Exit Polling, Vote Fraud & the 2020 Election

Discrepancy between the reported Trump vote (red vertical line) and the unadjusted exit polls (green vertical line) in the 2016 North Carolina general election. If the actual Trump vote fell anywhere within the 95% confidence interval, Trump would have lost NC.

by Thomas Neuburger

This is the beginning of an occasional series on vote fraud in the U.S., especially with respect to the treatment of Bernie Sanders in 2016 by the Democratic Party. I think this matters for a number of reason, but the two most prominent are:

1. If Democratic leaders corruptly nominate — or even appear to have corruptly nominated — a Clinton-Obama neoliberal for president in 2020, will the angry backlash from "change voters" ensure a Trump victory?

2. Even if Democratic leaders manage to elect a corruptly nominated neoliberal, will that materially change the trajectory of collapse due to (a) global wealth inequality and the rebellion against it; (b) the degradation of a human-friendly environment due to the poisons of wealth-driven consumption; and (c) most importantly, the degradation of a human-friendly climate from one that supports civilized (agricultural) life to one that supports, at best, bands of human hunter-gatherers?

Needless to say, if you worry about any of these issues, the fairness of the 2020 election, both in the primary and the general, matters. Let's begin the series by looking in general at exit polling and its use as a fraud indicator.

U.S. Elections as a Black Box

This is an era of unverifiable U.S. elections. Today's public voting system is a black box, since by design most voting machines do not produce an auditable paper trail of actual votes. Voting machines have an input (people use them to cast ballots), and an output (final vote totals are published), but without hand-counted paper ballots, there's no way to prove that the input matches the output.

This means that while there's generally no way to prove fraud based on what happens within the machines, there's also no way to disprove fraud. In a world in which the legitimacy of elections is now widely and regularly questioned by both parties — interestingly, both parties consider only the other party's victories illegitimate — it's important to be clear and accurate about which elections are fairly conducted.

Nevertheless, even without hard evidence (auditable paper ballots), indications of fraud can be many. One indication is a marked inaccuracy of unadjusted exit polls. (For examples of wildly inaccurate exit polls in the 2004 presidential election, read "A Corrupted Election.")

Exit Polls as Fraud Indicators

For a general overview of the importance of unadjusted exit polls, consider this November 12, 2016, article by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, "Did the GOP Strip & Flip the 2016 Selection?"

The article covers a lot of bases; this is the section on exit polls (emphasis added):

Polling Indicators

In the lead-up to November 8, pre-election polls strongly indicated a Clinton victory. Post-Election exit polls showed her winning as well, most critically in the swing states whose Electoral College votes could give her the presidency.

Exit polls are the accepted international standard for indications of election fraud and vote tampering. [See] Eric Bjornlund and Glenn Cowan’s 2011 pamphlet “Vote Count Verification: a User’s Guide for Funders, Implementers and Stakeholders.” Their work, done under the auspices of Democracy International for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), outlines how exit polling is used to ensure free and fair elections.

It adds that “U.S-funded organizations have sponsored exit polls as part of democracy assistance programs in Macedonia (2005), Afghanistan (2004), Ukraine (2004), Azerbaijan (2005), the West Bank and Gaza Strip (2005), Lebanon (2005), Kazakhstan (2005), Kenya (2005, 2007), and Bangladesh (2009), among other places.”

In countries like Germany and Switzerland, which use hand-counted paper ballots, exit polls are accurate to a margin error of less than 1%.

Here the 2016 exit polls were paid for by a major corporate media consortium, as has been standard practice for years. Here they are designed to reflect the actual vote count within a 2% margin of error nationally.

But in the US, if exit polls don't agree with official vote counts, they are regularly "adjusted" to conform to official results, no matter how implausible. This makes fraudulent elections appear legitimate.

During this year's Republican primaries, unadjusted exit polls confirmed official vote counts in all cases. In the Democratic primaries, unadjusted exit polls significantly varied from the official outcome in 12 of 26 primaries. All the errors went in Hillary Clinton's favor in her race against Bernie Sanders. This is a virtual statistical impossibility and suggests a rigged vote count.

In the general election against Donald Trump, things went the other way. In 24 of 28 states, unadjusted exit polls also showed Clinton with vote counts significantly higher than the final official outcome. The likelihood of this happening in an election that is not rigged are in the realm of virtual statistical impossibility.

In fact, based on the exit polls, the odds against such an unexplained "Trump Shift" are one in 13,110 presidential elections.

For example, Ohio's exit polls showed Trump and Clinton in a dead heat – 47 percent for Clinton to 47.1 for Trump. Officially, Trump won with 52.1 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 43.5 percent. This unexplained and unexpected 8.5 percent shift for Trump is mathematically impossible. ...

Given the prevalence of other Jim Crow tactics, it's likely the exit polls were impacted by non-white voters in all the key swing states who were given provisional ballots (or they voted electronically) leading them to believe their votes were being counted, even though they were not.

In key Senate races in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Missouri, exit polls also showed Democratic candidates winning by statistically significant margins, but then losing the official vote count.

In 2014, Senate races in North Carolina, Colorado and Alaska ended with exit polls also showing Democratic Senate candidates winning the popular vote, while ultimately losing the official vote count. The odds against this happening in two consecutive elections that are not rigged are also astronomical.

Data on the exit polls in the 2016 presidential election can be found here (pdf). The article has a number of links to graphical examples. One is presented at the top of this piece, but there are others.

What We Learned about 2016

Key takeaways about the 2016 election from the above article:

     • Exit polls confirmed the vote in the Republican primary.

     • Exit polls contradicted the vote in 12 of 26 Democratic primaries. All of the Democratic primary discrepancies benefited a single candidate, Hillary Clinton.

     • Exit polls contradicted the vote in the general election. In 24 of 28 states which showed this discrepancy, the benefit went to Donald Trump.

If these indications are accurate in general, it appears that both parties sometimes steal elections by manipulating voting machine totals in elections they control, with Republicans being more successful in general elections because they control more states.

Interestingly, fraud against Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary (if the exit polls do show fraud) was not matched by fraud against Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Did the Republicans run a more fair intramural election than the Democrats in 2016?

This series will continue. Fraud in the 2020 general election has to be identified and, if possible, stopped, or the election will be widely seen as illegitimate — this in an era in which both parties now claim the illegitimacy of the other party's victories in close contests. Further, if the 2020 election really is a fraudulent affair, it's best to be able to produce solid evidence and not just partisan claims, which these days seem as numerous as flowers in April.

Finally, if the Democrats run a primary campaign that's as widely seen as corrupt as the 2016 primary was seen, I fear for the electoral fate of their nominee, whoever she may be.

Staying silent about election machine fraud may have been an option in past elections, during which vigorous claims were easily dispatched by "sensible" mainstream heads. I don't think silence will be an option this time.