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Paul Grossinger writes on Inc.com about the last US presidential election:

1) In 28 states doing exit polling, 23 states had a margin favoring Trump, against 5 for Clinton. That's 82% of states going one way in a highly divided nation.

2) Among Clinton's 5, only one was above 5% discrepancy, New York. Trump had 10 and a full 13 above 4%. The typical margin of error in exit polling is sub-3%, dating back at least 4 elections.

3) Clinton suffered a significantly above the margin of error discrepancy in these states: Ohio (8.4%), North Carolina (5.9%), Pennsylvania (5.6%), and Wisconsin (4.8%). She also suffered a within-but-close-to-the edge margin in Florida (2.6%) These were the states most critical to winning the election.

4) Of the critical swing states for Clinton, only Michigan (0.3%) did not show a significant discrepancy in favor of Trump.

I don't want to veer away from the data into the realm of speculation, as the purpose of this article is purely to convey the details of the factual discrepancy of the exit polls against the vote results, and to highlight that an 82/18% split in favor, and a 100% split in swing states, is not normal in a closely contested election.

Frankly one can find arguments like this for almost any prior US election: that a systematic (in terms of [swing] states) discrepancy between exit polls and actual results point to potential systemic problems (fraud or at least some systematic error/bias) in the election process itself. (In Grossinger's case he then starts to enumerate potential vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines... and basically asks the reader to put the pieces together, wink, wink.)

As other examples: there was a paper by Steven Freeman that strongly suggested that Kerry won the 2004 election relying at least mostly on the discrepancies argument, saying there was no explanation for them:

in key state after key state, counts were showing very different numbers than the polls predicted; and the differentials were all in the same direction

There was another one by RC Barragan & A Geijsel concluding that Sanders was affected by massive fraud in his primary contest with Clinton in 2016; this paper has a section titled "anomalies exist between exit polls and final results".

Is there merit to this argument that discrepancies between exit polls and vote results point to problems with the election process (rather than say, the exit polls) in US elections?

Fizz
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    So essentially this person is saying: *"The poll failed to accurately predict the election result.... therefore the election result, no the entire **system**, is flawed".*. Permit me a snarky chuckle. –  Aug 01 '18 at 11:49
  • @MichaelK: you're welcome, but people have written serious rebuttals to this.... such as http://www.marklindeman.org/beyond-epf.pdf or https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/upshot/exit-polls-and-why-the-primary-was-not-stolen-from-bernie-sanders.html – Fizz Aug 01 '18 at 11:59
  • ... but it's still a popular idea on https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/32599/how-does-the-discrepancy-between-exit-polls-and-results-in-recent-us-elections-c – Fizz Aug 01 '18 at 12:07
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    It more likely indicates a systemic problem with the exit polls... – jwenting Aug 01 '18 at 12:37
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    @Fizz Ok, let me rephrase it: "Ok, I measure your height to be 5' 8"" "Well actually I am 5' 11"". "Then there is something wrong with your height". The poll is a measuring instrument. If it fails to measure accurately, then the poll is conducted wrongly. When it comes to reality vs a measurement of reality... reality is the right thing. –  Aug 01 '18 at 13:16
  • It could be people not wanting to admit who they voted for or they could be messing with the exit poll. – Joe W Aug 01 '18 at 13:57
  • @JoeW or the methods by which they were trying to interpolate from the tiny number of exit polls to the totality of votes were wrong. – Tgr Aug 01 '18 at 16:03
  • @JoeW A different explanation I found interesting was that republicans are less likely to participate in exit polling because of distrust of media outlets. Given the current president's frequently repeated opinions on the media, I found this to be a convincing argument. Funny enough, exit polling is done cooperatively by all the major media outlets, including Fox News. – Texas Red Aug 03 '18 at 23:32

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