1 in 1 billion chance Mitofsky is not an ass-brain! Eureka!

[Bread and Circus]

I used excel and entered in a binomial distribution
of his glial cells and found that he has a 999,999,999
chances in a billion that he has his head up his ass after
reading this:

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/1154871.shtml

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Pollster blames networks for leaking early data

By CHRIS CHURCHILL
Staff Writer

WATERVILLE -- By mid-afternoon on Election Day, many John Kerry supporters were giddily confident their candidate would sweep to victory. The source of this misguided euphoria? Exit polls showing Kerry would win in most battleground states.

snip...

But the exit polls leaked to the public on Web sites and elsewhere were wrong -- an unpleasant situation for Warren Mitofsky, who co-ran the exit polling on behalf of the nation's leading news organizations, including the Associated Press and CNN

snip... (and the following is the kicker)

Mitofsky on Wednesday said the exit polls had problems in nine states. In seven, the polls were overly kind to Kerry. "I'm not going to pretend the exit polls in this election were wonderful," he said. "They weren't."

But Mitofsky said his organization had corrected many of its mistakes by the day's end, after analyzing the data and comparing them to incoming voter returns. Much of the problem, Mitofsky determined, resulted from voter sentiment. Kerry supporters were eager and energized, he said, and therefore more likely to stop and answer a pollster's questions -- a pattern that happens occasionally in elections but was not anticipated this year.

snip... (but there's more to read at the link)

---

The reason I find this such an affront is that the guy
is bald faced admitted that he changed his research metholodology
mid-stream to coax the numbers to be in line with the
election returns. Having a bit of a background in science, I know
that it's a fairly basic no-no to change your testing methodology
if you are not getting the result you expect. The fact that he
admits to changing his methods as the day goes on really calls his
credibility into play.

Perhaps he is just a sucky pollster or perhaps he just "frauded"
his exit polls to match the "frauded" vote so he didn't look
like a shmuck. I mean c'mon, the guy has a total conflict of
interest here. If he picked Kerry as a big winner for the night
but Bush "got his (fictional) mandate", Mitofsky might go wanting
for work next time around.

This guy better make good, because he's on paper sullying a very
basic rule when you are doing any form of statistical research.

It's the methodology, ass-brain.

P.S. Mitofsky - Fuck You.

[Bread and Circus]

1. Oh yeah, one more thing, here's his CYA statement. LOL

The pollster stressed that despite the problems, neither his organization nor the subscribing news outfits made wrong calls. They did not announce that Bush or Kerry had won a state, only to have the announcement overturned by the hard reality of voter ballots.

"I didn't make any mistakes in 2004," he said. "And by mistakes, I mean declaring the wrong winner."

[Bread and Circus]

2. Oh and here's another one where he's been proven wrong....

(on the Hispanic thing --- where Bush's support finally got downgraded)

...Some are likewise questioning the exit-poll claim that Hispanic voters supported Bush in larger-than-expected numbers; Mitofsky answered a cell phone call from a national reporter inquiring on the issue during Wednesday's interview. He stood by his poll.

"I don't see any reason to determine what we put out is wrong," he said....

------------------

After reading the article, I can really see how you just can't
trust the guy, his motives, or his methodology.

[dargondogon]

9. Annual meeting of pollsters: Make Warren Mitofsky squirm

Republican pollster Frank Luntz got smacked down by the American Association for Public Opinion Research for failing to disclose his methodology.

Perhaps we should complain to AAPOR about Warren Mitofsky.

Time and again I've read about researchers complaining they can't get the raw data or clear explanation of methodology from Edison/Mitofsky's National Election Pool. If true, that appears to be a violation of AAPOR's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices.

From AAPOR's news release:
"In particular, the AAPOR inquiry focused on Luntz's reporting, prior to the November elections in 1994, that his research showed at least 60 percent of the public favored each of the elements in the GOP "Contract with America." When later asked to provide some basic facts about this research, Luntz refused.

"AAPOR holds that researchers must disclose, or make available for public disclosure, the wording of questions and other basic methodological details when poll findings are made public. This disclosure is important so that claims made on the basis of opinion research findings can be independently evaluated. Section III of the AAPOR Code states: "Good professional practice imposes the obligation upon all public opinion researchers to include, in any report of research results, or to make available when that report
is released, certain essential information about how the research was conducted."

