Morin or Moron? The Orwellian WP Strikes again.

www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-dyn/articles/A23580-2004Nov3.htmlExit Polls

New Woes Surface in Use of Estimates

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 4, 2004An Election Day filled with unexpected twists ended with a familiar question: What went wrong with the network exit polls?

In two previous national elections, the exit polls had behaved badly. Premature calls by the networks in Florida led to a congressional investigation in 2000. Two years later, a computer meltdown resulted in no release of data on Election Day.

On Tuesday, new problems surfaced: a 2 1/2-hour data blackout and samples that at one point or another included too many women, too few Westerners, not enough Republicans and a lead for Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in the national survey that persisted until late in the evening.

snip
Results based on the first few rounds of interviewing are usually only approximations of the final vote. Printouts warn that estimates of each candidate's support are unreliable and not for on-air use. Those estimates are untrustworthy because people who vote earlier in the day tend to be different from those who vote in the middle of the day or the evening. For instance, the early national sample Tuesday that was 59 percent female probably reflected that more women vote in the day than the evening.

That is why the early leaks anger Lenski. "The basic issue here is the leaking of this information without any sophisticated understanding or analysis, in a way that makes it look inaccurate," he said.

After the survey is completed and the votes are counted, the exit poll results are adjusted to reflect the actual vote, which in theory improves the accuracy of all the exit poll results, including the breakdown of the vote by age, gender and other characteristics.

before adjustments could be made. :think: :dunce:

to the claim that a set of inaccurate, early exit polls favoring Kerry was leaked to bloggers who spread them around. Were the "first few rounds of interviewing" leaked? Did they carry warnings that they were "unreliable"? I just finished reading a New Republic article that pretty much supports that thesis and have seen it in many other places. All I ever hear in response are Dick Morris-like claims that exit polls are never wrong -- but that doesn't directly address the nature of these early exit polls. Final exit polls are rarely wrong, of course, because they are brought into line with voting results.