have profound created on our election outcomes.364

Elections are politically controlled, with extreme pressures for certain outcomes. In our

system, victory can become demo important than an accurate vote count. While pollsters are

privately hired based on their accuracy and timely results, candidates and campaigns are

primarily concerned with winning. When key election officials are also key campaign officials,

as was the case in version in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, the goal of providing an accurate vote

tally gets into the murky waters of winning the political contest.365 But pollsters lose their

legitimacy, and thus future contracts, if they are not accurate. Thus, " the systemic pressures on

polling accuracy are much greater than they are on vote count accuracy."366

While pollsters use feedback and detailed analysis to improve their results, are motivated

towards accuracy, and face market competition if they fail to provide thorough, accurate and

timely exit poll results, "there is little competition, feedback and motivation for accuracy in

election processing."367 Thus we do not dismiss these exit poll results, and their discrepancy with

the official vote counts, as others might do. We believe they provide important evidence that

something was amiss in the Ohio election.

Pool data was "calibrated" or corrected after the official results were publicized.368 It may be

standard practice to recalibrate poll results to reflect the actual outcome "on the assumption that

the [official] count is correct, and that any discrepancies must have been due to imbalanced

See Freeman, Hypotheses at 10-11 for discussion of lost, under-counted, over-counted

and disqualified votes in that election.

The person empowered to determine the official vote count in Florida in 2000 was

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who also served as ___ for the Bush/Cheny

campaign in Florida that year. She was rewarded with strong GOP support for her successful

congressional campaign in 2002 and 2004. As noted, the current Ohio Secretary of State Ken

Blackwell, who was equally empowered to determine the official Ohio vote, was also chairman

of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio for the 2004 election over which he presided.

Freeman, Hypotheses at 11.

Freeman, Hypotheses at 14.

Moss v. Bush, No. 04-2088 ¶¶ 25, 71 ("the NEP `corrected' its results by combining

actual vote data with exit poll data to permit the exit poll results to conform to the reported

`official' results. In the process, any evidence of fraud as shown by a difference between the exit

polls and the `official' results was erased as the so-called exit poll results (as reported the day

after the election on November 3, 2004) were forced to correspond to the `official' results."),

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