Reply #8: To clarify: Blackwell wanted invalid polls. The networks didnt want [View All]

to waste their money and get crap results. After all, they need to be able to study their methods so they can improve them for later elections. So they were gonna compromise. Do valid polls but promise to sit on the results. Remember how none of the news networks would release their poll numbers? However, a disgruntled employee at one of the news networks saw what was happening and released the poll results to the world over the internet (which everyone should have seen coming). This meant that there were accurate, valid exit poll numbers out there, something that Blackwell and Rove had not planned for when they did their math. It was this discrepancy that would later lead Powell to his passive aggressive act of declaring the election in the Ukraine suspect based on exit polls--a big slap in the face of Bush, and potentially politically deadly had not the entire MSM of America been on Bush's side at that time. Because of this exit poll discrepancy, by December 2004, 25% of Americans believed that election 2004 had been stolen. We even got a (one!) senator to contest the election.

This was why they needed Mitofsky's ridiculous Reluctant Responders Theory.

If Blackwell had been able to get those exit pollsters to stand behind the line at 100 feet, when their results did not match the vote tally, a whole bunch of experts would have said "The exit polls are wrong. They stood too far away. End of story."

And we would not be talking about Election 2004. This Topic Forum would not exist.