The Results of Exit Polls in Kansas to Verify Voting Machine Counts in the November 2016 Election

Clarkson Elizabeth ()
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Clarkson Elizabeth: National Institute for Aviation Research, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS, USA

Statistics, Politics and Policy, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 161-194

Abstract: Citizens’ exit polls are performed by local voters to verify the official reported election results. Five citizens’ exit polls were run in southeast Kansas during the Nov 8th 2016 election. These exit polls were designed specifically to verify computer generated vote counts and run solely by volunteer labor, all local citizens who were willing to put in the necessary hours on Election Day to conduct the poll and later, to count the results by hand. These exit polls were able to obtain high participation rates resulting in the ability to detect small yet statistically significant differences. All five polling stations surveyed show evidence of multiple statistical anomalies in both the pattern and size of the errors between the official results and exit poll results although biases were not uniformly oriented across sites. The small discrepancies found in the studied races were insufficient to alter the outcomes. Non-response bias and unintentional errors were evaluated as potential causes; those explanations were plausible in some but not all cases. These results show a pattern of discrepancies between the exit polls and computer counted results displaying consistent bias within sites. This would be an expected outcome of a deliberate manipulation of the computer results. While this data doesn’t conclusively prove election interference and manipulation of votes counts, it should be taken seriously as a sign of such interference. Doubts about the accuracy of the reported results are appropriate unless other plausible explanations for the discrepancies can be found.

Keywords: election integrity; voting machine accuracy; citizen’s exit poll (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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DOI: 10.1515/spp-2020-0011

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