Of public opinion, exit polls and fraud (or the lack thereof) (Part 3)
Maybe that is the main point that gets missed: reality is messy. Science in general, and certainly "social science," proceeds incrementally and cautiously on the basis of radically incomplete information. Some folks have argued that the exit pollsters bear the "burden of proof" of demonstrating that non-response bias explains the exit poll results. But they rarely attempt to offer a coherent fraud hypothesis that does any better. It strikes me as an Intelligent Design argument applied to an election rather than speciation. In the election context, the intelligence is assumed to be malevolent, but in both cases, it is somewhat inscrutable. The largest exit poll discrepancies were in Vermont and Delaware, but no one seems very interested in explaining how and why those states became epicenters of vote fraud. I think of it as a "fraud of the gaps" argument: Fraud is invoked as an "explanation" of residual variance. (Or, as long as I'm offering strained puns, the argument asserts irreducible complicity.)
