"Gee, let´s make it REALLY easy to cheat..." GOP Wants to End Exit Polls

November 10, 2004
GOP Wants to End Exit Polls

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

As a BuzzFlash Reader said: "Gee, let´s make it REALLY easy to cheat..."

RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie wants to eliminate exit polls because he says they´re not accurate, implying that the final vote was unquestionably correct.

GOP Wants News Organizations to Abandon Exit Polls
[link to www.tvweek.com] (subscription req´d)
By Doug Halonen, TVWeek.com

After early exit polls in Tuesday´s election inaccurately suggested that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry would trounce President Bush, Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie is recommending that major news organizations pull the plug on the prognostications.

In remarks Thursday at the National Press Club, Mr. Gillespie said he is among those who were stunned by exit poll reports, which leaked widely on the Internet. "I would encourage the media to abandon exit surveys on Election Day and do what we do in the political profession -- look at the precincts and the turnout, see who´s turning out to vote," Mr. Gillespie said. "Don´t build a model that you try to, you know, build your own thoughts into of what you expect it to be."

Mr. Gillespie conceded that the exit polls weren´t reported directly by major news organizations themselves. "But with the Internet today, we´re kidding ourselves, aren´t we, to think that everybody in America doesn´t know what the exit data is showing?" he said.

He also said he was personally affected by the early reports, discouraged by what he was seeing. "But I´ve been through this before," he said. "In 2000 the exit data was wrong on Election Day. In 2002, the exit returns were wrong on Election Day. And in 2004, the exit data were wrong on Election Day -- all three times, by the way, in a way that skewed against Republicans and had a dispiriting effect on Republican voters across the country."

Gillespie´s implication that the final tally was correct, but the exit polls were wrong implies that our voting process is flawless and the people building our voting machines are nonpartisan and only interested in seeing a fair election.

Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the seriousness of the widespread problems [link to www.buzzflash.com] we have with our voting systems or the highly compromised partisans [link to memes.org] running our voting machine companies knows a truly fair election is not possible.

Why would the GOP want to eliminate exit polls? Because it´s the last semi-independent check of an election´s accuracy and the only way to quickly determine if the votes cast for a candidate match those counted by the machines.

[link to www.buzzflash.com]

Last Edited by Phennommennonn on 10/12/2011 07:23 PM