Article: VoteRescue/Texans for REAL Elections Conduct Exit Poll at Texas Straw Poll

VoteRescue/Texans for REAL Elections Conduct Exit Poll at Texas Straw Poll

Austin, Texas, Saturday September 1st, 2007

Yesterday, Saturday September 1st, Austin, Texas-based VoteRescue, in conjunction with our new Coalition, "Texans for REAL Elections", conducted an Exit Poll at the Republican party's Texas Straw Poll in Fort Worth, Texas. (Texans for REAL Elections includes "Vote in Sunshine"; "IndyTexans"; "Texas Motorcycle Rights Association"; "Project for the New American Citizen (aka "PNAC"), and the Austin, Texas "Truthseekers" organization.) Our small but very committed group of volunteers assembled at the Ft. Worth Convention Center and succeeded in garnering a fantastic 23.8% participation rate, or 308 exit poll participants, among the 1300 official Republican delegates who voted in the official Straw Poll.

THE TEXAS STRAW POLL WAS EXECUTED WITH HAND-COUNTED PAPER BALLOTS. But because of issues we had with the proposed protocol for chain-of-custody of the ballots, and prohibition of the public and the media from observing the count, we decided to proceed with our Election Verification Exit Poll (EVEP), with help and guidance from Ken Warren and Steve Freeman, whose model of EVEPs we used and simplified for the Texas Straw Poll, as well as their procedures for conducting the poll. (Many thanks to Ken and Steve for their helpful information!)

On site at the Ft. Worth Convention Center, we dealt first with rain, then intense Texas heat and humidity, and a guard at the door who would not let us set up in shade (but at least did not throw us off the property of the Convention Center.) MANY THANKS TO OUR WONDERFUL VOLUNTEERS: Laura and Randall Killins, Laura Westcott, Hector Del Toro, his friend Jimmy (last name? We never got! :( ) Bill Giltner; Kathy Cox, Gregory Gory, Whitney Young, Kathleen Wynne, Terry Melton, and VoteRescuer Debbie Stevens (who had us on as guests on her We the People radio talk show broadcast live from Fort Worth on Friday night!) Additional thanks to the other We the People Radio Network (WTPRN) hosts who interviewed us live both before (Kevin Smith's show the week prior) and during the Straw Poll (Torin Wolfe's show) to help publicize our efforts.

Our real break Saturday came when one of our Exit Poll teams gained access inside the building and managed to station themselves just outside the exit doors of the room where voting took place. (This may well have been because of the yellow "Vote in Sunshine" T-shirts obtained by volunteer Gregory Gory from the hard-working election monitors from the Iowa Straw Poll-- which looked amazingly similar to the yellow T-shirts worn by official Straw Poll volunteers! Happy Coincidence!) The mad rush to complete Exit Polls was on sometime between 12:00 noon and 12:30 when voting began, until just after 2 pm when it ended. Luckily, one of our volunteers, Kathy Cox, got most of us Guest Passes which allowed us inside where the biggest crowds of voters could be accessed in the shortest period of time.) We immediately sent most of our Pollsters to that location, which was how we got such a great percentage of respondents. Below are our results, set side-by-side with the "official" results from the Straw Poll:

Texas Republican Party Straw Poll

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Results for Election Verification Exit Poll conducted by

Texans for REAL Elections:

Candidate Our Results Official Results

# of Votes / % of Total # of Votes / % of Total

Sam Brownback 1 .33% 6 .46%

Hugh Cort 2 .65% 3 .23%

John Cox 4 1.30% 10 .77%

Rudy Giuliani 7 2.27% 78 6.00%

Mike Huckabee 23 7.47% 83 6.39%

Duncan Hunter 101 32.79% 534 41.08%