Is there any specific reason to think that the exit poll discrepancies don point to fraud?
There are several. One of my favorites is based on TruthIsAll’s observation: “Based on the pre-election polls: 41 out of 51 states (incl DC) deviated to Bush. Based on the exit polls: 43 out of 51 deviated to Bush.” As I discussed in Point 1, TruthIsAll’s analysis of the pre-election polls is idiosyncratic: for instance, he estimated an 85% probability that Kerry would win Ohio, although only one poll out of the last ten put Kerry ahead there. Nevertheless, if the two sets of deviations tended to coincide — if, for instance, Bush tended to do much better than the pre-election polls in the same states where he did much better than the exit polls — then one might judge that both sets of results tended to point to fraud. (Note: this argument assumes that the extent of fraud varied from state to state, and that the differences in exit poll discrepancies partly reflect differences in fraud.) Interestingly, as I show here, the relationship between these two deviations (official vs. pre-ele
