Exit Polls: National Research Commission on Elections Report

[euler]

National Research Commission on Elections and Voting

released a report titled: INTERIM REPORT ON ALLEGED IRREGULARITIES IN THE UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2 NOVEMBER 2004

The authors of the report are:

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

The main web site is here: http://election04.ssrc.org/research/academic/

The report is here: http://election04.ssrc.org/research/academic/

Key Findings:

Discrepancies between early exit poll results and popular vote tallies in several states may be due to a variety of factors and do not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud in the current election.

On November 2, early exit poll results showing significant leads for John Kerry in several battleground states were leaked to the public via the Internet. One consequence was that observers could see shifts in the exit poll results through the afternoon and evening on the websites of both news organizations and well-known blogs, raising suspicions that the early exit poll results were correct and that the actual vote totals had been manipulated or reflected administrative or tabulation errors.

Although these disparities have alarmed many observers, for several methodological reasons there is no a priori reason to believe that these differences reflect problems with the actual vote tallies. Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the United States are not suitable for use as point estimators for the share of votes that go to different candidates. Their results, in conjunction with other elements of statistical models used by the National Election Pool (NEP) and the decision desks of their news organization members, are best suited for determining the difference between the two leading candidates and whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them. Furthermore, the current design of exit polls is not well-suited to estimating whether certain aspects of an election functioned properly or not (for instance, efforts to assess whether particular types of voting machines were accurate). The usefulness of exit polls as currently administered in the United States is limited by (a) the sampling of a relatively small number of precincts, (b) the difficulty of knowing whether a random sample of voters was contacted at each precinct, and (c) the difficulty of combining Election Day information with data on absentee and early voters.

Because exit polls may not obtain a strictly random sample of voters at each precinct, exit pollsters typically weight their data to adjust for non-response and for known characteristics of the population. The problem of estimation is further complicated by the fact that partial data, such as were released in the afternoon on Election Day, are often unadjusted, not yet weighted for known attributes of the population or historical patterns of voting behavior. An unusual increase in turnout could introduce additional biases with regard to any or all of these assumptions. For the independent analyst examining the results of exit polls after Election Day, these issues are complicated by the fact that exit poll organizations do not typically disclose details regarding the source and quality of raw data or the transformations that have been performed on them. By the time that exit data are archived, they have been adjusted for such things as patterns of non-response and weighted to the actual outcome of the election. Thus, because of these and other limitations intrinsic to their sampling methods, current exit polls are not well-suited for estimating differences in measures like turnout or vote division by voting device, as the samples are not designed to reflect counties, or even specific county groups. There are other forms of statistical analysis, based upon designs that look like a natural experiment, to address some of these issues, and these analyses will be pursued by researchers when the appropriate data on election returns become available. Nevertheless, some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale (state or country) are accurate or whether fraud might be involved in an election. A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different. To validate results in specific precincts or from particular machines, the designs would have to incorporate larger numbers of interviews with voters leaving the polls for precision. And the stratification strategy would also need to be different, focusing on a combination of machine types and geography, for example, including a larger number of precincts at the first stage. There is little likelihood that the member organizations in the NEP would be willing to support the costs of such a design.

[Goldeneye]

1. So why even conduct a national exit poll?

on edit, I don't really want to read the whole thing. Can you just tell me why they needed to do a national exit poll? They could get the demographic information from the state exit polls.

[Imnottelling]

4. I know that euler will say

He'll say that exit polls give valuable demographic information of the electorate...how they can do that acurately without givin information about the eventual victor is a little bit of mystery to me.

However, euler is partially correct as demographics are part of why the MSM buys the exit polls. The other part is to help them call the election before all the votes have been totalled...which, incidently, contradicts euler's wonderful claims.

That is euler's mantra and he has been chanting it for many days around here. He sure has a lot of energy :)


IMO, the exit poll argument is become stale and unproductive in this forum. It isn't converting anybody anymore. euler will never believe the exit poll argument and the people that believe it already believed it will not be convinced by euler.

