Steal votes. Discredit exit polls. Eliminate exit polls. Steal more votes.

Excerpt from my article below. Full article at: Steal Votes. Discredit exit polls. Eliminate exit polls. Steal more votes.

“Exit pollsters should have to explain, in public, how they were so wrong. Since their polls, if biased or cooked, represented an attempt to use the public airwaves to reduce voter turnout, they should have to explain their errors in a very public and perhaps official forum. This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play.”i
– Dick Morris, Fox News analyst and exit polling expert

With a popular insurgency raging in Vietnam, Nixon claimed the support of a “silent majority.” With a popular insurgency raging in Iraq, George W. Bush claimed a re-election “victory” with the support of millions of “silent voters”: voters who voted by the millions (according to official vote tallies) but somehow snuck past professional exit pollers without detection. These “silent voters” are elusive. They evaded professional exit pollers in 2000 too. Perhaps silent voters’ desire for secrecy likely reflects evangelical Christians’ reluctance to speak their minds.

The 2004 media pool’s exit poll closely matches the Kerry campaign’s exit poll. Both tell an unambiguous story: Kerry won the 2004 election. The media knew that the 2004 exit polls were strong enough to guarantee a Kerry victory, as Fox News analyst Dick Morris has written: “While all anchors refrained from announcing the exit-poll results, it was clear from the context of their comments that they expected Kerry to win and wondered if Bush could hold any key state.”ii When President Bush praised Karl Rove as “the architect”iii of his latest victory, Bush wasn’t exaggerating. Rove designed and constructed Bush’s 3.5 million vote “mandate.”

Exit polls told an equally unambiguous story in 2000: Al Gore won Florida and the presidency. A senior Kerry advisor says he told people on Election Night 2004, “This feels familiar. It was good news, turns to no information… which turns into bad news.”iv A Republican pollster with a client named “Jeb Bush,” (who, completely coincidentally, happens to be both Florida’s governor and President Bush’s brother), says George W. Bush’s own campaign poll “Last time a week out it was 44-45 with Gore ahead .”v Every reputable political scientist who has examined Florida’s 2000 ballots agrees Gore would have been declared the victor in Florida under any of the proposed recount formulas. But the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited a recount in a party-line vote, handing the presidency to George W. Bush (who, completely coincidentally, happens to be the son of the man who appointed some of the Supreme Court justices who voted to award Bush the presidency in 2000).

Republicans have been trashing exit polls’ reputation for four years. Before 2000, exit polls were considered virtually infallible. Since exit polls were “discredited” in 2000, Republicans have been bad-mouthing exit polls in the media. Repeated denigration of exit polls succeeded because the media now regularly apologizes for exit polls’ alleged “inaccuracy” and “unreliability.” Exit polls have long been considered extremely reliable because they are based on people who cast votes moments before. Exit polls avoid the major problems of pre-election polls by eliminating the guesswork about who should count as a “likely voter” and whether they will change their mind before marking their ballot. Consequently, exit polls are considered reliable enough to detect fraud in other countries and Dick Morris is dismissive of all the lame exuses we have heard for the exit polls’ failure in 2000, 2002, and 2004...