Wired Hints at an Explanation

This Wired article suggests that pollsters may be putting together a more detailed explanation of the exit poll results. The presentation is still a little paternalistic:

But the people who read these numbers -- among them, thousands of ordinary Americans with an intense interest in the election -- put too much faith into them and leaped to conclusions, said Bill Schneider, CNN's polling expert. "I think people believed them, and it's particularly the case with internet bloggers," said Kathy Frankovic, CBS News' polling director. "That's unfortunate because it sets up expectations that may or may not be met. I think it's a good exercise because it reminded people that early exit polls can be unreliable." Bloggers picked out different numbers to use for their purposes, said Joseph Lenski, who ran the poll with partner Warren Mitofsky for the NEP. As the day wore on, later waves of exit polling showed the race tightening. "Doing an early poll is like reporting the results of the game at halftime," Lenski said. "You only have about a third of the information. No other survey research is held to that level of accuracy." The NEP had enough concerns that its early exit polls were skewing too heavily toward Kerry that it held a conference call with news organizations mid-afternoon urging caution in how that information was used. Early polls in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Connecticut were then showing a heavier Kerry vote than anticipated. Pollsters anticipate a postmortem to find out why that happened. Some possibilities: Democrats were more eager to speak to pollsters than Republicans, or Kerry supporters tended to go to the polls earlier in the day than Bush voters. "The exit poll is one of several tools that AP uses to call races," said Kathleen Carroll, the news agency's senior vice president and executive editor. "After every election, we look back at how all our tools worked. We'll be doing that in the next few days with our election experts and our colleagues at the National Election Pool, and expect to be able to address any concerns in that process."

I have a suggestion: don't blame the bloggers. If you want people to "read the polls correctly" then publish the data with confidence intervals. This is something pollsters are loathe to do, because they don't like attaching explicit skepticism to their results. But I, as a small-time Z-list blogger, do not care about "journalistic standards." I care about scientific standards, which are designed to maximize caution in the interest of discovering facts. The mainstreamers publish a bunch of voodoo numbers and then complain that people "read them incorrectly." They then suggest that "maybe we shouldn't release any poll data at all." NO! Release all the data! We can handle it! Probably better than you can! Mainstream media = information miser.