Exit poll work being done and investigating should still continue to be done but arguing about it in ths forum is beyond useless.

[euler]

10. How exit polls can be used one way and not another....

....does seem to be a little counter-intuitive. However, statisticians get past this during their education. I'm a novice, so I have a tenuous grasp (at best) on this concept. I found a easy to understand explanation for this in an article somewhere online. I know I bookmarked it, but I can't find it.

[Karenca]

13. Ahh yes!

<<<<<<He sure has a lot of energy :)>>>>>>>>

"Energy" He certainly has oodles of that!:boring:

I wonder why he is trying so hard to convert us. It's not working, Eul...It's beginning to appear as if you're preaching to your own choir: Yourself.

[euler]

21. I'm not really.

If you read my posts, I mostly just disseminate what the exit poll experts have to say on the issue. The post I made in this thread, for example, contains almost none of my own words. It does not take a lot of energy to do this - copy, paste, done.

An added benefit is that any negative responses sort of slide off of me because it's not me being rejected, it's the exit polling and statistics experts that are being rejected. However, I take great interest in this phenomenon: Experts, being rejected by people who are not experts. Bizarre, no ?

[Karenca]

24. "It does not take a lot of energy to do this - copy, paste, done."

All that energy trying to disrupt our work here is certainly beyond 'un-American'.

[euler]

27. What you call disruption, I call...

...critique.

You see critique as disruptive to this forum. I see the half truths bandied around this forum as disruptive to the whole cause. Our frames of reference are different. Your frame of references appears to be limited to this forum. My frame of reference is the entire cause.

In his book "don’t think of an elephant!", George Lakoff writes:

If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they’ll all reach the right conclusions. But we know from cognitive science that people do not think like that....To be accepted, the truth must fit people’s frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off. Why?

You won't see the truth I offer, and I won't see yours. We both have the right to be here, and be heard.

[Karenca]

29. I call it DISRUPTION because

your writings are the same as what Blackwell, et. al would like to have us believe.

Your SO-CALLED 'truth" would be more at home on one of those funny conservative boards.

[Time for change]

47. I think you're being unfair to euler

I get the impression that euler has an open mind.
And I also think that it is important to argue this, because the more people we convince the more likely it is that our message will get out into the general population, since almost everyone on the DU associates with non-DUers.

[davidgmills]

77. I agree with this

I want all opinions on this aired in a public forum. I'm glad he put it up. It will be ripped to shreds.

I am also glad people (respected like PhD's) from the other side are weighing in, although this was not much of a weigh in (really weak analysis in my opinion -- it's hard work so we won't try).

This was not any academic attempt to answer the question of what the data could be used for. This just smacks of a political conclusion. It smacks of an attempt to quiet down the questioning of people but I think it will have the opposite effect.

[righteous1]

79. Yea, but it's not Euler saying it, it's 6 experts from several

Universities. Guess you have more faith in TIA

[euler]

5. The exit poll in the US is designed for a specific purpose.

When used for that purpose, it's accurate and useful. In the second paragraph of my post:

Exit polls, used by the National Election Pool (NEP) and the decision desks of their news organization members, are best suited for determining the difference between the two leading candidates and whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them.

See my post #2 below for another quote explaining that exit polls that can verify the actual vote count are much more costly. It's possible to design a exit poll that gives MSM what they want, plus the capability to verify the actual vote, but it's much more costly. Who will pay ?

Your question is answered in several different ways in the paper, so read the whole thing.

[davidgmills]

78. BFD

So what? That does not mean that the data can't be used for something for which it was not specifically designed. What if scientists threw out all data because the experiment was designed with another objective in mind?

This is so bogus.

[andym]

181. Scientists and Serendipity

As a biologist, I would like to comment on the point about serendipitous discoveries from experiments designed to explore some other effect.

