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Election Integrity Organizations Plan Exit Polls for California Democratic Primary
In response to the cancelling of TV network funded exit polls just prior to the Kentucky and Oregon Democratic primaries, citizen funded exit polls are now being planned for the California primary:
Because network funded exit polls have been cancelled for the remaining 2016 primaries, a number of organizations including Protect California Ballots, California Election Protection Network and Election Defense Alliance have organized to conduct citizen exit polling.
These organizations are looking for volunteers to conduct the polling. Please check out the Facebook link above for details if you are interested in volunteering.
The announcement continues:
Exit polling is important for safeguarding the integrity of elections. So far in the 2016 election cycle, some state primary results do not match exit polls within the survey sampling margin of error. Such discrepancies are often indicative of election fraud. Why would the networks that traditionally fund exit polls cancel exit polling for the remaining primaries?
Around the world, exit polls have been used to verify the integrity of elections. The United States has funded exit polls in Eastern Europe to detect fraud. Discrepancies between exit polls and the official vote count have been used to successfully overturn election results in Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia…
The {recent cancelling of} exit poll reporting and the lack of an explanation for their absence has only added fuel to voters’ speculation regarding election fraud.
Actually, the statement that “some {Democratic 2016} state primary results do not match exit polls within survey sampling margin of error” is quite an understatement. The discrepancies between what the exit polls have predicted and the official Democratic primary results have exceeded the statistical margin of error in 10 states this primary season and all of them favor Clinton in the official results compared to the exit poll predictions. Beyond that, the consistency of the discrepancies has been quite remarkable, favoring Clinton in the official results compared to exit poll predictions in 20 of the 23 primaries since March 1 where exit polls have been conducted. The chart below shows that in graphic form (Note especially the last two columns).
The Inquisitr points out that:
Exit polls had become the source of suspicion of so much election fraud {in the Democratic primaries this year} that the hashtag “#ExitPollGate” surfaced on social media. Primary after primary, exit polls were not aligning with election outcomes in the Democratic primaries…
Voter advocacy groups have pointed to exit polls as a red flag that election fraud may be occurring, because the United States has used exit polls as a measure of fraud in elections in other nations. So why did the TV networks suddenly cancel them for the rest of the primary season right before the Kentucky and Oregon primaries?
Election Fraud Watch 2016 has a simple explanation:
The exit polls have not matched the official results OUTSIDE the margin of error in many states in the Democratic primary election. It has been a red flag for fraud. WHY are the networks canceling exit polls in the remaining upcoming primaries? Simple. They do not want to provide a means of evidence to document the theft.
But haven’t we been told by our national news media that exit polls aren’t reliable for the purpose of identifying fraud?
Yes, we’ve been told by our national corporate news media over and over again that exit poll discrepancies aren’t a reliable measure of election fraud. They tell us that for the same reason that they fail to tell us so many other things. They are wedded to the status quo and they don’t want to rock the boat. Have you ever heard them discuss that our election system is ranked LAST among the established democracies in the world? The fact of the matter is that as explained by Jonathan Simon at the Election Defense Alliance, whenever we see exit poll discrepancies that are highly suggestive of fraud, they always favor the more conservative candidate in the official vote count compared to what is predicted by the exit polls. Our national corporate news media is fine with that and they want to make sure that we all know that anyone who takes exit polls seriously as a means of monitoring elections will be labeled a “conspiracy theorist” – as if election fraud couldn’t possibly occur in our country. And yet, almost every expert on the electronic voting machines that are used to count our votes acknowledges that they are highly vulnerable to vote rigging.
As an example of our news media trying everything they can to get our mind away from exit polls, let’s consider Nate Silver’s “Ten Reasons Why you Should Ignore Exit Polls”, as I believe that Nate is the most frequently quoted pollster on this subject. He is far too intelligent to write something with so much fallacious reasoning, so I am assuming that he was heavily persuaded to do it. I discuss his ten points in detail in this post. Here I will just summarize why we should ignore his advice on this:
1) Some of his reasons to ignore exit polls (2, 3, 5, and 10) clearly exhibit circular reasoning. He says in various ways that we should ignore them because they have been shown to be wrong in the past. But they definitely have NOT been shown to be wrong in the past. What they have shown is that they often deviate from the official election results (again, they always favor the more conservative candidate in the official count). To say that this proves them to be wrong is classical circular reasoning. What such deviations show is that exit polls often differ from the official count, meaning that either the exit polls are wrong or the official count is wrong (i.e. rigged).
2) Nate makes his living by analyzing pre-election polls. Yet in his criticism of exit polls, he doesn’t even mention that some of his reasons for ignoring exit polls (4, 6, and 9) apply equally or more so to pre-election polls. Does he want us to ignore pre-election polls too? Of course not – he makes his living from them.
3) Related to number 2 above, he doesn’t balance his discussion by including the very substantial and unarguable advantages that exit polls have over pre-election polls, which include: a) They assess how the voter actually voted rather than how s/he intends to vote at a later time; b) Pre-election polls rely on models to estimate who likely voters will be. Different pollsters use different models to estimate that and obviously some of them are wrong. Sometimes, most of them are wrong. Exit polls have no need for such models. Each respondent to an exit poll has approximately a 100% chance of voting because s/he has already voted and; c) despite the problems that exit polls have in obtaining a true random sample of voters, the problems with obtaining a true random sample with pre-election polls are far worse for the very simple reason that many voters cannot be sampled at all because they are unobtainable by phone.
In summary
If exit polls are as bad as our corporate news media tries to tell us, then why does our country pay to have them performed elsewhere in the world?
And if the substantial exit poll discrepancies in the Democratic primaries this year are indicative of the poor reliability of exit polls rather than election fraud, then why have the exit polls in the Republican primaries been so consistently right on target(scroll down to table)? I’ll suggest a reason why. To repeat myself – exit poll discrepancies in this country in recent years (since 2004 at least) always favor the more conservative candidate in the official vote count (i.e. election fraud is almost always perpetrated on behalf of the more conservative candidate). In the Republican primaries this year, election fraud wasn’t worth the effort. All the candidates were plenty enough conservative to satisfy whoever might be behind this.
I’m looking forward to the California primary election and comparison with the California exit polls. Should there be a large discrepancy (in either direction and regardless of who wins), I would very much want to see a hand count of the whole state to see how much the official machine count differs from the hand count. There is no other way that we can have confidence in the results in the face of large exit poll discrepancies from the official results.
38 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
since the election is June 7 - next week.
I'm feeling kinda left out: I'm a NPP permanent mail voter, and everything went off without a glitch. Got a postcard asking which ballot I wanted at the end of March, got the actual ballot itself - labeled "Non-Partisan Democratic" the day after it was sent out, on May 10, filled it out, put it in the handy postage-paid envelope, sent it back. When I check the county registrar's website I see it's listed as received and counted. I wanna be special and not bother informing myself in advance and whingeing about being oppressed afterwards! 
Seriously, will polling places run short on June 7? Maybe. Turnout is expected to be higher than usual, and there is a surge of new voters who don't always seem to be the most informed about California's unique election rules. NPP - no party preference or non-partisan voters - have a choice of 4 ballots that they can request this election - the standard NPP, Democratic, Libertarian or American Independent. The election officials make their best guesses based on past elections and current news as to how to staff them and stock ballots, but they sometimes guess wrong.
