Exit Polls: Why They Have Been Significantly Off

“Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable…Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent. ‘Exit polls are almost never wrong,’ Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ‘so reliable,’ he added, ‘that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.’ In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down. And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine — paid for by the Bush administration — exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

There are two main types of election polls: pre-election and exit.

Pre-election polls predict how people will vote; exit polls tell how people voted.

As Edison Research’s executive vice president Joe Lenski states, all exit polls are conducted by Edison Research and distributed to six media organizations: Fox, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and the Associated Press. Exit polls are private, anonymous, and adjusted before release to account for every group or demographic that chooses not to respond for any reason.

When the polls close in each primary, media organizations release the full exit polling data. Afterwards, Edison Research compares them to actual voting results and makes adjustments. For instance, the exit polls initially showed a 4 point win by Hillary Clinton in New York at 9 PM, but were changed to 12 points at 9:45 once Edison obtained voting results.

Therefore, the best time to determine the actual exit poll results is right after voting closes. However, this year in the Democratic primaries, the exit polls have been consistently, significantly, and systemically off:

Table compiled by Theodore Soares and attained from richardcharnin.wordpress.com

I verified the table with tweets from fivethirtyeight.com and PDFs of the first reported exit polling data, also accessible as images. This table was attained through Election Integrity, a Facebook and Google group of over 1,000 people dedicated to uncovering and preventing election fraud. While some confessed that election research and data can be a minefield, they unanimously agreed upon this:

When the exit polls are way off, either the polls are wrong, electoral fraud was committed, or both.

As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. mentioned, research shows that exit polls are almost always spot on. When one or two are incorrect, they could be statistical anomalies, but the more incorrect they are, the more it substantiates electoral fraud.

This is shown by the data, which is extremely suspicious: discrepancies in eight of the sixteen primaries favoring Clinton in voting results over exit polling data are outside of the margin of error. That’s half of them outside the margin of error: 2.3% greater in Tennessee, 2.6% in Massachusetts, 4% in Texas, 4.7% in Mississippi, 5.2% in Ohio, 6.2% in New York, 7% in Georgia, and 7.9% in Alabama.

This is extremely, extremely abnormal.

The margin of error is designed to prevent this, accounting for the difference in percentage totals between the first exit polls and actual voting results for both candidates combined (as noted by the table’s third footnote). For instance, if Hillary Clinton outperforms the exit polls by 2.5% and Bernie Sanders underperforms by 2.5%, and the margin of error is 5%, then the exit poll is exactly on the margin of error. When an exit poll or two is outside of the margin, this denotes failure in the polling; when eight defy it — egregiously so — that indicates systemic electoral fraud.

Keep in mind, these are the discrepancies in favor of Clinton between exit polls and voting results, from lowest to highest: -6.1%, -1.9%, 1.1%, 1.7%, 3.4%, 3.9%, 4.1%, 4.3%, 4.6%, 5.2%, 8%, 8.3%, 9.3%, 9.9%, 10%, 11.6%, 12.2%, and a whopping 14%.

The discrepancies alone demand an investigation of electoral fraud. These are not just small, isolated errors, but systemic and alarming differences that point towards Hillary Clinton beating exit polls in an impossible way.

Nevertheless, one may still contend that 1) exit polls are “unreliable” and 2) Bernie supporters are more “enthusiastic” to take exit polls than Clinton supporters.

However, if exit polls were done that poorly, we wouldn’t bother using them in the first place. In addition, they would be all over the place numerically, instead of consistently and considerably skewed towards Hillary Clinton. Besides, exit pollsters are, frankly, not idiots; they’ve had decades to hone, adjust, and perfect their methods, and have many elections to compare results to.

Therefore, they account for any and all unlikely changes, including response bias — the possibility that Bernie supporters are more enthusiastic. Moreover, Donald Trump supporters are arguably more enthusiastic while deriving from a similar anti-establishment base. Since Edison Research compiles the exit polls singlehandedly and the Republican race has easily been more polarizing, divisive, and contentious, one would expect that Republican exit polls would be even more skewed.

Except they haven’t been. They’ve been spot on almost every time.

I was able to find tweets of almost all of the first Republican exit polls from fivethirtyeight.com, PhD student and election tracker Taniel, and CBS live blogs. Here is a table comparing their data and the actual voting results:

If you have more data, feel free to add it in the comments.

In every primary I could find data for, the Republican primaries have been almost exactly right, with every data point in the margin of error, during a more polarizing, contentious, and hard-to-predict race. Hence, this should be enough to prove my point: if exit polls were unreliable, then the Republican primaries would have equally bad exit polling data, but they don’t, not even by a long shot.

It demands an independent investigation, with the nomination results and voting ballots thoroughly, fairly, and properly audited.

But this isn’t the only evidence of electoral fraud…