nude donkey

i posted the following at ruys http://www.emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/cgi/dr/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=1011

ive just noticed that 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 from Scoop, 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 actually final (and they haven't updated it), then it would seem to render irrelevant all of the other discussions about chatty democrats and gender bias and the rest.

Is this a smoking gun?

there's a little bit more here http://wotisitgood4.blogspot.com/2005/01/exit-stage-left.html

perhaps we do know a little bit more than we did before.

(i dont know how to do the link thing - sorry)