Mitofsky is a bigwig among AAPOR's members. Perhaps it's time they asked him to live up to the organization's code of ethics.

[understandinglife]

3. Please be sure to send this to Rep Conyers and Mr Arnebeck...

.....as Mr Mitofsky has got himself into a situation that 'all the spin doctors and all the horse ass's men' aren't going to be able to save him. Thus, the reason why, in a different thread I've urged Rep Conyers and Mr Arnebeck to not only get the 'raw' exit poll data for 2 Nov 2004 from Mr Mitofsky, but also the names and contact information for every E-M pollster and the locations at which each of them polled.

We should all be charitable and ship Mr Mitofsky a few cases of 'right guard' and orange t-shirts; he's going to need them.

Peace.

"Did Bush Know?" <-- talk about needing some dry shirts and deodorant!

[goldengreek]

4. First of all, Mikofsky...

We're talking about the information posted on the CNN website at around 12:30 midnight, and by your own admission these problems had long been "fixed" by then.

(Whatever the hell that means.)

Secondly, we were also looking at the tracking polls going ino this damn election, and since we know Little George was stalemated at around 48% we're still waiting for an answer on how he alledgedly went over 50% when it's clear the undecideds went for Kerry.

'Fuck you' indeed, Mr. Mitofsky.

[IndyOp]

5. More reason to doubt the exit polls - bigtime!

Apparently the ongoing war casualties COST Bush millions of votes and the gay marraige amendments did NOT help him -- according to a new study by UC Berkeley profs... More reason to doubt the exit polls - bigtime!

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x113620>

[Bread and Circus]

6. Here's another non DU online piece that discredits Mitofsky's bull...

It focuses on the fact that the exit polls were mostly
wrong in "the Swing States" which goes against Mitofsky's
"eager Kerry voter" postulate.

Read on...

http://www.berkeleydaily.org/text/article.cfm?issue=11-19-04&storyID=20131

on-swing states the exit polls conducted by the National Election Poll group closely tracked the final tallies; for example, in Missouri, the exit polls predicted the result as 46 percent Kerry and 54 percent Bush where the final result was 46 percent Kerry and 53 percent Bush.

The problems with exit polls occurred only in swing states. There were eleven “battleground” states: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Only in Wisconsin did the exit polls come close to the final result. In the other 10 swing states the polls were dramatically off.

What caught my attention was that the variance was not random, some for Kerry and others for Bush; all the final tallies were significantly better for Bush than the exit polls predicted. The average net differential—predicted difference between Bush and Kerry less the actual difference—was 4.8 percent. (For example, in New Hampshire Kerry was predicted to beat Bush 54.9 percent to 44.1 percent, a difference of 10.8 percent; the actual results were Kerry 50.3 percent, Bush 49 percent, a difference if 1.3 percent; therefore the net differential favored Bush by 9.5 percent.)

Thus, there were two problems with the swing-state exit polls: they were wildly off the mark—4.8 percent is a huge error for these polls—and they all erred in Bush’s favor.

-------------------------------------------

And here is Slate taking a jab at his crapola

http://slate.msn.com/id/2109310/

As for the Edison/Mitofsky concession that Kerry voters might have distorted exit polls in his favor with their eagerness to complete a post-ballot questionnaire, this generic excuse was also used in the 1996 Arizona Republican presidential primary. The final exit poll gave candidate Patrick J. Buchanan 31 percent of the vote, while the actual count gave him only 27. This 4 percentage point differential exceeded the poll's margin of error by 1 percentage point. Voter News Service Editorial Director Murray Edelman attributed the error to enthusiastic Buchanan voters in a Feb. 29, 1996, Washington Post story. "Buchanan's voters are much more fired up. They're more eager to talk about it, more behind what they just did," he said. In 2000, VNS determined that in Kentucky, Bush voters were more likely to complete the exit pollster's questionnaire, according to this CBS News post-mortem from 2000. Blaming anomalous exit-poll data on enthusiastic voters seems to be a standard industry cop-out and ex-post facto reasoning at its worst.

[Old and In the Way]

7. We need independent proof.

Mitofsky is obviously doing a CYA here. And the media is helping him out.

In parallel to the effort to find voter fraud, we should be conducting extensive canvassing of Democrats and Kerry-Republicans in selected state precincts to either validate or refute our assumptions. I, too, think there is a systematic case to be made that the vote was stolen.

