The exit polls were conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool. The NEP has a policy of re-adjusting the final polls to match the vote as reported by state and local governments. Due to this policy later polls may be tainted so as to hide election fraud. Women do seem to be either more likely to participate in a poll, or more likely to vote early. In the early polls women represented 58% of the sampled voters, but by poll closing only represented 52% of the voters as reported by local governments, so women were likely oversampled in the early polling. The 52% figure is consistent with historical turnout numbers. Blacks may also have been undersampled, since black turnout increased 25%, much greater than the increase in turnout by other groups.

Unfortunately, NEP has not made the raw numbers and sampling methods available to other pollsters to study. Historically, exit polls are very accurate at predicting the winner. This is because the largest source of error in conventional polls is in determining the probability that a voter will show up in a polling place and vote. Exit polls do not have to cope with this variable. However the probability that the difference between the polls and the vote as reported by state and local governments in Florida, Ohio, and Pensylvania is due to random error is 1 in 250,000,000. This has led Republicans and Democrats alike to cry foul. Karl Rove has implicated a vast left wing conspiracy to tilt the exit polls, while Democrats have cast doubt on the accuracy of the un-auditable Diebold and Election Systems & Software, Inc. DRE software written by Bob Urosevich.

Late Exit Polls

Last CNN exit polls

CNN Ohio exit poll by gender

The sample size is not known exactly because it was reported as percentage with only two significant digits, and a total sample size of 1863.

Final exit poll as reported by TruthIsAll on www.democraticunderground.com

Late Exit Polls reported on Microsoft's Slate.com

Early Exit Polls

Early Exit Polls reported on Microsoft's Slate.com

External links

• http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/pdfs/Mitofsky4zonedata/

See also

• U.S. presidential election, 2004
  • 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy and irregularities
    • 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy, exit polls
    • 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy, vote suppression
    • 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy, voting machines
    • 2004 U.S. election voting controversies, Florida
    • 2004 U.S. election voting controversies, Ohio
  • U.S. presidential election, 2004, exit polls