Unadjusted State Exit Polls Indicate that Al Gore won a mini-landslide in 2000

Unadjusted State Exit Polls Indicate that Al Gore won a mini-landslide in 2000

Richard Charnin
Updated: June 13, 2014

Track Record:2004-2012 Forecast and True Vote Models https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zRZkaZQuKTmmd_H0xMAnpvSJlsr3DieqBdwMoztgHJA/edit

First there was the 2000 Judicial Coup and then the long-running media con that Bush really did win. Let’s take another look. Al Gore won the unadjusted state exit polls (58,000 respondents) by 50.8-44.4%, a 6 MILLION VOTE MARGIN compared to the 540,000 recorded. There were nearly 6 MILLION UNCOUNTED votes – the great majority were Gore votes.

Twelve states flipped from Gore in the exit poll to Bush in the recorded vote: AL AR AZ CO FL GA MO NC NV TN TX VA. Gore would have won the election if he captured just one of the states. Democracy died in 2000.

Officially, Bush won Florida by 537 recorded votes. But it was not even close. Gore won the unadjusted Florida exit poll (1816 respondents) by 53.4-43.6%. Given the 3.0% exit poll margin of error (including a 30% cluster effect), there is a 99.9% probability that Gore won FL and a 97.5% probability that he won by at least 200,000 votes.

There were 185,000 uncounted ballots: 110,000 over-punched and 75,000 under-punched. In addition, thousands of “butterfly” ballots meant for Gore were marked for Buchanan in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County. The recount was aborted by 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court. But Florida was not unique. The 9.8% margin discrepancy was exceeded in 10 states: TX AL NC TN GA AR ID MD SC FL

The True Vote Model is based on 1996 and 2000 votes cast. It was a close match to Gore’s exit poll share. He won the True Vote by 50.9-45.3% assuming he had 75% of 8 million returning 1996 voters whose ballots were uncounted and 75% of 6 million uncounted votes in 2000.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast: Here’s how to estimate the effect of spoilage on the election outcome. For fun, let’s take Florida 2000. We know from comparison of census tracts to precincts that 54% of the 179,855 ballots spoiled were cast by African-American voters, that is, 97,000 of the total.

Every poll put the Black vote in Florida for Al Gore at over 90%. Reasonably assuming “spoiled” ballots matched the typical racial preferences, Gore lost more than 87,000 votes in the spoilage pile. Less than 10% of the African-American population voted for Mr. Bush, i.e. Bush lost no more than 10,000 votes to spoilage. The net effect: Gore had a plurality of at least 77,000 within the uncounted ballots cast by Black citizens.

Note that Palast’s estimate of spoiled ballots does not include thousands of absentee, provisional or stuffed ballots. Or the unknown number of Gore votes dropped or switched to Bush in Cyberspace.

The 2000 election theft was a prologue of what was to come.

In 2004 Kerry won the unadjusted exit polls by 51.1-47.6% and the True Vote Model by 10 million votes with 53.6%. But he had just a 48.3% recorded share in losing by 3.0 million votes. It was a 13 million margin vote flip. The margin discrepancy exceeded 10% in 15 states: VT DE AK CT SC VA NJ HI NH MS PA UT MN NM OH

In 2008 Obama won the unadjusted state exit polls by 58.0-40.3% with a 23 million vote margin – exactly matching the True Vote Model. the exit poll/vote margin discrepancy exceeded 10% in 28 states. Obama had a 52.9% recorded share, officially winning by 9.5 million votes.

State and national exit poll discrepancies are calculated in two ways:

1) The exit pollsters provide the average Within Precinct Error (WPE) for each state. But that implies that the exit poll was in error, not the recorded vote, so a better term is Within Precinct Discrepancy (WPD). The WPD is the difference between the average exit poll precinct margin and the average precinct recorded vote margin.

2) The unadjusted exit poll discrepancy is the difference between the actual total exit poll respondent margin and the total recorded vote margin.

In 2004, according to the weighted aggregate of the state unadjusted exit polls, Kerry won nationally by 51.1-47.6%. His margin based on the average WPD was 52.0-47.0%.

Kerry won the NY recorded vote by 58.4-40.1%, an 18.3% margin. The exit pollsters indicated a 12.2% WPD, a 30.5% (64.5-34.0%) exit poll margin. In the unadjusted exit poll, Kerry had 901 (62.05%), Bush 525 (36.15%), Other 26 (1.80%) – a 25.9% unadjusted exit poll margin. There were 1452 respondents, a 3.2% margin of error.

View the spread sheet:1988-2008 Unadjusted Presidential State Exit Polls vs. Recorded Votes. The data source is the Roper site.