Condemned to Repetition: The 2006 Exit Poll Controversy

By Mark Lindeman

After George W. Bush narrowly defeated John Kerry in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, some observers became firmly convinced that Kerry had won—and that the exit polls showed it. Early tabulations based on the National Election Pool (NEP) national exit poll indicated that Kerry had approximately a three-point advantage in the popular vote. For those who believed that the exit polls had a record of "uncanny accuracy"—until recent elections—the inference of massive fraud was obvious. There are good reasons to doubt that the 2004 exit polls accurately measured the outcome. (My personal favorite is the exit poll projection that Kerry won New York by over thirty percentage points. My home state may be blue, but not that blue.) Still, some people firmly believe that the NEP pollsters, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, are withholding telltale evidence of massive election fraud.

On election night 2006, a gap once again emerged between initial exit poll tabulations on the one hand and official returns on the other. An initial tabulation based on the national House exit poll, posted a bit after 7 p.m. EST, indicated that Democratic candidates had outpolled Republican candidates by about 11.4 percentage points. This figure overstates the official Democratic margin by perhaps 3.5 to 4.5 points (depending on how uncontested races are treated). Statewide Senate and governor's races had similar "red shifts"—that is, Republicans on average did better in the vote counts than in the exit polls.

Given widespread doubts about the integrity of vote counts—underscored by the startling discovery of over 18,000 "undervotes" in a congressional race in Sarasota County, Florida—I understand the impulse to conclude that the exit polls are more reliable. And indeed, the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) promptly issued a report arguing that the 2006 exit polls evinced a "landslide denied"—millions of votes stolen from Democratic candidates around the country. Here we go again.

The EDA report, authored by exit poll debate veterans Jonathan Simon and Bruce O'Dell, acknowledges doubts about the polls' accuracy—or, in their words, "the campaign that has long been waged to discredit [their] reliability." However, they argue that the 2006 exit poll contains "an intrinsic and objective yardstick" to check its accuracy: a question about whom respondents voted for in the 2004 presidential election. According to the initial (7 p.m. EST) House tabulation, 47 percent of voters said they had voted for Bush in 2004, and 45 percent said they had voted for Kerry—a two-point margin similar to the official 2004 results. In the final tabulation, weighted to match 2006 vote counts, the gap widens to six points (49 percent Bush, 43 percent Kerry). Without evidence that Bush voters turned out in 2006 at a much higher rate than Kerry voters, this six-point gap seems impossible. Simon and O'Dell propose that "the valid exit poll was the unadjusted exit poll." They believe that the adjusted exit poll had to be padded with Bush voters in order to match an inaccurate vote count. Ergo, millions of Democratic votes were stolen around the country.

Unfortunately for Simon and O'Dell, their exit poll evidence contradicts itself. As they observe in a footnote, if the 2004 exit polls were "as accurate as the 2006 exit polls have proven to be," then Kerry received many more votes than Bush. Why, then, aren't there more Kerry voters than Bush voters in the initial 2006 tabulation? The mystery deepens if one believes, as Simon and O'Dell apparently do, that Kerry voters turned out in 2006 at a higher rate than Bush voters. And indeed, a second footnote duly suggests that the likely Democratic margin in the 2006 House races was "more than 20 percent (61 percent-38 percent)." If so, then the initial tabulation understated Democratic performance by over eleven points—about twice as large as the 2004 exit poll discrepancy! So the EDA defense of exit poll reliability seems to be highly selective.