EXIT POLLS: Flawed Methodology, or a Dying Canary?

I know it sounds tinfoilhatty to some people, but there is plenty of hard evidence (including actual legal convictions, and the inevitable "whistleblower dies in small plane crash the day before testifying" story) that elections have been stolen in the past, and lots of implications that they're being stolen today. FL '00 was stolen by the Republicants (I'm specifically referring to win-at-any-cost neocons here: they're like Replicants ... nearly indistinguishable from human beings) long before the polls opened, and the Crosscheck program (brainchild of the AZ Rebublicant responsible for AZ's "living while brown" laws and Trump's "build a wall and get MX to pay for it" scheme) is just part of the recent attempt to take that strategy national. The presumption in all the hand-wringing following the recent election is that the pundits and exit polls were wrong; I'll agree with the former, but the latter is the standard by which we judge whether international elections were free and fair, and asking a voter "who did you vote for?" will be different than the actual results based on many factors such as whether the scantron machines (which are older are less frequently updated or calibrated in poorer areas) misread your ballot, or whether the poll worker challenges your right to vote based on a disenfranchisement effort and hands you a provisional ballot (which you would be surprised to find out typically lands in the trash, and is often prohibited from being used in a recount).

The fact that, e.g. Ohio turned off the security and accounting features on its e-voting machines for no good reason just prior to the 2016 vote; or the existence of laws like the ones in MI mandating that a recount CANNOT include comparing paper ballots to machine totals (allowing only for retabulation, but throwing out once again any precinct where the voter roll counts differ from the vote total by a single vote, even if that's a mis-scan or a forgotten tick mark (oops!) by a poll worker); or that Secretaries of State are inevitably highly partisan hacks (I'm looking at you, Ms. Harris) tells me that these shenanigans are not only known, but welcomed by our perpetual overlords. There are a lot of bad election laws that only make sense in the context of preventing meaningful auditing or recounting. There are plenty of real election experts that know how to run a free and fair election that are being willfully ignored.

Exit polls in '04 were right in 49 of 50 instances, the exception being Ohio, which both decided the election and is the home to Diebold, the voting machine company that runs most of the Ohio e-voting machines, and which is run by a staunch Republicant who promised to "deliver Ohio to Bush." Similar, they nailed the exit results well in '00, aside from calling FL as a clear victory for Gore.

Exit polls, where wrong in '16 (which was often), failed beyond statistical probability in favor of Republicans in all but one (non-contested) state. Where the states were swing states, those error bars were most violently violated. Even if you believe in a Shy Trump Voter (have you ever met one of those?), this doesn't explain errors in down-ballot elections or the collection of locations where the skew was heaviest, and the odds of pollsters (who make their living on the strength of their accuracy) missing in this manner (not just missing, but with extreme prejudice) are winning-the-lottery-while-being-struck-by-lightning-like.

But don't just take my word for it, please:
https://scienceblog.com/490775/elections-stolen-shouldnt-ask/
I invite you to tell me where any of these claims are wrong, as long as you use a reasonable citation.

This ignores "legal" disenfranchisement efforts such as gerrymandering, voter ID laws (which address exactly the wrong kind of vote fraud), provisional balloting, roll purges, rewriting the laws determining the balance of power based on whether or not your party is in power, willfully not doing your job once elected, using your office to ensure reelection and/or campaigning in lieu of governing, etc. These issues plus additional evidence of (sufficiently) widescale fraud intended to give a minority of the population (white, male, conservative, religious, wealthy ... i.e. those who feel most put upon these days) the majority of the political power -- in what used to be a democracy -- will be coming soon to this space, under "Electoral Shenanigans." So, you have that going for you. Just remind me not to board any small aircraft any time soon.