2006 Exit Poll Data Screenshot Captures

Once again, as in 2004, the national media and Edison-Mitofsky have colluded in election deception.

On this page we present screenshot captures of the network consortium exit poll results for the 2006 Midterm Elections -- showing you the original, authentic 7:07 p.m. exit poll on Election Night, compared to the "forced" exit poll issued the following day at 1:00 p.m., heavily adjusted to conform to the "official" electronic election returns.

The 7:07 p.m. exit poll figures on 11/07 showed an 11.5% electoral margin between Democratic and Republican votes for the U.S. House.
View them by opening this file: http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/HOUSE_EP_7PM_1107.pdf [1]

The 1:00 p.m. exit poll figures released Wednesday, 11/08 show an apparent but "adjusted" (falsified) 7.6% percent spread -- understating the scale of the Democratic sweep by 34%.
View those figures by opening this file: http://electiondefensealliance.org/files/HOUSE_EP_1PM_1108.pdf [2]

The full explanation how and why this was done, and how we know that the original exit poll figures of 11/07 are the true reflection of this election, is published in this press release [3] and in this full-length report. [4]

Here is an excerpt from the Press Release:

The 2006 Edison-Mitofsky Exit Poll was commissioned by a consortium of major news organizations. Its conclusions were based on the responses of a very large sample of more than 10,000 voters nationwide*, and posted at 7:07 p.m. Election Night on the CNN website. That Exit Poll showed Democratic House candidates had out-polled Republicans by 55.0 percent to 43.5 percent – an 11.5 percent margin – in the total vote for the U.S. House, sometimes referred to as the “generic” vote.

By contrast, the election results showed Democratic House candidates won 52.7 percent of the vote to 45.1 percent for Republican candidates, producing a 7.6 percent margin in the total vote for the U.S. House — 3.9 percent less than the Edison-Mitofsky poll. This discrepancy, far beyond the poll’s +/- 1 percent margin of error, has less than a one in 10,000 likelihood of occurring by chance.

By Wednesday afternoon the Edison-Mitofsky poll had been adjusted, by a process known as “forcing,” to match the reported vote totals for the election. This forcing process is done to supply data for future demographic analysis, the main purpose of the Exit Poll. It involved re-weighting every response so that the sum of those responses matched the reported election results. The final result, posted at 1:00 p.m. November 8, showed the adjusted Democratic vote at 52.6 percent and the Republican vote at 45.0 percent, a 7.6 percent margin exactly mirroring the reported vote totals.

The forcing process in this instance reveals a great deal. The political party affiliation of the respondents in the original 7:07 p.m. election night Exit Poll closely reflected the 2004 Bush-Kerry election margin. After the forcing process, 49-percent of respondents reported voting for Republican George W. Bush in 2004, while only 43-percent reported voting for Democrat John Kerry. This 6-percent gap is more than twice the size of the actual 2004 Bush margin of 2.8 percent, and a clear distortion of the 2006 electorate.

There is a significant over-sampling of Republican voters in the adjusted 2006 Exit Poll. It simply does not reflect the actual turnout on Election Day 2006.

To download and read the full report, click Landslide [5]

Exit Polls

One of the most important facts to understand about the 2004 presidential election is that the exit polls for that race were expertly conducted, scientific, and well-funded surveys of the actual vote in 2004. The original exit polls--which is to say the actual, true, unadulterated exit polls-- revealed a clear Kerry victory, before an offline, middle-of-the-night "adjustment" for a novel, unsubstantiated theory known as the "Reluctant Republican Responder" (rRr) effect.

Late on election night, Nov. 2, 2004, the computer servers conducting the central tabulation were said to be "down" for a several hour period. At the time, Kerry was leading in the exit polls by a significant margin. Miraculously, when the servers came back online, a flip had occurred in the direction of the numbers with Bush now leading Kerry. Soon the Bush "lead" seemed to be insurmountable. Kerry then conceded.

