Reply #18: Dr. Steven Freeman: YES exit polls indicated a Kerry Victory in OH, NM& NV [View All]

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indicate a Kerry victory was a matter of debate, but as any of Manjoo's experts should have known, these data have been superseded by the more detailed data released later by the National Election Pool exit pollsters.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



http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/06/12/freeman/