"Citizens to conduct exit polls in Wisconsin recall elections."

Instigated by "the Election Defense Alliance, a nonpartisan national group that monitors elections," as reported in Isthmus.

The purpose of citizen exit polling, say organizers, is to monitor the "integrity" of elections that rely on computerized machines to tally votes. Concerns about the validity of electronic voting machines in the 2004 elections, as well as the mishandling of some 14,000 ballots by the Waukesha county clerk in the recent Supreme Court race, have brought the issue to the fore in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

The ultimate goal, says Jonathan Simon, cofounder of the Election Defense Alliance, is to "draw attention to, expose and change our vote-counting system, which is at the very least vulnerable to manipulation."

So, that sounds as though this is an attempt to amass evidence that will be used to challenge the official results of today's elections.

[Sally] Castleman of the Election Defense Alliance says citizen polling is a necessary check on the system because official ballots are counted in secret and there is no way to verify the accuracy of electronic machines, which she says are vulnerable to mistakes, malfunction and manipulation....

[UW-Madison political science professor Charles] Franklin says the accuracy of exit polls depends on the random selection of polling locations and voters. He says he's not familiar with the work of the Election Defense Alliance, which since its founding in 2006 has conducted citizen exit polling at 60 sites in eight states, but says relying on exit polls as a check on the system "places enormous faith in the ability of exit polls to properly sample voters as they come out of the system."...