To better understand this "Red Shift" of 2004, as well as other information about exit polls, please explore the following reports, inquiries and analyses. See also this excellent video presentation [6] by EDA's Jonathan Simon on the statistical impossibility of the Bush 2004 victory.

Grassroots Election Monitoring and Exit Polling in Centre County, PA

[36]

Thank you to the many local citizens whose donations supported our exit polls so far, and thank you also to Election Defense Alliance [44] for their support!

[44]

Florida Voters Sign Affidavits in Citizen Exit Polls

Original article at: http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_mj_creec_080204_florida_voters_s... [48]

To participate in citizen exit polls in the upcoming Ohio and Texas primary elections March 4, see http://www.projectvotecount.com/project.aspx [49]

February 4, 2008

Voters in 10 Counties Sign Sworn Statements Attesting to their Votes in Florida Primary Election

I just participated in a citizen exit poll in the state of Florida, and I do mean throughout the state of Florida. Ten counties in Florida were covered, in at least one precinct, by citizen pollsters, with more than one precinct covered in larger cities. I don’t have the exact numbers yet since I am typing this without internet, under a canvas canopy in the jungles of a campground near the Sarasota-Tampa area. The Little Manatee River is floating lazily nearby, Spanish moss draped over huge live oak trees, palm shrubs everywhere. Eat your heart out, snow laden states; Florida is the place to conduct exit polls for Presidential primaries, especially those early ones. Florida’s was January 29.

Florida was one of those states where the delegates won’t count for the Dems, since they moved up their primary to Jan. 29. According to the official election—not sure how many absentees or provisionals are included yet—McCain and Clinton “won,” if you trust the official results… which “trust issue” is exactly the point of doing citizen exit polls. Professional pollsters are hired by mainstream media, CNN and the other big networks, and there is ample evidence that they change their poll results to reflect the official reported election results, and do not care a whit for using their polls as a check, or verification, of those official results.

But citizen exit polls! There’s a new concept! Citizens who care most about checking on the honesty and accuracy of the official election results can conduct their own polls. Since the highly questionable election of 2004, a few citizens’ election integrity groups have been conducting exit polls here and there in several states across the country, for instance, in California, Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to name the ones that I know of personally.

We don’t have the comparisons to the official Florida results, by precinct yet, due to the slowness of the official tally report. Our hand-counted written poll results were done on election night, or, in the case of larger precincts, by the next day. BUT due to machine malfunction, official precinct results are delayed!. We didn’t want to release the exit poll data before the official precinct results were made public, so that the official results could NOT be changed to match them! On the other hand, with a high turn-out of exit poll participants, we are more likely to be correct as a sample, AND we just might have more votes for a particular candidate than their optical scan machine tally shows. We are waiting to release the exit poll tallies until the officials are finished jimmying around with the official tallies, so that they don’t UN-RIG the precincts we did. Isn’t that an interesting exercise to be conducting in the “greatest democracy in the world”?

But I will tell you this. Besides covering a good sample of Florida counties, I witnessed something of a miracle in the precinct I participated in. Voters, in fact the majority, were actually filling out the poll—it could also be called a survey—AND printing their names at the top and signing a statement swearing, affirming, or attesting that they voted the way they did. This form was drawn up by people with law degrees, Mark Adams being the mastermind, to stand up in court to PROVE fraud, if the official count differs significantly, especially if the candidate winning was not the one to receive the majority of votes. Perhaps citizen exit polls have been done with affidavits before (not sworn before a Notary Public, but sworn by signing the statement), but I can’t recall one, and I don’t think such a widespread canvassing--with affidavit-- has ever been done, in the history of citizen election activism.

