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With regard to the exit polls on the U.$. election day, "'I don't know,' said pollster John Zogby, who relied partially on exit polls Tuesday to declare Kerry the winner in Ohio. 'I'm not blaming everything on the exit polls, but the exit polls were terrible.'" We have to point out something about the pollster Zogby as an example of how capitalism corrupts truth. A little after 5pm election day, Zogby put up his polling results showing Bu$h ahead in the popular vote by tenths of a percentage point but with Kerry winning the battleground states handily.
In the following days, Zogby made that result disappear. Instead, paeans to his predictions from days earlier when he showed Bu$h in the lead made their appearance.
Make enough predictions by running out a survey every day and by letting media companies speculate on the votes and formulas and there is no way Zogby could not find a prediction that he made to suit himself after the election. We do believe that Zogby has capitalist reasons to avoid the question of systematic voter fraud, because his inaccurate electoral projection could cause people not to buy his products in the future.
Sadly, the ignorance of the public can cause Zogby to lose business. The public wrongly asks too much of pollsters. At the same time, Zogby compensates for that problem with advertising techniques.
At this time, Zogby and other commercial pollsters have their reputations on the line, justifiably or not, and we would say mostly unjustifiably. For this reason, the pollsters would actually like the "Kerry won" theorists to disappear. Rebutting "Kerry won" theorists in detail would require reminding the public about results that the public does not understand and likely scoffs at.
Slate writers have also seen the influence of capitalism on polling:
"Some critics believe the exit polls have become too proprietary. Instead of trying to keep the results secret, the poll results and methodology should be entirely above board, said Jack Shafer, the media critic for Slate, an online magazine that published leaked poll results on Tuesday.
"That way, he said, the public can be better informed about how to view poll results — and make a more informed decision about how to interpret them.
"'There is very little transparent about what they do,' he said. 'They are basically accountable to no one.'"
This is another reason that MIM has joined the call to release the exit poll data by major pollsters and start a public discussion of it.
Source:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/200
2081763_exitpolls04.html