The position taken by the Edison/Mitofsky group is consistent with professional norms and practices. Election survey analysts ordinarily assume that official election results are the objective standard against which their own findings must be weighed, and perhaps found wanting. We admire Edison/Mitofsky's willingness to find fault with their methods and interview results. However, nothing in their report demonstrates that such errors could account for the gap between the exit polls and the election results.

Furthermore, I read into NEAP's actual arguments against the Edison/Mitofsky hypothesis for the exit poll - election result discrepancy. The hypothesis is, basically, that 56% of Kerry voters but only 50% of Bush voters were willing to respond to exit pollsters. There is no data to test this hypothesis directly. What NEAP did was to check the overall (e.g. Bush+Kerry+Other) rate of exit poll response as a function of the actual vote for Bush. The result was this graph:

However, note: (1) NEAP commits the sin of not conducting a trend significance analysis themselves, (2) something that should have been conducted by taking the different number of precints in the different bins into account, (3) there are a lot of possibilities for unaccounted-for systematic errors (a systematic error is a non-random bias, say correlation with race or settlement type), that is, factors that make people in general and Republicans especially more paranoid of pollsters in less red or blue areas.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}