How did activists pull this off? First this was not just election activists disgruntled since 04, or even 00, or before, over the riggable software of electronic voting. This was a relatively new army of activists, the Ron Paul supporters, who have lately become aware that their candidate was cheated in a straw poll, and could be again in Republican primaries. Voting rights activists, the majority of whom have been drawn from the ranks of left-leaning people, not so much Democrats as people fed up with BOTH major (“corporate controlled”) parties, have teamed up with right-leaning, Libertarian-leaning meet-up going Ron Paul workers. And I do mean workers. The exit polling I witnessed, and helped a little with, in a precinct in Sarasota, was the most organized I have ever seen. Credit must go to the top, Mark Adams, but also to the people who worked with him at all levels. Ron Paul must have quite a team. Our star pollster was a professional salesman, obviously a successful one. Very few people slipped by without filling out a survey; those who did were the ones who didn’t even stop long enough to hear this guy’s persuasive arguments. The rest of us strived to emulate his technique, and passed the “tougher” sells on to him, while we collected the completed surveys, made sure they had put the date beside their signature, and prepared more surveys with a hard surface to write on and pen attached, for our super pollster to hand to the next voter. Here is his spiel, incase you are planning your own exit poll.

“We’re conducting a VOLUNTEER (emphasized a little) exit poll and we’d like to have you participate if you are so inclined.”

You don’t ask them, “Would you like to participate?” because it’s too easy to say, “No, thank you.” Instead, you mention that there is a choice. Americans love choices. Of course if they refused, our salesman was ready to meet their objections with good solid reasons.

He would often follow the first sentence with a second, “This is to validate the votes.”

We would also explain very simply that if their candidate got say 80 votes out here at the poll, but the official count was 60 votes, then we have a problem. People got this and were willing to do it. Mark said that at his polling location, many genuinely thanked him for doing this poll to check the “machine count.” This is Florida, after all.

We got a lot of., “Who are you?” We answered that sometimes by saying who we are not. “We are not the media or tv stations, we are NOT representing any parties or candidates.” “We are a citizens’ group; we don’t get paid.” OR, “We represent an election watchdog group.” You don’t want to seem to be doing too much explaining as if we are defensive. Sometimes we just handed them a little blurb Mark, or someone working with him, wrote up about the website.

The other tough question was, “You want my signature? It’s supposed to be a secret ballot!” Our skilled salesman said to answer the first question with, “YES, absolutely. We need your signature to validate these polls.” I would say, “We need to make sure you are a valid voter.” Or I would say, “The election in there (indicating the machines room) was by secret ballot; this is an exit poll, and we need to know who voted.” Our crack pollster would actually explain to them that to challenge any discrepancy, we needed sworn ballots. Some still refused, so we had to let them go. Often our salesman pollster followed them as they walked away and drew them back by saying, “This is really important.” By our straightforwardness, openness, charisma, and intensity, we got a pretty good percentage of voters signing their exit poll ballot as to how they voted, in fact swearing to it. (See website for actual exit poll survey forms and other materials you will need to conduct an exit poll in your own state http://www.projectvotecount.com [50].)

Ok. That was the good news. Plus this: we were surprised that we were allowed to have a table right outside the voting room. People would have to walk by us to get in to vote and to leave. Ohio had this interpretation of law als--we are considered to be exit pollers, just like the professionals, Zogby or Edison/Mitofsky. And from my observation of the Mitofsky poll taker in SC last Saturday, we are at least as professional, competent, and effective. In fact more so. We had a team of pollsters (as opposed to a single poll taker in a precinct in SC) , so very few got by and almost everyone was asked. Breaks never took the team’s numbers to fewer than three. ( The election official decided that three of us were all he would allow.) Mark also had provided paperwork on the website that would show the Florida law that allowed us to exit poll. Probably many, if not all, states allow exit polling either outside the 100 foot line, or right outside the official voting room. Ohio also had a directive for the 2006 election allowing us to be right outside the voting room. We could not talk to voters before they went in, in both Florida and Ohio, but we often pointed them to the door to vote when they looked puzzled when they came to vote.

