Some folks point to the exit polls in 2004 showing John Kerry with a convincing victory as evidence that the election was stolen. While there are plenty of well-researched examples of irregularities, the exit polls just prove that they were wrong, not that the election was stolen.
Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com gives you ten reasons to ignore exit polls. Just look at his top reason:
Exit polls have a much larger intrinsic margin for error than regular polls.
Exit polls also tend to over-sample Democrats. They overstated Barack Obama's performance by 7 points during the primaries. Just ignore them, especially the ones that will leak before the polls close.
Patience. We might have a result by 2000 EST, 0100 GMT. I think that's really optimistic. However, we will have a good early indication with the results in Virginia. As veteran political operative David Gergen said last night on CNN, if John McCain loses Virginia, it's very difficult to see how he can win.
