By Theodore de Macedo Soares
The 2020 South Carolina Democratic Party presidential primary was held on February 29, 2020. Election results from the computerized vote counts differed significantly from the results projected by the exit poll conducted by Edison Research and published by CNN at poll’s closing. The disparities exceed the exit poll’s margin of error.
Of all presidential candidates, Biden’s vote count exhibited the largest disparity from his exit poll projection. His unverified computer-generated vote totals represented a 8.3% increase of his projected exit poll share. Given the 528,776 voters in this election, he gained approximately 19,700 more votes than projected by the exit poll. This gain came at the expense of other candidates—mainly candidates Sanders, Warren, and Steyer.[i] Exit polls are widely recognized—such as by, for example, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)—as a means for checking the validity of unobservable computerized vote counts.
The United States remains one of the few major democracies in the world that continue to allow computerized vote counting—not observable by the public—to determine the results of its elections.[ii] Countries such as Germany, Norway, Netherlands, France,[iii] Canada,[iv] United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and many other countries protect the integrity of their elections with publicly observable hand-counting of paper ballots.[v]
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