bloggers were not playing by the network's rules.

How did blogs influence the polls? The polls were taken. Are they saying Dems stayed home because they thought they won? If anything it pumped them up.

that if every 30th vote that was punched in for Kerry was converted to a Bush vote, then we would be able to explain why a tried and true, accurate method of exit polling was suddenly way off. They act like the variables they are blaming the inaccuracies on are new. They're not. But the Liebold computer vote switchers are.

When I heard that the exit polls and the results in FL and OH were off 5-6 pts and I SAW THE SHOT OF CHIMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE LOOKING ASHEN AND WEAK, IT REMINDED ME OF HOW HE LOOKED WHEN THE FIX WAS IN ON 9-11 WHEN HE LIHOP AS HE READ THE FUCKEN BOOK, i knew we were done.

Smear anything and anyone who challenges, threatens, and exposes their lies.

"It's the bloggers, stupid!"

:puke:

How do they even make the connection? Who was conducting the polls, bloggers? I didn't think so.

Here's my tinfoil hat theory: Republicans lied when they left the polls making it seem like the vote was shifting to Kerry.

But then, the more reasonable explanation is Diebold and the like.

Here's my tinfoil hat theory: Republicans lied when they left the polls making it seem like the vote was shifting to Kerry.

Everyone who didn't drink KKKRove's koolaid knows the media are covering up for the companies whose fraudomatic e-vote machines threw the election to Bush, cheating Kerry out of his rightful place in the Oval Office. The media know there's a real conspiracy between the voting machine vendors, the GOP, and the BFEE, but have been told to lie about that fact and dismiss those who suspect the truth as "conspiracy theorists" to sell the illusion that Bush has the mandate he lacked in 2000.

that's "internetS"

Is that their own people were influenced into thinking Kerry was winning big because the bloggers were spreading erroneous polls that they (networks) had commissioned.

and think simply that "bloggers are spreading erroneous information".

that it what their argument appears to be. I think this idea that exit polls are unreliable was just born yesterday. Every other year we've been hearing how the exit polls are the most reliable because they survey actual voters.

Or did they forget that CNN posted that exit polls on their website... that is until they changed the data to more acurately reflect the vote count at 1:40 in the morning.

http://www.buzzflash.com/analysis/04/11/ana04025.html



(On the other hand: Organize and Smash the State! :))

Taxpayers get hit with a bill for $3600 (or more) for EACH of
the touch-screen "voting" computers, which are nothing
more than dedicated COUNTERS except that they are
marketed by Republicans (who vowed to ensure Bush,s
victory); and the American people have not been allowed
to examine or certify the software in these
units.
 
Here is how easy it is to "make magic"
 
-- we need COUNTERS - (B) = Bush; (K) = Kerry; (V) = Vote; (T) = Tally
 
1. If V = B, add 1 to B
2. If T = 8, add 1 to B; Clear T; Skip 3
3. If V = K, add 1 to K; Add 1 to T
 
This extremely simple bit of programming would shift 12% of
the vote from Kerry to Bush, it would defy exit polls, and it
would make it look like Bush had a huge popular
win.

(Note: the link below links to SoCalDem's thread here
on DU. But I can't get that link to work, so...)

http://rense.com/general59/steI.HTM


The computer voting machines were fixed. This will be
proven when differences between the recorded votes for
Bush and the exit poll results are found to be higher in
a statistically significant way in areas where computer
voting machines were used. This will have to be
carefully studied, as the Republicans were very clever and
not greedy. They only manipulated the results in the key
states and only to the extent they needed to win. The
Democrats have only themselves to blame for this mess,
having had plenty of notice of the problem and failing to
complain about it until it was too late.

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/

Bush and the exit poll results are found to be higher in
a statistically significant way in areas where computer
voting machines were used."

Who is doing this study? It's the exact question I had.

This country is in BIG, BIG trouble.

People just lied in the exit polls.

This is what the talking heads and TV pundits are telling us today...That for the first time all the exit polls were mysteriously wrong!....Sorry, I DON'T BELIEVE IT!
P.S....I don't know what the Repubs did, but something fishy happened!

Just OH and FL

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/53438/6175

coast to coast were wrong....That is NOT TO BE BELIEVED by reasonable people!

Blame the exit poll so no one will notice you changed the votes.

But now this time, not only blame the exit polls but blame our trusted sources of news of spreading "erroneous" exit poll results.

:puke:

:scared:

And to second guess ourselves. "Bloggers are unrealiable!", "Michael Moore is a raving radical!", "San Francisco's Mayor lost us the election by allowing gay marraige!" It is an attempt to get us to doubt our convictions and to divide us. They are already conniving to win 2006 and 2008.

if something else is wrong (bloggers) then in simple (actually falacious) logic, the votes are right.

