(Breaking, March 9th, WFAA News: Fully 10% of votes in Dallas County, Texas were not counted; recount possible.)

Wildly divergent exit polls in South Carolina and Massachusetts, and documented voting problems in California and Texas, have prompted veteran election watchers to suggest that there may have been election fraud and voter suppression on Super Tuesday, always at the expense of the Bernie Sanders vote.

Are Exit Polls an Indicator of Election Fraud?

Edison Research/CNN polls show 4-point and 7-point discrepancies in South Carolina and Massachusetts, respectively, between the computer-tallied vote totals and exit polling. Exit polls are considered by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to be one reliable—although not in itself conclusive—indicator of election fraud. Election fraud may be perpetrated by the hacking of vote tabulation machines or reporting incorrect results that are different from the tally tapes from each machine.

Although exit polls may be wrong, which even among experts are considered just one limited but useful tool for detecting fraud, it is more unusual when the errors always point in the same direction. Both the SC and MA exit polls showed Sanders doing better than the official vote tallies.

The Biden Bounce

In South Carolina, where Joe Biden scored what was described extensively in the media as the "Biden Bounce," Biden gained nearly 5 points in the official tally over the exit poll projection, and an astonishing 7 points in the official tally in Massachusetts. The typical margin of error for Edison Research polls is 3%.

Owner of TDMSResearch.com Theodore de Macedo Soares wrote of Massachusetts after the primaries:

"The 2020 Massachusetts Democratic Party presidential primary was held on March 3, 2020. Election results from the computerized vote counts differed significantly from the results projected by the exit poll conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN at poll’s closing. As in the 2016 Massachusetts primary between candidates Sanders and Clinton, disparities greatly exceed the exit poll’s margin of error. Sanders won Massachusetts in the exit poll and lost it in the computer count."

Soares has noted that it is particularly suspicious when other exit polls seem to be quite accurate in other contests, or with respect to candidates of little interest. In 2016, exit polls between Hillary Clinton and Sanders were off in a manner that favored Clinton, but were always within a point of being accurate in other races.

It should be noted that Soares' calculations are based on early, "unadjusted" exit polls, which are based on surveys alone. Controversially, polling companies often "adjust" the numbers to more closely match the machine-count totals. A New York Times article says of this year's Michigan primary exit polls:

"The numbers on this page are preliminary estimates from exit polls. They will eventually be adjusted to match the actual vote count."

Polling companies have never adequately explained how it is scientific to fudge the results of raw data.

Since Edison Research did not publish overall results for each candidate, Soares used the gender-based results to arrive at total figures.