Internet guru Larry Lessig calls for release of the exit poll data on his blog today. The Exit Poll Consortium should release this data to faciliate an objective analysis of statistical anomalies that may require further investigation.
Lessig is an extremely influential leader in the Internet legal community and the open culture/open source communities. His call resonates with the general cultural movement to make critical information publicly available. This is a position that is not outcome-oriented: just put out the data, and let the data decide what happened.
The organizations in the consortium: ABC, CBS, NBC, AP, CNN and FOX. All are pressure points for the release of the data so that the election can be fully analyzed.
http://www.lessig.org/blog/
And here is the website from Edison/Mitofsky, the company that was contracted to provide the exit poll data. A lot of representations about the reliability of their methods and results.
http://www.exit-poll.net/index.html
And here's how Edison describes the soundness of their exit poll methodologies and the improvements since 2000, and a promise to clearly report any mistakes:
Q: How will these exit polls and projections differ from what was done in 2000?
A: Since 2000 all models have been updated and improved. Polls of absentee voters in 13 states will be conducted so the absentee vote can be combined with the vote cast at the polls on Election Day. Quality control procedures are more sophisticated. The computer system is new this year and has been extensively tested.
Q: Are these new models and procedures going to assure the public that there will be no mistakes?
A: The mistakes made during the 2000 election were unusual. During the 10 years before that VNS and the poll before it made only one mistake from 1990 to 1998. Before that, when the broadcast networks made their own projections, there were similarly very few mistakes during the 1970s and 1980s. There were no mistakes during the limited coverage in 2002. There were no mistakes made during the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries. Many lessons were learned from the 2000 experience and changes were made to see that mistakes like the ones in 2000 would be very unlikely to occur again. Having said all that, there is no way to guarantee that a mistake in identifying a winner will not happen again. If it does, the public can be assured that the mistake will be publicly acknowledged and corrected as soon as possible. Even in 2000 the mistakes were corrected by the same people who made them within a short time.
http://www.exit-poll.net/faq.html
Free the data.