Exit polls have been vilified in American elections since 2000 and it's a curious problem that has very serious and intelligent people scratching their heads and wondering what is going wrong. I have my theories.

Exit polls are often wrong in very close elections like this one and 2000 because so many votes get "spoiled" and are not counted, unbeknownst to the voter. So when voters are approached by exit pollsters and tell them how they voted they have no idea whether or not their vote was counted or not. There's something like a 1-2% spoilage rate, higher in places like Ohio where they still use punch card ballots and that has a huge effect on the results.

I have two general feelings about this. One is that we need to do everything to possible to reduce spoiled votes. No one should wait in the kind of lines we have in this country, vote and then not have their vote counted because the system doesn't work right. Two is that I think the exit polls might be more accurate than they are given credit for. If you look at Florida in 2000, the exit polls called it, accurately in the estimation of many independent observers, for Gore. If not for Jewish grandmothers voting for Buchanan and the large number of spoiled votes in predominantly Democratic counties, Gore would have won.

The same (minus the Buchanan votes) might be true for Ohio and New Mexico this time around. There's no way to know for sure. But if you look at the evidence which is that exit polls called these states one way with the actual result the opposite and the number of spoiled votes is larger than the difference, it's compelling.

Of course, while further evaluation of the votes in Ohio and New Mexico might swing those states blue, it does nothing to address the larger issue of 3 million more people in this country voting for Bush than Kerry which Democrats need to come to terms with.

Back the subject at hand, it's unfortunate that we as a country seem unable or unwilling to do anything about the massive electoral problem in the USA. You would think that after Florida 2000 we would have done something to prevent the same problems from recurring, but he haven't. Changes have been made for sure, but not nearly enough. There's too much at stake and the country is too closely divided not to do something to ensure a more perfect election. Provisional ballots are a nice idea in theory, but in practice they are a joke. Computerized balloting is rife for fraud. And will someone please tell me why we still use punch cards in this country?