CODE RED – Computerized Election Theft and the New American Century

[Savannahmann]

81. One problem I've always had with these arguments.

I'm not saying that the voting is valid and accurate and 100% above board and all that. I am saying the problem is the polling. Public Opinion Polls tend to fall within a certain range, and it is accomplished by phoning say two thousand people and asking them questions. Then they select a thousand of those people and weed out the remainder as unreliable. All of that is done statically and through a process that is always undergoing refinement.

Exit polling is done in the parking lot where you select some of the voters and ask them questions. In order to be statistically valid, it has to get a good sample of the public. You can kind of estimate that by asking people questions in every polling place, but they don't have enough people to do that, so they select certain polling places, and allow them to represent the whole. However, those polling places are but a snapshot of those districts, not necessarily the entire state.

With phone polls when you get an answer, it is looked at, considered, and then put on the back burner. You wait until you have more polls from other companies before you start to determine a trend. You wait because one poll is not enough of a look to see what is going on regarding public opinion. If you have three polls that say the people oppose Obamacare by ten points, and then one comes in and it reports that the people support it by a whopping twenty points, you don't jump for joy. You wait, and see if that trend continues. You wait because that one poll may be an outlier, an anomaly. Oh the results may be accurate, as far as it goes. Calls to geographic areas, but there is no way to be certain that you're getting an accurate sample. So you wait. If the next couple polls show that then you think there might be a trend.

I've been voting since 1988. I've voted in Southern California, in person. I've voted in Georgia, in person. I've voted in the last four Presidential elections, in person. I've voted in every mid term and special, in person. I've never seen a person asking questions after I voted. Not once. Does that mean that they were not asking questions in my state? No, but it does mean they were not asking at that time, and at that place.

To get an accurate sample, you would have to question just about every fifth person coming out of the polling place. Even then that does not take into account early voting, absentee ballots, and a host of other issues.

So exit polling to me, is rather inaccurate. It's interesting to see the numbers afterwards, and to see the results. But the polling is weighted. Let me explain what that means.

You are standing outside of the polling place. You know that the electorate is made up of about half women. So you make a point to question as many women as men. In the last election, you know that the district went Blue plus five. In other words Democrats won by five percentage points. So you begin there, you throw out excessive Republican votes because it does not fit the trend. You select your polling place because the results there mirrored the district average last time. That is no guarantee that the voters in that district are going to be an accurate sample of the rest of the district, or state. The district is ten percent black. So you try and make sure one out of ten people are black. Same with other minorities. After a couple hours, you move on to another polling place, or not. Either way, you get a snapshot at best, that may or may not be fairly accurate.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Finally, congressional approval. I think that has more to do with disapproving of other peoples representatives. As I said, I live in south Georgia, and even the Democratic voters generally speaking don't want Nancy Pelosi representing them. So when someone asks them if they approve, or disapprove of Congress, they say disapprove. They disapprove of Nancy and many others, but they re-elect their congressman, because he is doing and saying what they want to hear. What those people are saying is your representative sucks, but mine is pretty good. You couldn't get Cotton elected in California, but he was elected from his state. You couldn't get Senator Durbin elected in my state, you just couldn't do it. A Democrat in Georgia either has to be from a Democrat plus a huge amount to win, or has to be a very blue dog Democrat. Not fair, but true.

So what those polls are showing, especially with the reelection of so many, is that the people disapprove of representatives that are not their own. It's the I'm right and you all are idiots trend writ large. Everyone is guilty of that one. Yes, I mean people on the left, and right.

Exit polling if weighted against the actual results can give you an idea of what people were thinking, generally speaking, about the election. It can't predict the election because districts change, and attitudes change.