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Election Justice On California Primary: ‘Early Voter Exit Poll Yields 23% Discrepancy With L.A. Vote-By-Mail Totals’

By Dawn Papple
Published on: 03:17 PST, Jun 14, 2016

Election Justice USA asserts that a Capitol Weekly early-voter exit poll conducted across the state of California yielded a 23 percent discrepancy in Los Angeles vote-by-mail ballots compared to the actual results. During the polling of the early round of mail-in voters, Hillary Clinton had a lead over Bernie Sanders in the Los Angeles area that was less than 10 percent.

Election Justice USA, a voter advocacy non-profit organization, says that the discrepancy is significant enough to demand a hand audit of the early mail-in ballots.

“The discrepancy cannot be easily explained by demographic factors: the results of the Capitol Weekly exit poll were weighted by age and race. Moreover, the exit poll had 21,000 respondents, and was praised–prior to election night–by mainstream elections journalists, including Nate Cohn of the New York Times. While no exit poll can prove fraud, a significant exit polling discrepancy such as this constitutes cause for alarm, especially one of this magnitude. It’s also sufficient cause for immediate action: voters should bring pressure to bear on officials and demand an expanded hand audit.”

Capitol Weekly’s Democratic absentee voter exit poll results were displayed online in various places, including their website and Twitter.

The Capitol Weekly Open California Exit Poll used online surveys that were sent by email to California voters who were reported by Political Data Inc. as having returned their June 7 absentee ballot, so it is believed that the discrepancy could be the result of Sanders’ supporters’ greater internet literacy or inclination towards email use.

In California, Clinton was favored among people who were older. The discrepancy in exit polls of the early voters and the actual results are reportedly not due to fraud, but rather it mirrors the discrepancy of the likelihood of responding to an email poll based on age, according to Capitol Weekly.

The results of the exit poll were intended to reflect the absentee voting pool in order to give insight not on who would win overall, but on what the starting point would be as the election day voters headed to the polls.

“The results of the online exit poll show Hillary leading in absentee votes by 10 points. This does not predict that she is going to win by that margin, but it gives us a sense of the current state of the race based on ballots already cast, and the starting point for each campaign as polls open at 7 a.m. on Tuesday morning.”

The exit poll did not account for mail-in ballots that were sent in during the week preceding the election, nor the vote-by-mail ballots that were hand-delivered to polling locations. The results were screened to include non-partisan voters who obtained a Democratic presidential ballot, according to Capitol Weekly. California voters who were registered as “No Party Preference” were required to obtain Democratic cross-over ballots in order to vote in the Democratic primary.

The cross-over ballot requirement is also at the heart of an upcoming lawsuit, according to an earlier report by the Inquisitr, which says that civil rights attorney Bill Simpich claims that incomplete and incorrect instructions were sent to No Party Preference voters. According to Simpich, instructions on obtaining cross-over ballots were not “made clear in the instructions sent.” According to Trust Vote, an election integrity lawsuit has been delayed, because of the organization officials’ “desire to include election data from California.”

“In other eleven states besides California, there has been noted a significant difference between the Edison Research exit polls and the electronic vote totals presented on the morning after the primaries. These totals do not include anything from California. These differences show votes appear to be shifted from Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton. The chances of this kind of shift happening are considered to be statistically impossible between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning in these eleven states.”

The early mail-in ballots showed Clinton ahead 55-45 and were based on over 21,000 respondents who had cast their ballots as of June 4, 2016, according to Capitol Weekly.

Los Angeles County has just 556,319 ballots left to go through. Clinton’s lead in L.A. County as of Friday, according to an update from the State of California Monday, is 164,241.

Dean Logan, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, tweeted that the county will start the run of ballots at 1 p.m. and will report updates later Tuesday afternoon. Logan says he will tweet when the county’s updated summary is online.

An article in a blog on the New York Times by Nate Cohn projected that Senator Sanders could steadily erode Mrs. Clinton’s margin with the late mail ballots, writing that these “late ballots tend to be from younger voters, and should be stronger for Mr. Sanders,” but Cohn stated that, in his opinion, a long count of the later ballots probably would not portray “the sort of show of strength” Sanders would need to take his fight to the convention.

Sanders meets with Clinton Tuesday night as the final primary, the one in Washington, D.C., where Sanders’ campaigned with the call for statehood, is wrapping up. The final totals for the California primary are still weeks away but will be completed before the Democrats meet at their national convention in July.

[Photo by Rich Pedroncelli/AP Images]

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