Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:

> Also, if the evidence really is as good as this article suggests, it 
> does surprize me that the mainstream media haven't picked up on this. It 
> does tend to make me doubt much of the truth of these stories, or think 
> that they have been distorted, because if the evidence really is good, I 
> just don't see the media leaving it alone.

Right.  I want to know.  Well, now that there is a freely-available 
article written by a famous person, everyone can look at it and the news 
reporters should be covering it.  Either they should say that it is all 
baloney, or that some of it is true, or that all of it is true, or 
whatever.  I look forward to hearing from them.

By the way, the number 1/660,000 from the social scientist named Freeman 
-- that number is not correct.  I told him he was doing it wrong and he 
just went ahead and did it wrong anyway.  That pisses me off a lot. 
Originally he had 1/250,000,000, which was also wrong.  I showed him a 
correct method that brought the number down to 1/1,200,000.  Then he came 
up with the 1/660,000 which seems to have involved correcting some of his 
other mistakes, but not the one I pointed out.  He is a fairly naive 
statistician and I don't know which of his numbers might be incorrect. 
The number I get, based on his data, is 1/6,359, which is still 
statistically significant but not quite as earth shattering as he was 
shooting for.


> One example - at the beginning of the article it says that exit polls 
> suggested that Kerry should get a landslide victory.  But my sense at 
> that time was that the nation was very divided, and that the election 
> would be extremely close.  Thus, if exit polls at that time really did 
> predict an overwhelming Kerry victory, I do have to say that my 
> immediate reaction at that time would have been that the exit polls got 
> it wrong, because they simply would not fit with my anecdotal sense of 
> what was going on - and generally I trust anecdotal evidence a lot more 
> than statistical evidence.

A "landslide" victory could mean 2:1 in the electoral college, but that 
might translate to less than half of the popular vote.  It is 
theoretically possible to win by a landslide in the electoral college 
while losing by a landslide in the popular vote -- one reason to find the 
system unappealing.

Mike

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