Exit Poll Strategy

If the media wanted to make up in some small way for their transgressions in blindly helping Bushco send this country to war based on a neocon wet dream, they should follow the advice of Paul Krugman and finance several different competing exit polling operations for this election.

If the election is anything less than a landslide on either side, the skepticism about touch screen voting machines will hinder any president’s claim to legitimacy. Now, Junior and his kool-aid drinkers don’t really care about that because he found that he could pretty much do anything he wanted without it, but it’s crucial to preserve our democracy, nonetheless.

The Georgia election in 2002 is a good example of what might happen in a number of places if good exit polling isn’t done that validates the returns. The state showed two very surprising upsets that none of the polls had predicted. Going into the election they’d all had Senator Cleland winning by 2 to 5 points and he lost by 7. In the governor’s race the swing was 16 points from the last polls to election day; Barnes had been up by 9 points and he lost by 7.

These things happen and it may very well have been a result of a last minute GOP surge. But, there is also some good evidence that the e-voting machines in Georgia were tampered with. We will never know the truth of that.

This time people on both sides are bound to question the results of these new e-voting machines if the returns show a close race. There will be no paper trail in most of them and the legitimacy of many winners is likely to be in question if there’s no data to suport the tally. Exit polls are one way to do that.

The media should spend some money and get this done, not for predictive purposes on election night, but to validate the actual election returns. Otherwise we are going to be in tin foil hat territory for a long time to come. It’s the least they can do.

Here are the Exit Poll Results for the 2000 election. You might want to bookmark it as we will start seeing more comprehensive polls over the next couple of months and it’s interesting to see where the shifts, if any, are taking place.