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Why did we end exit polling? Seems like an obvious counter-measure/check. I don't trust for-profit media to conduct them. This is something that we all need to

by webXL 11y ago

Why did we end exit polling? Seems like an obvious counter-measure/check. I don't trust for-profit media to conduct them. This is something that we all need to chip in to accomplish, if we care about democracy. If we can't trust election results, we really can't trust anything connected to government, and as the state continues to grow, that's very little.

logfromblammo 11y ago
There are two reasons. Firstly, they were diverging from official results. There are two possible reasons. Reason one would be that the exit polls were not accurately reflecting the will of the people. Reason two would be that the official results were not accurately reflecting the will of the people. It could be both. Since reason two would have been too uncomfortable to consider, reason one was chosen. And the exit polls dried up. It is not even widely known that prior to ending the polling completely, the pollsters were already applying statistically-calculated adjustment factors before reporting the poll results on air, in order to force the polling numbers to predict the official results more accurately. I don't even need to put my foil hat on to say that I trust a statistical prediction made by blindly sampling from a random pool of volunteer respondents over a secret-source black box that pretends to be counting votes, where there is significant incentive to cheat. The great thing about exit polling is that anyone could do them, and publish the results along with their margin of error. And some people still do. They just don't get reported on television during elections night coverage any more. The second reason is that news programs are now reporting official results, as they are tallied and reported by those black box computer systems. The computers can count electronic ballots quickly enough to report initial results shortly after voting booths close. Exit polls lost the advantage of speed. The television news programs like to be able to project the likely winners as soon as possible, and preferably before any competitors. By the time the hand-counted paper ballot areas finish reporting, the winners have already been known for hours, if not days.
- webXL 11y ago
  Seems like this trust issue could be solved with a bit of cryptography. A search for "blockchain elections" turned up some interesting proposals. http://www.bitcongress.org/ http://www.bitcongress.org/ seems like it's being served over 28k modem though.

by webXL 11y ago

logfromblammo 11y ago

There are two reasons. Firstly, they were diverging from official results. There are two possible reasons. Reason one would be that the exit polls were not accurately reflecting the will of the people. Reason two would be that the official results were not accurately reflecting the will of the people. It could be both. Since reason two would have been too uncomfortable to consider, reason one was chosen. And the exit polls dried up. It is not even widely known that prior to ending the polling completely, the pollsters were already applying statistically-calculated adjustment factors before reporting the poll results on air, in order to force the polling numbers to predict the official results more accurately. I don't even need to put my foil hat on to say that I trust a statistical prediction made by blindly sampling from a random pool of volunteer respondents over a secret-source black box that pretends to be counting votes, where there is significant incentive to cheat. The great thing about exit polling is that anyone could do them, and publish the results along with their margin of error. And some people still do. They just don't get reported on television during elections night coverage any more. The second reason is that news programs are now reporting official results, as they are tallied and reported by those black box computer systems. The computers can count electronic ballots quickly enough to report initial results shortly after voting booths close. Exit polls lost the advantage of speed. The television news programs like to be able to project the likely winners as soon as possible, and preferably before any competitors. By the time the hand-counted paper ballot areas finish reporting, the winners have already been known for hours, if not days.

webXL 11y ago
Seems like this trust issue could be solved with a bit of cryptography. A search for "blockchain elections" turned up some interesting proposals. http://www.bitcongress.org/ http://www.bitcongress.org/ seems like it's being served over 28k modem though.