Sick of Exit Polls Yet?

by Dem FromCT

Well, not everyone feels that way. Ruy Teixeira points to a new study by the Social Science Research Council entitled A Review of Recent Controversies Concerning the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Polls (pdf format). It sets the table thusly:

By the end of the evening, when the full set of NEP data and the output of their statistical models were available, none of the network partners had made any incorrect calls of individual states, and it was clear at a reasonable hour that President Bush had been re-elected.⁵ However, many bloggers and websites were concerned that the early exit poll results did in fact accurately represent the voters' preferences, and the differences in actual vote outcomes from the exit poll results may have stemmed from fraud, problems with new voting technology, or administrative malfeasance in specific locations.

As a result, there was sufficient public discussion and consternation that a committee of the U.S. House headed by Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) held open sessions about election administration and the exit polls to which several of the principles were invited for presentations. NEP and its partners remained relatively silent through all of this, and it was not until January 19, 2005 that a report was released by Edison Research/Mitofsky International about what happened with the exit polls on Election Day.⁶ That report has now become a topic of extended discussion on the Web.

As Ruy points out, this is a big picture summary that, while not breaking new ground, does has the virtue of being relatively short (18 pages) and blessedly readable. Use it as a primer/summary when the topic comes up. Speaking of polls, don't miss this series from the Mystery Pollster, Mark Blumenthal, in which he pins several prominant pollsters including Gallup and Pew into committing to be more forthcoming about publishing the party affiliation numbers at the time their polls are released. From Pew:

Given the evolution of the dialogue on the subject - for which MysteryPollster deserves a lot of credit -- and the greater understanding among political observers regarding the perils of weighting party ID to an arbitrary parameter (clearly illustrated by the party ID distribution on Election Day 2004), *we will begin posting party ID and its trend in our toplines in future survey releases* [emphasis added].

And encouragement from Gallup:

As far as I know, Gallup has no history over the last 70 years of routinely posting the party ID composition of each survey we conduct, just as we routinely don't report ideology and  a lot of other measures regularly asked in each survey.  As noted, we send the party ID composition percentages to anyone who is interested (actually, we really don't get that many requests for them). *But since this seems to be an area in which there is perhaps bourgeoning interest, we'll probably start posting them on our website for each survey, along with rolling trends and some explanations of how Gallup measures party ID and what it's significance is* [emphasis  added].

Thanks are in order... Steve Soto and Chris Bowers, among others, have been all over Gallup and the commercial pollsters for withholding this information except on request (when they've been very forthcoming... but you have to ask them). [Zogby, by subscription at least, has always laid out everything in more detail than you ever wanted to know]. Transparency at every level for elections is a good thing and should be applauded.

crossposted to the Daily Kos

Comments

[melonhead]

does anyone other than me find it very strange that when the 2004 presidential race got started, karl rove stated that there were 4 million evangelicals that did not vote in the 2000 election and that he would bring them to the polls in the 2004 election. bush lost by 500,000 in 2000 and won by 3.5 million in 2004. that is almost exactly a 4 million vote swing. is rove this good, or did he know that he could turn the dials on the vote-o-meter to get whatever outcome he desired?

[DemFromCT]

Matt Bai wrote extensively during the campaign about the GOP ground game, which we all misunderestimated.