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

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sat, 3 Jun 2006, Vern Green wrote:

> Since this has turned into such a hate fest towards me,

If there's a "hate fest" it's because you accuse people of things they 
haven't done, like intentionally misleading others when you can't even 
identify a misleading statement.


> I will have to resort to more drastic measures in an attempt to show you 
> that the election exit polls were wrong because of the system used, NOT 
> because of some conspiracy.
>
> http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf

I really think that you should not consider searching for evidence and 
presenting a URL and quotations to be "drastic measures."  It should be 
more like "standard operating procedure."


> "Since election day there has been discussion about the differences 
> between the National Exit Poll and the estimates from the Cross Survey 
> from all state surveys. Some estimates differ by several points among 
> certain demographic groups, most noticeably among Hispanics. These 
> differences appear mostly among demographic groups that are both 
> relatively small (8% or less of the voting population) and those that 
> tend to be geographically concentrated."
>
> "One way to reduce error is to take additional steps to keep the 
> interviewers focused on strictly following their interviewing rates in 
> order to properly sample voters within each polling location. This will 
> be made an even greater priority in the future. We will develop 
> additional steps in the recruiting and training process to make certain 
> that the interviewers are following the detailed instructions that we 
> give them."
>
> "For the 1,460 exit poll precincts where we have both exit poll tallies 
> and final vote returns, we calculated an average WPE of -6.5 on the 
> difference between Kerry and Bush."
>
> "While we cannot measure the completion rate by Democratic and 
> Republican voters, hypothetical completion rates of 56% among Kerry 
> voters and 50% among Bush voters overall would account for the entire 
> Within Precinct Error that we observed in 2004."
>
> Anyway, you can read the rest for yourself. The point here is that I was 
> right, the exit polling company HAS offered up they made an error, and 
> got it wrong as I suggested before.

I don't really see it that way.  They are saying that large differences in 
completion rates by Democrats and Republicans would have to exist to 
explain the numbers, but they are not able to directly measure those rates 
so we can't really tell what happened.  They are also saying that large 
prediction errors in some concentrated minority populations could be 
accounted for by sampling error that could be reduced by doing a better 
job of training their interviewers.

Here's where you have a point:  In 2004 they undertook a larger exit poll 
than in previous years.  This meant hiring and training twice as many 
people as before.  It seems to have meant hiring lower quality people and 
not training them as well.  I was told years ago that US census data was 
not as good for the big census years as for intermediate years.  The 
reason, supposedly, was that census workers were very poorly trained for 
the big, complete census polls, but better trained for the smaller, 
incomplete polls.  The smaller samples were of better quality though 
smaller, but statistical analysis was able to use the smaller samples to 
get better answers.  That sort of thing could have affected the exit poll 
results in 2004.  More data is not necessarily better.

But then we have the other evidence of fraud in Ohio, and we have this 
information which seems to strongly contradict the Mitofsky theory -- from 
Kennedy's Rolling Stone article:

  Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and
  a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is
  dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more
  disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush
  strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six
  percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only
  fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to
  support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman,
  ''but actually contradicts it.''

  What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls
  and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts
  where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls
  were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where
  Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate
  to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests
  Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

How could that happen if the inaccuracy is due to oversampling of Kerry 
voters?  It just doesn't make sense.

Mike

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