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Reply #65: Yes, you do seem to be flummoxed. [View All]

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Response to Reply #56
65. Yes, you do seem to be flummoxed.
As long as we're talking about some VNS guy, can you remember what network he was on and roughly what time of night? Then I might be able to judge relevance.

It was on a local station in FL, sometime after midnight, I believe about 2:00AM, and I believe it was WESH, but I'm not sure.

It was definitely after returns were starting to come in showing the crazy numbers of spoiled ballots. And that is the point, isn't it? The exit polls showed that the spoiled ballots would have gone heavily for Gore.

Unless you are one of those people who would argue that one out of every five people who waited in line for hours to vote in overcrowded polling places actually intended to vote twice for president, and did so.

You should know that this argument has quite a history in the Jim Crow south, and it's the reason why butterfly ballots were made illegal in the states covered by the Voting Rights Act. It's an old gotcha game that was used for decades to disenfranchise voters. Just double-punch the ballots and they don't count. Or, do you beleive that one in five voters intended to vote twice for president? It's such an old trick I saw movies about it in elementary school.

Let me try it this way: how would it affect the relationship between the exit poll results and the official returns? How, if at all, would the exit polls reveal the number of spoiled ballots?

The exit polls show a snapshot of the election. What you are looking at is "how" the respondents "believe" they voted. In FL 2000 this was an accurate snapshot.

The incredibly high number of spoiled ballots in Duval and Palm Beach counties actually changed the outcome of the election. This is a fact that I also don't think is in dispute.

My entire argument is that VNS had an ACCURATE snapshot of the election in FL 2000, on election night, in real time, and it showed that Gore was missing some 50,000 votes.

Four years later Edison/Mitkofsky was declaring that they would not repeat the mistakes of FL 2000. So, do you understand the problem now with your whole attitude about this? It just isn't very scientific, just like E/M wasn't very scientific when they vowed to not repeat the mistakes of 2000.
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