Mark Sires wrote:
>
>
> And let's not forget the 'Florida goes to Gore' announcement by our unbiased
> media. How many voters didn't go to the polls (which was announced before
> the polls in Florida had closed) will never be known. This doesn't generate
> a lot of sympathy from me I'll admit.
>
I have been wondering about this for some time. You might think it was a
media thing, but the call was made by several independent (if anything
can be) exit polling organizations. I have heard two separate reports by
the exit poll community on this. The first one basically said, we must
have muffed it because it was so close. The latest report I heard (and
maybe it was politically biased, but it seems to me that everything
about this election is politically biased) claimed that the exit polls
were substantially right but large numbers of those who said they voted
for Gore (in certain counties which made the differece) were in the pool
of ballots that were rejected. This is what I suspected in the first
reports that I heard.
I was distracted for awhile by the report that a precinct reporter had
mis-reported Gore's totals by 35,000, but I later realized that exit
polls do not base themselves on partial precint reports, but rather on
sampling from real voters leaving the polling place. Of course, a
certain and perhaps growing per centage of people sampled are not
telling the truth about who they voted for, but the pollsters know about
that, it would have to have been substantially more than in past years.