Just like the 60 minutes NG document being a fake became evidence for the assertion that Bush served honorably etc.

This is a fake story. It says nothing factual, while giving the appearance of being so. It is planted specifically to get us to distrust our news sources.

the vote tally is wrong. just like FL in 2000.

i do not recall elections before 2000 where the exit polling was incorrect. anyone care to refresh my feeble memory?

The exit polls were probably right but the point of this report is to get us to doubt on the intentions of our bloggers. Let's not be distracted from what they are trying to do here. They are trying to get us to distrust our most trusted sources for news.

distrust the blogsphere, in general

But not only the blogosphere but any liberal or progressive voice out there.

We are angry and the powers that be are already working to deflect that anger against Bush, et.al., and to get us to direct it against ourselves.

they cheated again, is there anything we can do? :mad:

races, but not the big ones, not nation-wide. That's why they've been doing exit polling for what, 40+ years. Because they have proven to be reliable to within 2-3 points, consistantly.

This was a brilliant misdirection play.

Knowing the Kerry side is incredibly computer based, they used our own media to puncture the intensity of our GOTV efforts in midday.

We were the fools for falling for it.

No, no, no! The exit polls were correct! This is disinformation to get us to distrust the bloggers! Your post shows that it is working. You are undermining the credibility of the bloggers by giving credence to the lie that they were deliberately disinformed.

Luminous Animal has it right! WE know the truth.

Talking about disinformation. Yikes!

GOTV efforts in midday'. Are you saying we thought we had it in the bag and quit working, based on reading blogs?

I was out hanging door hangers at 6:45, bad back, bad hips and all. I had to quit at 11:00 because of exhaustion -- not a kid anymore -- but I didn't see a computer till after 5:00. And nobody at the HQ I was in was wasting time hovering over blogs or TVs. We knew there wouldn't be any meaningful results until 7:00.

The polls were right. It was the votes that were wrong. And I'm not going to roll over for Rove in the name of national unity.

...is at it again. Talk about drinking the koolaid! They sure have a lot of "wood" to be saying that....sheesh!

But we'll never be able to prove them right because we can't really give those touch screen precincts a good review now that the count has been stopped.

However, we may find out that the touchscreen were fine. Maybe the problem was in padded voter registrations?

Only voters do. If there is a discrepancy, it's in the counting, not in the registrations.

...and like in 2000, it was correct. The Peoples' Media (bloggers DU, the internet) is a threat to corprat media.

We don't need corprat media and we should STOP watching and patronizing them, except for the purpose of repudiation of them and theirs.

All the bloggers did is disseminate the information. Had nothing to do with coming up with the actual numbers. Besides most warned that exit polls by themselves are often flawed and innacurate and to not put alot of faith in them without actual elction raw data to back them up

That's why we keep using them. On extremely close, tight races, where 1 or 2 points can swing it either way, you might distrust them. If they are showing a 5+ point lead, you can trust that there is a lead there.

nt

...it is because they don't want you to look the other. The fix was in a long time ago. Kerry had the momentum and the votes. The result defies logic--and should not be trusted.

So. What do we DO about it?

and all I saw "reported" were long lines, and possibly that being a good sign for Team Kerry! If there were exit polls, they were attributed to the mainstream press.

I find it funny Fox is fussing over "erroneous and misleading" information from the "internets", which never makes the claim to be "fair and balanced" LOL.

Changed the exit poll data at 2 am on November 3rd on its website. A lot of people out there saw that on this site.

the election - they have to cover for electronic voting machine theft.

Blaming bloggers is a way to divert attention from the real issue: Why were exit polls, which are normally very reliable indicators, so far off?

Answer: Manipulated results from electronic voting machines.

fraudulent vote. Do NOT let them get away with this. It is why they did away with exit polls after the 2000 theft. It is what allows you to discern the theft. They have stolen three elections and the Governor's recall in California. How many more do we let them get away with?

ProjectEVote - A project to produce 'at cost' an auditable e-voting system.

this election was such a fraud.... kerry was a f*cking setup
form the beginning- he was supposed to be dull and
boring, thus making it believeable that the chimp would
win again. If instead of kerry, we had nominated
_any_ intellingent, honest American- dubya would have lost in
a landslide. Kerry threw it all the
way.

think about it- here is THE authority on vote fraud telling
all candidates not to concede for ten days while we audit
the election- so what's kerry do- concedes right away and
says "now it's time to unite" what a f*cking joke.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org

We can still win this thing you know.
We can count the votes,(hasn't been done)
get rid of the machines and go back to paper.
You know, the way Canada and Venezuela do it.

