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

["Vern Green" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

So we have the people who conducted the exit poll writing a report on
how they got it wrong, and that is still not good enough for you. Some
how Robert F Kennedy knows more than the people who actually did the
work? Talk about standard operating procedure.


So how about a little more information to debunk Kennedy's article. At
Salon.com there is an article by Farhad Majoo. Not exactly the bastion
of conservatism over there at Salon, but his article is pretty
interesting.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/03/kennedy/

A couple of key things in the article that debunk Kennedy,

"Scrubbing the voting rolls of people who hadn't voted in prior
elections isn't an arbitrary move. It's the law. Here's the relevant
section of the Ohio code, 3503.19, which states that a person who
"fails to vote in any election during the period of two federal
elections" shall have his registration "canceled." To be sure, people
who intended to vote and weren't aware of this rule could have been
cut from the rolls, and you might say that's unfair. But that's an
argument for a better election law, and not proof that the purges were
part of a Republican election-theft plot."

http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/ebook/part1/eligibility_rules_os.html

And again on the exit polls and in particular your Freeman statement.

"To begin with, Freeman and his team did not "find" the
survey-completion rates that Kennedy cites. Mitofsky released that
data in a public report. This data was not discovered "now" -- Freeman
and others have been touting it ever since Mitofsky put it out in
January 2005. You can see the data on page 37 of Mitofsky's report.
There, Mitofsky indeed shows that in precincts where Bush got 80
percent or more of the vote, an average of 56 percent of people who
were approached volunteered to take part in the poll, while in
precincts where Kerry got 80 percent or more of the vote, a lower
average of 53 percent of people were willing to be surveyed. But these
numbers don't reveal how Bush voters or Kerry voters behaved, they
only show how all voters, taken together in average, responded in
certain precincts. They are irrelevant to the question of whether
fraud occurred."

Majoo makes a pretty good case dispelling a lot of Kennedy's article.
Kennedy of course, only has to throw the allegations out there and see
what sticks, he can claim all of this was a republican conspiracy and
everyone who is still upset from the 2000 election will drink it up
like Kool-Aid.








On 6/3/06, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> 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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--
Thanks
F Vernon Green

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