But here are the problems....

(1) The Republicans have had weeks to fix the raw data. While some problems can still be exposed, I don't think it will show the magnitude of the problem.

(2) We don't have a mainstream media that is sympathetic to our story. Their combined actions on "locking down" any real discussion or conducting investigative analysis should tell us this. In fact, I suspect that they are now working on a new meme that will ridicule the whole electoral movement. If we can't produce the evidence, we are cooked.

So we need to canvass and see if we are correct that there is widescale election fraud. We need to convince Democrats that this is in their best interests (I think that's the easy part) to sign an affidavit atesting to who they voted for.

Secret ballots + Republican voting machines + Republican counting = loss of our democracy.

[Bread and Circus]

8. My theory is that Mitofsky's poll were right in the first place and that..

this is all CYA activity.

What are the odds that Mitofsky, who is internationally
known for being cautious and accurate for years and years,
gets it wrong THIS TIME and only seems to get it wrong in
THE SWING STATES ???????????????

It just doesn't jive.

The only unifying conclusion is FRAUD.

"Eager Kerry Voters" which only seem to reside in
THE SWING STATES, is just not cutting it with me.

The exit polls were right, the Frauded vote tally is wrong.

But Mitofsky made $10,000,000 on the deal and he was paid to
"quell any lingering suspicion" about this election. Meaning,
let's not have a disaster like last time. When the frauded
vote totals came in, Mitofsky et al. worked toward massaging
the numbers for one thing and cooked up a few ad hoc CYA
statements on the other.

The problem is that the favorable data for Kerry leaked.

Too bad, so sad for the flat earthers. Too bad, so sad
for Mitofsky....for despite his complicity with "the man"
I doubt they will ask him to play next time.

[Old and In the Way]

10. Mitofsky might be between a Republican Rock and a Democratic hard place.

I wonder if he's been gotten to? This poor bastard may be fearing for his life...

[Name removed]

15. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Bread and Circus]

16. That's unweighted data and unweighted data only.....

I'm not sure if you are compairing apple to apples here.

I am going to set this paper up as it's own thread as I think
it needs discussion.

I think the Mitofsky data needs publishing no matter what.

[ClintCooper2003]

11. MITOFSKY IS A F**KING MORON FROM HELL!

He is benefiting from the confusion surrounding the fact that different firms were doing exit polling all on the same day and releasing them all over the internet.

The fact of the matter is that Mitofsky himself told me personally that he approved the posting of the exit polls (Ohio, Florida, etc.) favorable to Kerry on CNN.com. And none of those polls were released to the general public until AFTER THE POLLS HAD CLOSED.

Also, YOU DON'T WAIT FOR THE RESULTS AND THEN CHANGE THE EXIT POLLS TO MATCH THEM. THAT'S NOT HOW THINGS WORK!

[pilgrimsoul]

12. So now we know why...

we've seen or heard nothing about the raw data being released in all this time. Man, sucks to be him! My guess is that if any official hearings with sworn testimony are scheduled, either the raw data will be destroyed or vanish under mysterious circumstances or an unfortunate accident will befall Mr. Mitofsky in the near future. I'd love to see that guy's November 2 phone and e-mail records.

[Bread and Circus]

13. It's not rigorous scientific technique to change your methods...

midstream. Otherwise, it just becomes a parlor trick.

You can get a scientific paper published if you massage
your methodology to get the results you want.

[DoYouEverWonder]

14. We need to find out where the exit polls were done

I have a hunch, that the exit polls the networks did were biased in favor of Bush.

Here's what they did in Alachua Co. In the last two elections they sent pollsters to only one precinct. Both times they picked the same precinct in a rural community called Jonesville. Now, Alachua is a Democratic stronghold, so if they wanted to get accurate results, Jonesville is the last place you would go. However, if you want to bias the poll for Bush, then Jonesville would have been the one of the best places in the county to go.

What I'd like to know is where else did they poll and what were the demographics of those sites. My guess is that you will see the same bias in the other sites too.

[Paligal]

17. Put pressure on Mitofsky!

Great Post!!!
Someone on this board has been corresponding with Mitofsky. Let's keep pressure on him. Let's remind people of the inherent dishonesty in "correcting" your data to match your results after the fact.