ProjectEVote - A project to produce an auditable e-voting system 'at cost'

Look, maybe he is doing Nixon thing. Nixon conceded gracefully but he continued litigation about voting fraud.

Since perception is everything and media declared * as a winner, maybe he did not have much choice though it was still too early he could wait at least until all provisional votes are counted.

Anyway, e-voting fraud is right now the biggest thing. It is bigger than Kerry 'loss'. ( Yes, I believe they stole it again.)

The point is if we don't act quickly with DNC ( since they are official ), we will never win since there will be always a fix.

They know exit poll was correct like 2000 CBS call was correct!!

Hertopos

Kerry concedes...which is not binding...KNOWS that there is voter fraud, sends out the dogs, behind the scenes through 3rd party people...gets this stuff looked into... Lo and behold, Kerry wins...the election is turned around - it's not certified yet and Kerry looks as if he took the high road and he's then accepted more as Pres... Maybe too far fetched but Kerry holding up the election and going to court while a war is going on might not be as smart a play as conceding and yet let the counting and investigating go on...

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated"?
J. Rotten sex pistols
I really believed Kerry was in it to win it after the debates but man was I wrong.

I knew it was a Skull and Bones presentation in the begining after Kerry was Deibolded ahead of Dean. Hell, maybe even Dean is in on it?

This sucks.

If so, he's not going to uncover any e-voting fraud!

He benefited from Diebold!

He, His Wife and Bush all in on it togather!

All of them are intimately connected to Skull+Bones!

I believe that the REPUGNANTS undermined Dean on purpose to get Kerry in knowing that he would be easier to beat...and the black box fraud would be easier to pull off. There would be much greater voter turnout for Dean and they would not have been able to balance it out with the black box fraud!!!
I am disgusted with Kerry and his call for conciliation...Everyone here know the story of the Scorpion and the Turtle? Bush is the Scorpion and the rest of us are the Turtle and there is absolutely no reason to believe that he will do anything different that he did last time when he had even less of a reason to think he was actually the true POTUS!!!! This country is f*cked. The constitution and the Bill of Rights will be made into toilet paper by Bush and his Christian Reconstructionist/Dominionists, financed by Howard Ahmanson will be in charge, and we will all be put into internment camps if we are not stoned to death. Believe me, this is not the mad raving of a tinfoil hat crazy. Do a google on these names, and see their connections to Deibold, SAIC, ES&S, and Sequoia. They are all related, and their goal is to run this country..and they are only 5 senators away from doing it!!! In 2006 they will win those 5 Senate seats if we continue to use the black boxes!!!

It'll go something like this:

"In order to prevent discredited and unreliable news sources from spreading dubious information aimed at misleading the Amurkan people, the TiN Initiative will require all news sources to apply for a license ($100K) and to undergo rigorous integrity monitoring by the new Office of News Integrity."

I can't imagine why else they would want to pick on bloggers, unless they ultimately aim to shut them down and thereby prevent the truth from ever getting out.

E-voting fraud is much bigger than Kerry loss. We even don't know which race we lost because of this fraud. They are doing what they are very good at 'preemptive attack spin'. Don't underestimate our enemy. We actually have 2 years to turn the tide if we can fix this e-voting fraud and if we send more Dem and Green candidate to local election. Do you know that DNC has been abandoning so many local elections without fight? Meanwhile our enemy is gaining momentum. In fact, Christian coalition became such a strong influence by gaining so many local political appointments and congressional posts.

Stop expecting anything positive from our main media. However, we can still influence them if we can gain certain momentum.
They are even trying to discredit all left leaning bloggers at the same time they will use their bloggers at its full potential.

We need to act now. What the hell DNC doing. I thought Kerry people are at least trying to do Nixon thing. 'Graceful concession' but non-stop litigation afterwards.

Hertopos

I waited for DNC to do something in 2000.

"They've got a plan, I said. Something to trip
the Rep. up. Give them enough rope and so on and
so forth.

But.... nothing. Like Charlie, Lucy and the football.

From Sarahlee:

CRITICAL TALKING POINTS
• Count every vote – including all provisional ballots
• Demand systematic investigation of voting irregularities in
local places nationwide - e.g. provisional balloting
issues, absentee ballot issues, discrepancies with exit
polling data, voting machine problems, polling places
moved
• Our message to the Democrats: don’t concede until every
vote is counted
• All eyes on Ohio

IDEAS FOR SIGNS

Count Every Vote!
Dems: Don't Concede!
Investigate Voter Suppression!
No Voter Disenfranchisement!
All Eyes on Ohio!
Provisional Ballots are Votes too!
Democracy Means all Votes!

