NEWS RELEASE DATE: Friday, May 13, 2005 EMBARGO UNTIL: Saturday, May 14 at 2:00 p.m.

(EST) CONTACT: Rich Garella, (212) 473-6929 Fritz Scheuren (202) 320-3446 Ohio Exit Polls Not a Smoking Gun for Fraud, Study Says A just released analysis confirms pollster Warren Mitofskys assertion that the exit polls that put John Kerry ahead of George Bush in Ohio on Election Day 2004 do not necessarily indicate that there was fraud in the Ohio election. Exit polls estimated that Senator John Kerry was leading for Ohios electoral votes, but not by a large enough margin to be called the winner. Had he won Ohio, he would have won the Presidency. However, the official result was a victory for President George W. Bush. The discrepancy between the polls and the results gave rise to widespread accusations of systematic election fraud. The new study, commissioned by the Election Science Institute (ESI), was presented on Saturday at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Miami. It looked at the results of the exit polls, which were conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and compared them to official results from 2004 and 2000. The research team, led by Dr. Fritz Scheuren, used more detailed information from the exit polls than previous studies. The team was able to use this precinct-level information while preserving ballot secrecy at a local level. The more detailed information allowed us to see that voting patterns were consistent with past results and consistent with exit poll results across precincts. It looks more like Bush voters were refusing to participate and less like systematic fraud, Dr. Scheuren said. Dr. Scheuren is the current President of the American Statistical Association, and Vice President for Statistics at NORC, a research institute based at the University of Chicago. Steven Hertzberg, project director at the Election Science Institute, spoke to the broader implications. We need to develop better tools to monitor our elections. The fact that there is debate over this at all shows that we need elections to be more transparent, more accountable, more auditable, he said. To increase public confidence in the system ESI has begun working with election officials in Ohio to help publish more timely election data so the public may verify for themselves that the voting and the counting is done accurately. The Election Science Institute (ESI) is a non-profit, non-partisan scientific organization based in San Francisco and founded in 2002 under the name Votewatch. ESI monitors public elections in the U.S. to identify voting anomalies which impact election results, and works with election officials to help them improve voting and election systems. ESI conducted its own exit polls in New Mexico for the purpose of assessing voters experiences. ### The paper is being presented at AAPOR 2005s Saturday lunch plenary. The conference is at the Fontainebleau Hilton Resort, 4441 Collins Ave, Miami. See http://www.aapor.org. For more information on the Election Science Institute, see http://www.electionscience.org.

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