How Voters Can Protect Against Inner Biases

By DALTON CONLEY

Pundits were shocked in 2004 when exit polls wrongly showed John F. Kerry cruising to victory over George W. Bush. In the weeks that followed the election, statisticians and political scientists scurried to explain the apparent disparity between actual vote counts and what voters told pollsters as they left the booth. That fiasco, of course, came on the heels of the major exit-poll drama four years earlier, when television networks called the race early — only to reverse themselves