There was a Democrat Party worker who gave us some challenges: she thought we should not be so controversial, telling people their vote might not count, or asking voters’ opinions and then having them sign it. She referred to some guidelines that were written down, but it seemed to us that they were open to interpretation. Every poll I have been a part of always has those officials who question the validity of what we are doing. But what it comes down to is that we are unpaid citizens increasing the transparency and testing the validity of our elections, in one of the few ways still open to us. We can’t watch the vote count on machines that tabulate internally. We can’t even stand and watch people vote, unless we have signed up to be official observers for a particular candidate. And in Sarasota, at least, we, the people, were not allowed to be in the same room where the votes were being tabulated.

Also by Florida law, precinct results are supposed to be posted at the end of the election day, presumably before the memory cards and other election materials are packed up and returned to county location for tabulation. Florida precinct workers, just like Ohio precinct workers, do not follow this law. Sometimes the excuse is that tabulation is not done at the precinct level, even though the machines could be set to print out a tally record. Various other excuses are given, such as, “People don’t look at them anyway,” or “Someone steals the postings,” or “They are too long to post,” but the bottom line is that this valuable check by the citizens that the results are not changed further down the chain of custody , is just too “inconvenient” for the poll workers. We did not get the precinct tabulation results in our Sarasota precinct, and considered ourselves lucky to get even the total number of voters that day, from a somewhat suspicious official guarding the entry to the voting room. And so exit pollsters must wait for the results from the county election office, after who-knows-what happens to them.

We need those precinct results in order to compare them with our poll results, AND the citizens need those precinct results to verify that they were not changed later. There are absentee and early votes and provisional votes added in, either before election day or after, but the machine count of every voter who voted in person on each optical scanner is a fact, recorded on the memory card of each machine. Unless the memory card is lost, or altered by pre- or post-software manipulation, it is a permanent record, until erased, of how the votes were cast on election day, NOT COUNTING absentees, early, and provisional votes. This is a record that MUST be available to the citizens for an honest election. Citizen pollsters, as well as official poll workers, should be able to check that the number of voters that day matches what they recorded in the poll books and on their machine counts. That is the most basic of checks and balances. An audit or poll or partial recount checks to see if the sample of paper ballots counted is of the same percentages as the official count. To do that, an accurate precinct count and tally must be available to the citizens.

One of the few citizen observers who watched the Sarasota county elections board counting the ballots on election night, that is, she was able to see , through a glass window, the central tabulator reading the memory cards from each Optical Scan machine from each precinct, reported that she saw a tabulator failure, causing the officials to override the machine count, and enter vote tallies by hand, as guided by the vendor of the voting machines. (This was Jeannie Dean who is will be posting her video footage of this incident.)

WHO is watching the vote count? Where are the citizens overseeing our elections? The activist observer who reported this to me said the press and party officials were all talking among themselves about trivia and were schmoozing socially, while the count was being manipulated.

Was fraud being committed? Were the totals from each precinct machine being entered correctly? Who on earth can tell? NO real citizen oversight was allowed. And WHEN will the precinct totals be released? The Sarasota chief election official said it may be days. Meanwhile citizen pollsters will sit on their data, not wanting to allow the official precinct data possibly to be changed to match it. The exit poll canary who can help signal fraud will be silenced for now, but is still alive and awaiting some fresh air and the light of transparent elections in Florida and in the rest of the country.

Marj Creech, Election Defense Alliance, Sarasota, Florida, February 4, 2008

See also http://www.projectvotecount.com/ [51] and http://www.recallvotingmachines.com [52]

Frequently Asked Questions About Exit Polls

Frequently Asked Questions About Polling Answered by Steve Freeman and Election Integrity.org

Are we saying that the discrepancy itself means that Kerry must have really won the election?

No, the evidence that cast doubts on the election results comes from diverse sources. The exit polls have never been cited as primary evidence of fraud, but only as a reason to take that primary evidence to heart. US Representative John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the foreword to our book says the discrepancy is "but one indicia or warning that something may have gone wrong -- either with the polling or with the election." The discrepancy is an undisputed fact. The question is "What caused it?"

