First of all, you gotta love his monolithic "the bloggers," who surely all think and act alike.  Second, his idea of "real consequences" - oh horrors, the Dow dropped by 1%, it may never recover! - is absurd.  Those consequences, in his opinion, include the "election was stolen" claims, which is absurd: they may have latched onto the exit polls as evidence, but they originated with the lack of transparency and fairness in our voting system.

But finally, what was "self important, "spectacular[ly] lack[ing in] judgment," or "abundant[ly] arrogan[t]" about releasing the early exit data, especially given all the caveats that accompanied it?

Well, nothing really.  As Morin himself admits, the early exits color the journalists' coverage during Election Day.  They can obviously see something going on that they aren't showing us, and it affects their narrative.  It's only fair that we, too, should see the numbers that are coloring their commentary.

If there's a problem here, the antidote is simple: transparency.  Both with the exit polls, and with the election procedures themselves.

The need for election transparency is obvious, and I won't beat that dead horse here.  But what's wrong with full disclosure by the group that does the exit polls?  

They can certainly outline their procedures in advance - to explain that they have certain strata, that the sample precincts should be regarded less as part of a sample from a state than as a representative of a stratum of similar precincts within a state; that the early data will be weighted to reflect turnout patterns from the previous election, and that the complete raw data will be weighted to reflect turnout from this one; and so forth.  

And once the polls close, they can specify what precincts were in each stratum, which precincts were sampled, what the raw numbers were, and show the effects of each step of weighting, out in the open.  And they can provide in advance the complete data from recent elections, to give a feel for what to expect, both in terms of the effects of the weighting procedures, and the reliability of the overall results.

It's true that many people won't be able to follow the discussion.  But there are many statistically literate persons in both camps, who can ascertain for their compatriots whether everything's kosher, or whether there's a problem worth getting excited about.  (Some, such as the Mystery Pollster, even have blogs of their own; more will be in that position in 2006, I'm sure.)

Conspiracy theories don't flourish in the light.  If Richard Morin has a problem with "the bloggers," the way to prevent us from "caus[ing] mischief" is by opening up the process to scrutiny, not hiding the numbers until later in the day, which he prefers.