And if somebody told you it wasn't -- that it was just an error or pure random chance, never mind, keep emptying your wallet -- you'd start to wonder about their motives.
Common sense. Not a conspiracy theory. Just what you're seeing, right in front of you.
Without getting into all the state-by-state details -- I'll let Prof. Freeman tend to the numbers -- what happened last Tuesday, where a wide variety of extremely accurate exit polls suddenly turned out to be at the extremes or even beyond their margin of error, was exceedingly unlikely -- even if the benefits of these errors had been evenly distributed.
But they weren't evenly distributed. They favored Bush. Over and over and over. That's the coin flipping. And flipping. And still coming up heads. Heads in Florida. Heads in Ohio. Heads in a bunch of other swing states (even while the exit polls remained relatively accurate elsewhere). Almost everywhere the election was close, the coin just kept coming up heads.
How bad was it?
According to Dr. Freeman's analysis... 1 in 250,000,000.
One in a quarter of a billion.
In simpler terms, that 50-50 coin flip just came up "heads" almost thirty times in a row.
Do you still trust that coin now?
That's from a Bob Harris post, quoting this paper by Professor Steven Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania.
Update 11/14/04:
Sometimes readers actually offer thoughtful comments, appropriate helpful criticism and good information. All of which I appreciate greatly. Unlike the first two comments to this post, the third one offers something useful: another view about exit polls. So thanks to "visitor" for this link.
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