Exit Polls Do Not Imply Fraud

The New Republic has an article debunking election fraud theories based on exit polls. Exit polls always favor the Democrats. This isn't fraud, it is bad polling.

Year	Exit Poll Results	Exit Poll Dem Lead	Election Actual Dem Result
1988	Dukakis: 50.3% Bush: 49.7%	+0.6%	-7.7%
1992	Clinton: 46% Bush: 33.2%	+12.8%	+5.6%
1996	Clinton: 52.2% Dole: 37.5%	+14.7%	+8.5%
2000	Gore: 48.5% Bush: 46.2%	+2.3%	+0.5%

The fraud is using polling methods that have been wrong since 1988, and reporting the results as if you expected them to be actual fact.

Republicans voting either early morning, or on their way home from work, are to my mind less likely to fill out an exit poll. I know I wouldn't. (Or I might follow Mike Royko's advice, and lie.)

So you can believe that the whole exit polling apparatus is flawed,

Or, you can believe that a massive secret conspiracy somehow shifted roughly 2% of the vote from Kerry to Bush in every battleground state, a conspiracy that fooled everyone but the exit pollsters - and then only for a few hours - after which they deliberately suppressed evidence of the fraud and damaged their own reputations by blaming the discrepancies on weaknesses in their data.

[Hat tip to Right Side of the Rainbow]