The young did vote, but so did everybody

Kenyon College student Maggie Hill waited in line for nearly 10 hours to vote for John Kerry, as hundreds of her classmates waited for one of only two voting booths.

While few young voters had such a tough time at the polls Tuesday, more than 20-million Americans under 30 took the initiative to vote - resulting in a 51.6 percent turnout for that age group, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement at the University of Maryland.

CIRCLE researchers based their calculations on exit polls done for the Associated Press and others by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, and found that 18- to 29-year-old turnout was up by 4.6-million voters and more than nine percentage points from exit poll data from the 2000 election.

The figures also beat exit poll numbers from 1992, the last time the youth vote spiked amid an otherwise general decline in turnout since 18-year-olds first got the chance to vote in 1972.

Turnout increased among other age groups, too, leaving young voters with roughly the same proportion of the total electorate nationally as in 2000. But activists who were part of an unprecedented effort to get out the vote - from Rock the Vote and Declare Yourself to the Youth Vote Coalition - felt that didn't detract from their accomplishment.

"To have beaten the '92 number is incredible," said Ivan Frishberg of the nonpartisan New Voters Project. Back then, Bill Clinton defeated the President George Bush.

The new $10-million polling system used by many news organizations to predict the outcome of the presidential race was marred with problems that led to the erroneous impression John Kerry was heading for victory, according to a report prepared by the system's architects.

The report, written by Joe Lenski and Warren Mitofsky and obtained by the New York Times, details systemic glitches that skewed the data in ways that dozens of news organizations, who paid tens of thousands of dollars for the service, were not aware of.

In some cases, the report said, survey takers could not get close enough to the polls to collect adequate samples of voters' opinions.

And the report theorized that the poll results overstated more states for John Kerry than for President Bush because the Democratic nominee's supporters more actively sought out pollsters. Whatever the case, according to the report, the surveys were the least accurate since at least 1988, the earliest election the report tracked.

Some of the exit polls were off the mark for a simple reason, said the man who headed the world's foremost polling organization for years.

"One of the reasons that jumps out is that the proportion of women in the sample is much too high, and women were leaning more toward Kerry than toward Bush," George Gallup Jr. said.

MANY VOICES: It's all but official: Turnout in the 2004 election was the highest in 36 years. The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate estimated that 120.2-million people cast ballots Tuesday, a figure that translates into a 59.6 percent turnout rate. That's five percentage points higher and 15-million more voters than in 2000, the group says - and the largest turnout since Richard Nixon faced Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election.

POT PARTY: Many observers are saying Tuesday's results show a sweeping endorsement of traditional values and a rejection of wishy-washy liberalism. On the other hand, folks at the Marijuana Policy Project are celebrating wins in at least 17 of 20 contests in places such as Montana and Columbia, Mo. Montana approved a medical marijuana measure by 62 to 38 percent, the MPP pointed out, and folks in Columbia passed a medical marijuana proposal and backed another measure that replaces jail time with a maximum $250 fine for marijuana possession.

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