mysterypollster

I posted the following as a comment to Mark Blumenthal @ mysterypollster http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2005/01/more_fun_with_e.html

Gday Mark - I havent really been following the exitpoll issue closely, but I read Farhad's article and he said "At midday Eastern time, NEP interviewers had spoken to about 8,000 voters" which kind of piqued my interest (it seems that he made a mistake - he seems to be referring to the 3.59pm poll, not midday). In any case, I took a closer look and noticed the discrepancy between the 11,027 and 13,660 numbers which you and others have also noted. However, I wonder if you were a bit dismissive when you said "The missing 2,633 interviews, presumably coming mostly from states in the Midwest and West".

The NEP issued a statement on Nov2 which appears to be their final summary at the end of the day about their activities for the day - it is still on http://www.exit-poll.net under the prominent link titled "National Exit Poll Methodolgy Statement" which links to http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/MethodsStatementNationalFinal.pdf (note the word "final").

This document specifically says "The National exit poll was conducted at a sample of 250 polling places among 11,719 Election Day voters representative of the United States. In addition, 500 absentee and/or early voters in 13 states were interviewed in a pre-election telephone poll." That is, the NEP's apparently "final" statement explicitly states that they only did 12,219 interviews.

As we know, by 1pm the following day, the NEP was reporting that they had actually conducted 13,660 interviews - 12% more than they had officially stated - which is starting to test the limits of credulity, given that these people are supposed to count things for a living.

One hypothesis is that there was much interview-stuffing on Nov3 to produce the requisite swing to Mr Bush. To the extent that the NEP's 'final' statement is valid, then it would seem to render irrelevant all of the other discussions about chatty democrats and gender bias and the rest.

Separately, the consensus seems to be that the leaked numbers on Scoop are the legitimate NEP numbers - Mitofsky didn't claim otherwise in that delightful exchange with Mickey Kaus. However, some of the numbers seem curious - more here if you are interested http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2005/01/exit-stage-left.html