by TruthIsAll
Democratic Underground
Those are the odds that Kerry's EXIT poll percentage would EXCEED his ACTUAL reported vote percentage by MORE THAN THE MARGIN OF ERROR in 16 out of 51 States by chance alone. That is exactly what occurred on Nov. 2.
I know that is hard to fathom. But here is the data. And here is the calculation, based on the number of individuals polled in each state and the corresponding Margin of Error (MOE).
The chances of a given state falling outside the MOE = 1/20 = .05. The calculation for the probability that 16 out of 51 states would fall outside the MOE is a simple one which uses the BINOMIAL DISTRIBUTION FUNCTION:
The Probability (P) that at least 16 out of 51 states would deviate beyond the exit poll MOE is:
P = 1-BINOMDIST(16,51,0.05,TRUE)
This returns P= 0.0000000218559% or 1 out of 4,575,415,347!...