Our number one priority now shouldn't be trying to turn this election around - it's already lost. It should be, first to destroy public confidence in e-voting (at least e-voting without an audit trail), and second to begin introducing alternatives.

I hope Mike Moore is already working on a documentary about this election!

It might as well be those mysterious, and probably seditious entities called "bloggers". It couldn't possibly be good old massive vote fraud. Since Kerry caved so fast, there will never be a proper examination of just how foul the whole election probably was. That is the really pity of his early concession.

I think we have seen the last honest U.S. federal election for many years.

Mega-million corporations now blaming bloggers for "misleading them" regarding exit polling?

They are f*cking DISGRACEFUL!!!!

How lazy can they get? They are paid millions to act like government stenographers, now they recognize they get their actual ground work from bloggers.

We have possibly the worst media in the planet, only saturated with hard cash.

Of course, the beloved unbiased media could never be at fault. :eyes:

Exit polls were unerringly accurate in 2000 and 2002. What went wrong this time? Black box voting. The exit polls were "wrong" in the states with black box voting and Republican governors and Secretaries of State.

Nobody had any motive to lie to the exit pollers. After 2000, Republicans and Democrats alike knew that the name of the game is perception - if it's close, the vital thing is the project the impression that your guy won bigtime. So everyone would have told the pollers the truth about their votes.

Thousands - hundreds of thousands - of Democrats in Ohio and Florida and elsewhere voted absentee or provisional specifically so that there would be a paper record of their vote. What was their reward? The election was called, conceded, and accepted before those envelopes were even opened.

The bastards stole it, folks, and they stole it with complete impunity. It doesn't matter what the grassroots does now. Kerry conceded (and I was a big Kerry supporter in the primaries!). Whatever we say or do, it'll be a non-story or a human interest piece about crazy die-hard Democrats.

Remember, they eventually counted the 2000 votes in Florida, and discovered that Gore won. Nobody cared - it was purely a matter of academic interest. Hey, whaddya know. Gore won. Isn't that interesting. Doesn't change anything, though. Bush is still President. Same song, second verse.

The exit polls were reconfigured right on election night to conform to the results. How was that correction done? Was that done in 2002 or in the angry barrage they got from the GOP after 2000?

Does that mean the new judgmental factors were reconfigured after previous stolen elections in 2002 especially when the SAME discrepancies among the usual suspects arose in that kinder , cleaner election? One in which I might add the same Democratic polls also went in thinking just like they did this year that they had a good chance.

Which leads me to the brilliantly unchanging DNC with regard to the fraud they can no more see and imagine than the paid news shibboleths who made utter fools out of themselves on national TV by making the fine art of explaining away a mystery and the obvious a smooth art best done off the cuff with no facts available except issue charts. Did THEY reconfigure polls for EITHER fraud or the loss in 2002 or did they presume that this time, surely, turnout would wash away those little discrepancies they blamed entirely on their own issue misjudgment and sundry other small stuff. Also in fact that was the year the Bush GOTV effort took them "by surprise."

In any event the reasons given being the SAME in 2002 don't match up with the turnout by any stretch even if you wanted to risk generosity to the devil.

In short, the polls, ours and theirs you could argue were already skewed and I don't think the Dems paid their internals for their bubbly optimism. The exit polls matched OURS. That's ironically two dubious undemocratic measures against the supposedly real thing.

That leaves the coin flippers in the voting booth that the Dems love to bet on. Is that a significant factor? I don't think so. Common sense tells most people with a supply of it the vote was stolen. We know how(and did nothing as a party to eradicate it- the single issue after 2000 worth pursuing). Our party acceded mainly to reforms that would prevent a fight over recorded votes like Florida- and got it in part. That will get much much worse.

Truthout, I think, featured an article by someone recommending the site electionline.org to that site scroll down to the end paragraphs. It recommends online voting and the proven goodie goodness of voting machines. And then tell me what internal polls you want to trust next time.

the exit polls were altered to conform to the announced results of the vote counts (in 2004). In other words, they began with the vote count numbers in favor of Bush, and then changed the exit poll numbers so that, while coming as close as possible to the previously reported proportional breakdowns, the results were the same as the vote "count" results.

"News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry,"

I'm sure their crack researchers are all over this. I am just holding my breath in anticipation of what our fourth estate will uncover. What warriors!

What the fuck.

one of those dang intenets rumors

They're right...what fools we've all been to abandon fair and balanced mainstream media.</sarcasm>