With the exit polls—as usual— “adjusted,” Walker “wins” Wisconsin! (Who’s surprised?)

From Jonathan Simon:

What we got tonight in Wisconsin was the same old stench, coming from the same old corner of the room. To wit, there was a huge turnout (highly favorable to the Democratic candidate Barrett), in fact they’re still waiting in line to vote in Milwaukee and elsewhere nearly two hours after poll closing; and the immediate post-closing Exit Polls had it a dead heat, 50%-50%. But the only place those polls were posted was as a Bar Chart in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Not a single network posted any Exit Poll numbers, though they all have been regularly posting them throughout the 2012 primary season within a few minutes of poll closing. But they all called the race “extremely tight,” since they were looking at the same 50%-50% Exit Poll that the Journal Sentinel at least had the courage to post in some format.

In short order, and quite predictably, the race was Walker’s, the networks anointing him the winner as the Exit Poll “Adjustment” Process played out. You could actually see it on the Journal Sentinel’s Bar Chart: the blue bars shrinking and the red bars lengthening every 20 minutes or so. It will take a bit of visual measuring but the adjustment process was egregious, on the order of an 8-10% marginal disparity between the Unadjusted Exit Polls and the Adjusted Exit Polls congruent to the eventually-to-be-announced “official results.”

We’ve seen this before, election after election, the familiar “Red Shift.” And it’s the Exit Polls that are always “off,” because the Votecounts must always be “on.” Except that the Votecounts are secret and in the full control of outfits, with strong right-wing affiliations, like Dominion Voting and Command Central. Votes counted by partisans in complete secret–is this sane?

Today massive robocalls were reported to have been placed to targeted Barrett supporters, telling them they didn’t have to vote if they had signed the recall petition, and others that they couldn’t vote if they hadn’t voted in 2010. An obvious question: is there a bright ethical line between making (whoever actually made them) targeted robocalls telling your opponents’ supporters they don’t have to vote if they signed the recall petition versus setting the zero-counters on a bunch of memory cards to, say, +50 (for Walker) and -50 (for Barrett) so at the end of the day the election admin sees a “clean” election and you’ve shifted 100 votes per precinct? Do you believe that operators who have clearly not blanched at doing the first would for some reason blanch at doing the second–much neater and more efficacious as it is?

And if you’re thinking “well the pre-election polls predicted a Walker win,” you should know that the methodology for all of those polls, even the ones run by left-leaning outfits, was the Likely Voter Cutoff Model (google it, by all means), which disproportionately eliminates Democratic voters (students, renters, poor, minority) from the sample and so skews it conveniently anywhere from 5% to 10% to the right (the pollsters all would have been out of business by now if they had kept using a sound methodology and getting competitive elections wrong with it).

This election was dubbed “the second most important election of 2012;” it will “foretell” November just as the Massachusetts Special Senate Election (Coakley-Brown) “foretold” November 2010. And there was a massive red shift and even more than the usual indicators that it was rigged. Can anyone live with that, just give it a pass, and sleep tonight?

–Jonathan Simon

4 thoughts on “With the exit polls—as usual— “adjusted,” Walker “wins” Wisconsin! (Who’s surprised?)”

  1. Wisconsin Recall: The adjusted Final Exit Poll was forced to match an unlikely recorded vote

    Richard Charnin

    June 6, 2012

    The media and the exit pollsters have done it again.

    Before the first votes were posted, the media reported that based on the exit polls, the election was “too close to call”. But Walker won by a solid 7% margin and 173,000 votes. Why the big red shift?

    Why did the media not provide the actual unadjusted exit poll data (the “crosstabs”)? Was it because they knew that they would have to adjust the poll to match a bogus recorded vote and did not want the public to view the impossible “adjustments”?

    The 53-47% Walker result was implausible since voter turnout exceeded that of the 2010 election. And who turned out? Voters who wanted Walker out. Its obvious that the grossly unpopular Walker could not have done better than he did in 2010 – only worse.

    And as is always the case, there was no mention of the fraud factor in the mainstream media. There never is. To the exit pollsters and the media, there is no such thing as election fraud.

    The GOP employs overt voter disenfranchisement in plain sight by robocalls, election workers discouraging voters from using paper ballots, etc. But we are supposed to believe that they would not covertly program the voting machines to flip votes from Barrett to Walker in cyberspace? And even if the machines are manufactured and programmed by right-wing organizations using unverifiable code.


  2. Why are exit polls adjusted at all? Exit polls are not votes so they shouldn’t be adjusted to match votes. If we saw unadjusted exit polls numbers and vote results and they seemed to be in conflict, we could assume something is wrong with one or both of those results. And we could try to fix it.

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