Radosh.net

Given that this is an article about using exit polls to verify that votes are counted propery, how fucked up is this lede?

"Since the 1960's, the exit poll, that staple of election-night television, has been used along with other tools to declare winners when the polls close in each state, and its accuracy is noted later when the actual vote count proves it right. A landmark exception, of course, came in 2000, when the networks initially gave the decisive Florida vote to Al Gore."

At first I thought the article intended to use Florida 2000 and example of the accuracy of exit polls, but no, they go into a "but..." and treat it entirely as the anamolous situation where the exit polls were wrong.

Um... the exit polls gave a decisive victory to Gore for precisely the reason that people now want to use them to validate or challenge votes: because they were more accurate than the actual voting. People told pollsters who they thought they voted for, otherwise, exit polls would have taken note of Pat Buchanan's surprise lock on the elderly Jewish vote.

Posted by Daniel Radosh

11:39 AM