     There are only two possible explanations for the discrepancy: 1) far more Kerry voters than Bush voters agreed to fill out the questionnaires offered by pollsters, or 2) the votes were not counted as cast. In our book, we examine these two possible scenarios as thoroughly as possible.

The official NEP explanation that more Kerry voters than Bush voters agreed to fill out the questionnaires seems plausible. Why question this conclusion?
It is not a conclusion, but rather a presumption.
The pollsters merely asserted that this must be true without evidence or even a theory as to why it may be the case. The limited data that the pollsters present not only fail to substantiate the presumption, they undermine it entirely.

All independent indicators on poll participation suggest not lower, but higher response rates among Bush voters. One of these is that response rates are higher, not lower, in precincts where Bush voters predominated as compared to precincts where Kerry voters predominated. In precincts where Bush got 80 percent or more of the vote, an average of 56 percent of people who were approached volunteered to take part in the poll, while in precincts where Kerry got 80 percent or more of the vote, a lower average of 53 percent of people were willing to be surveyed.

How, then, do the exit polls indicate fraud?
There are more than a dozen indicators. I’ll mention just two of them.
First, there is no reason why exit polls should be more or less accurate in key states, but they are a key corruption variable: If you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed. The discrepancy is significantly higher in the 11 swing states than other states and significantly higher yet in the three critical battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, 

     Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the president's men would steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is small. Lo and behold, the report provides data that strongly bolster this theory. In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0—the numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3)

Criticism and Validation of Our Research 

Have your papers been peer reviewed?
Yes. There is no formal mechanism for papers like this (nor is there any good forum in which to publish them), but when I leave a "t" uncrossed in these papers, people write to the dean and demand my dismissal (actually, they do that anyway). The conclusions of the initial paper, in fact, have been accepted, and the "debate" has moved on.

     The US Count Votes paper which I co-authored with 11 mathematicians, statisticians, and other social scientists was extensively peer reviewed.

Has evidence come to light since the publication of these pieces which would explain this exit poll discrepancy?  No such evidence has come to light. All indications are that if the primary exit poll data were made available, it would conclusively show count corruption and identify where count corruption occurred. Unless there is some great public pressure or successful legal action, none of this primary exit poll data will be released.

Have there been any rebuttals to your analyses? There are many "rebuttals." They come from every angle you can think of, and many you could never think of. They are easy to find on the web. Here are two examples:

http://www.counterpunch.org/landes03032005.html [57].
Intended to sow confusion? Counterpunch is supposedly one of the leading "alternative" media forums.

http://elections.ssrc.org/research/ExitPollReport031005.pdf [58].
This is a report by reputable academics at top universities, sponsored by a reputable foundation. Its purpose seems to be to justify that (1) exit poll results should never be released until they have been "corrected" to the vote count, and (2) that the raw uncorrected data should never be released at all for methodological reasons that are not even sound methodology. (Many of us are appalled by (lack of) election reporting, but academic commentary has been no better.)

What do the pollsters say?
Incredibly, Warren Mitofsky, the lead exit pollster justified ignoring the vast preponderance of publicly available evidence which we have presented by claiming that data which they refuse to share, “kill the fraud argument.”

The retort is a triple outrage. First, the dismissal of public data in favor of secret data. Second, that this supposedly conclusive analysis is the work of an entrpenuer and doctoral student hired by Mitofsky. No independent researchers or serious scholars have ever seen the data or the methods by which they reach this conclusion. Third, the data is secret.

If there were indications of fraud, wouldn’t the pollsters be the first to say so? Wouldn't they want to defend their methods?
No, the last thing that Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International want to do is to imply fraud.
By minimizing the discrepancy and attributing it to polling factors, they were re-awarded one of the most prestigious and lucrative contracts in the polling world. The incentive of Warren Mitofsky, was, in his own words, to "make this thing go away."  

Lack of Transparancy in the National Election Pool Exit Poll

Have you been able to obtain the "uncorrected"^* data from the polling consortium?  The data needed to fully investigate the integrity of the election has never been made available to independent researchers. Rather, it remains the property of the NEP consortium that commissioned the exit polls, which says it cannot be released. Data has been made available, but not the data that could be used to verify the validity of the election. In the future, it's unlikely that any media poll will even let us know about any exit poll discrepancy. (For this reason and more, we have undertaken to develop an independent exit poll [59].)

Why won’t they release this data?  NEP pollsters claim that release could violate confidentiality agreements, i.e., that under some extreme circumstances one conceivably might be able to figure out how one unusual individual in an unusually homogenous precinct may have said he or she voted.

The pollsters say they are protecting respondent anonymity – what’s wrong with that?
Protecting respondent anonymity is, of course, proper and ethical. It is highly improper and unethical to use this as a dissimulation for failing to comply with the more fundamental ethical considerations of open data and protecting democracy.
The NEP claim of protecting respondent anonymity is a crock, for at least six reasons:

1. it’s unclear that such identification would be, in fact, be a realistic possibility

2. Why would any researcher ever go through the trouble of doing this? Certainly, it’s clear that our intention is to detect fraud, not to determine how a lone obscure voter might have said they voted.

3. Even if, in the extremely remote circumstances, that someone might think he or she could identify a voter, what harm could it cause? Yet NEP would have us accept that a small, extremely hypothetical risk that a few individuals’ confidentiality might be compromised but causing no apparent harm –outweighs the importance of an independent check on our nation’s voting procedures and, very likely, evidence of a stolen election.

     Even if this doesn’t persuade you, consider that:

4. Confidentiality could not be a concern in the vast majority of precincts that have even minimal demographic diversity. Why not release precinct identification for these data?

5. In those few precincts where some individual identification might conceivably be possible, NEP could simply have blurred the
demographic data. Indeed, given the choice between precinct identifiers – critical to the investigation of fraud – and demographic data, not only is the relative importance plain as day, but demographic data make no sense at all. After all, what is the point of trying to explain why voters purportedly voted as they did, when we
cannot even say how they voted?

6. Finally, consider that NEP denied this data to highly qualified and experienced independent academics from the nation’s leading research
institutions, many of whom have experience working with sensitive and national security data, who offered to work only onsite and reimburse NEP for any additional costs incurred. Yet they have given it to two individuals whose only qualifications seem to be an ability to promote the Mitofsky perspective.   

•  Elizabeth Liddle, a British doctoral student in an unrelated field, who has argued ubiquitously (4,000 posts, many of them very long, in one year on [the web discussion board] Democratic Underground and similar numbers on other sites) and extensively that the data, which she cannot share, indicate no fraud.

•  Steve Hertzberg, a man with no record at all of either research or maintaining confidentiality, whose qualifications includes no background in research, polling, or political science, but rather, in direct marketing.

It is clear that NEP’s primary concern is not respondent confidentiality, but rather control over the findings.

Independent Exit Polls

[6]

•Exit polls, whether in the Ukraine or the United States, are the most powerful tool available for detecting vote fraud and theft — which is why the campaign to discredit them has been so determined.

•Ensuring the integrity of Election 2008 will depend upon reliable exit polls: polling data that are independent of media control. Media-controlled exit polls are, obviously, rendered useles when they are “adjusted” to conform to announced vote results, as happened in 2004.

•This is why Election Defense Alliance (EDA) has made citizen Election Verification Polls (EVPs) its top priority. We are working with a nationally recognized polling firm to conduct polling in critical competitive federal races.

Click here to read about verification polls EDA commissioned to guard the 2006 Midterm Elections [60]

Polling coverage on the scale required will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, even relying on large amounts of volunteer citizen labor. For a more detailed discussion of the role and history of Exit Polls, click here. [6] Additional extensive reading on the 2004 Exit Poll scandal is collected for your reference here. [6]

PLEASE HELP NOW. EDA needs your immediate support in funding this critical endeavor. Millions of American voters will thank you.

Election Defense Alliance is a program of International Humanities Center, a nonprofit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code [FEIN: 33-0767921]. Donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

1. Check or money order
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Networks To Dissolve Exit Poll Service: Replacement Sought For Election Surveys

By Richard Morin / Washington Post Staff Writer / January 14, 2003
Go to original. [62]

The major television networks and the Associated Press decided yesterday to dissolve the Voter News Service exit poll consortium but have not reached agreement on a replacement plan to survey voters on Election Day.

VNS employees were told at a morning meeting at their headquarters in Brooklyn that they had been laid off immediately and the service had been disbanded. The consortium has stumbled in the past two national elections, with the networks calling the 2000 election for George W. Bush only to have to retract it later that night. Last year the VNS computer crashed on election night, leaving news organizations without exit polls.

During yesterday's brief but stormy session, Murray Edelman, VNS editorial director, angrily denounced the network partners for making the exit poll service into the "scapegoat" for the problems, according to VNS employees at the meeting. He declined to comment when contacted at his home after the session.

The networks and the AP have not decided what to do with the unreleased data collected by VNS on Election Day, when a massive systems failure shut down its analysis and data collection operations. The exit poll service reportedly was close to releasing the results of the national exit poll and possibly some state exit poll results when VNS was shuttered.

Through yesterday, the partners considered two possible replacements for VNS, one offered by CNN and a more informal proposal made by CBS. But the meeting ended without a final decision, said a source with direct knowledge of the deliberations. The partners are scheduled to meet again today.

Both proposals try to keep the existing consortium together as a partnership. The CNN plan would rely on a system designed by Warren Mitofsky of Mitofsky International and Joe Lenski of Edison Media Research, consultants hired by the network two years ago to advise it on exit polling and election forecasting. The plan calls for a national exit poll in 2004 as well as exit polls in each of the 50 states, sources said. The system could be expanded to include exit polls in next year's presidential primaries.

Other VNS members would join with CNN as equal partners in a pool arrangement that would oversee but not directly manage the exit poll operation, which would cost about $10 million.

Under the CBS proposal, the network would hire some of the consortium's employees, including some who already are on the payroll of different partners. A contractor would be hired to conduct the actual exit polling. The current partners would jointly administer the operation, which would be based within CBS.

Both plans initially had received a cool reception from other VNS partners. Some members fear the CBS plan merely relocates VNS and its problems to CBS. But others worry that the CNN plan would make it appear that the other networks were clients of CNN.

There were concerns that Mitofsky might exert too much influence in the CNN-sponsored effort. Mitofsky, an experienced survey researcher and formidable personality, is the former head of the predecessor to VNS and previously had directed the CBS polling unit for 15 years. He and Lenski have worked together extensively on exit polls, including one done for The Washington Post on the District mayoral race in November. In 1994, Mitofsky did exit polls for a newspaper group that included The Post and the New York Times. Technical problems delayed delivery of those data on election night.

For nearly two years, Mitofsky and Lenski have been working on a precinct-based exit poll and vote-counting system for CNN as a double-check against VNS data. The CNN system worked virtually flawlessly on Election Day last November while VNS crashed. The CNN system, which would be the core of its proposed new exit poll operation, gave CNN an advantage in recent negotiations over the other networks, which had nothing comparable in place.

The VNS board of managers also reached agreement with Battelle Memorial Institute to settle an outstanding contract to complete development of new exit poll technology and software, sources involved in the talks said.

VNS experienced serious problems with Battelle almost from the start of their relationship two years ago. Consortium employees repeatedly warned the board that Battelle was failing to perform -- warnings that the board did not take seriously, according to sources with direct knowledge of VNS operations.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

Weighting Results for Undersampled R's in Exit Polls, Parallel Elections [Updated]

Weighting Results for Undersampling of Republicans in Exit Polls or Parallel Elections