It is a valid point, but in almost every case that I know about, the initial experiment has to be redesigned and repeated to prove the new discovery. This may not be possible here, since we can't redo the exit polls (but see below, we can redo the analysis using the available raw data). However, we can do full recounts, like was done in Florida in 2001 (after the election) by the news media. But even full recounts that revealed few problems could never exclude that the election wasn't stolen by ballot manipulation. So we have a problem. Still, at least one state, perhaps Ohio, should be subjected to a full hand-recount.

The main point:
Given the exit poll analysis by Freeman and others there are 2 hypotheses: one that the ballot-counting is in error (perhaps due to systematic fraud), the other that the exit polls are in error (perhaps due to this design flaw). Of course, one does not exclude the other. The authors of the paper in this thread chose the second hypothesis using Occam's razor. Basically they are saying "The exit polls were not designed for the election analyses being performed, therefore the election analyses are likely flawed." But Occam's razor sometimes cuts the wrong way.

So there is a need to validate the exit polls as best we can. We need to know how the sampling was done. In statistics, we need not only to sample a random group of people, we need to sample the correct random group of people to draw conclusions about the specific question we have.

Let me give a clear hypothetical example, let's say we want to know who will won Ohio in a statewide election, like the 2004 Presidential election. Now, let's say we are an exit-poll company that doesn't really understand statistics, but we have a crackerjack technician who is a demon at excel spreadsheets. They ask how many people do we need to poll to get a margin of error (MOE) of 1% for a population size of 5,600,000 voters with a 95% confidence interval. They calculate this requires 9588 randomly selected voters. The company CTO says, "so we can chose any 9588 random voters and we'll get a MOE of 1%"? The tech says "sure." So the company decides save some money to maximize its profits and selects 9588 random people from 10 precincts in Cleveland, since it's so accessible and have a lot of minimum wage workers that can be hired as polltakers. They decide to apply this method to the 2004 Presidential election, and discover that Kerry will get 67% of the vote, and Bush 33% (See the Cuyahoga results) with a MOE of 1% at a 95% confidence interval. Now this clearly does not predict the Ohio vote. What went wrong here. Incorrect assumptions. You need to more than "randomly" poll 9588 voters, you need a good model for the whole state: it must adequately reflect the real distribution of voters, and it must really sample them "randomly". For example, if wealthy people are more arrogant than the general population and less likely to be willingly sampled, and if they favor one candidate strongly, then you must correct for this, etc, etc.

OK, if we buy the hypothesis that the exit polls were not designed to be used for validation, because of the statistical model employed, then we need analyze the model used to understand the real "error". To do this we need the raw exit poll data, so we can do a proper statistical analysis of the data, and calculate the results using the best statistical model we can create, and calculate how reliable this model might be. When and if this data is available, we can perform this analysis. To get a better handle on the situation we can use historical data. I think can start with the "raw data" from exit polls in the past. Btw, by raw data, I don't mean summaries of the data. I mean the data, pre-assembly and manipulation. Does anyone know where/if this is available.

Bottom line, could analyses such as Freeman's or even TIA's result in the correct conclusion. The answer is YES, but...., we need more comprehensive analysis of the raw data and/or a full-recount to validate them.

[davidgmills]

184. What I have recommended for a month now is that

we re-exit poll Ohio. I have been told it would take about 16,000 voters. Purely random sample. No clustering or stratification.

Only concern is whether people lie about who they voted for. I think that concern of lying is overrated personally.

Cost is not prohibitive.

What say you?

[qwghlmian]

185. Please explain

how exactly you would pick 16,000 random 2004 voters.

[waz_nc]

186. 2000 exit poll raw data

This is a good post. Here's a source for the 2000 raw exit poll data and code books etc. I think it's $95. It's going to be difficult to draw any causal inferences from survey data, but I guess it's a place to start.

http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/usvns2002_2.html

[andym]

188. 2000 raw exit poll data

If someone buys this data, I would be happy to try an analysis.
Perhaps we should make Freeman aware of it-- he might have research funds available to purchase it.

Thanks for nice-words about my post.

[euler]

2. More from the same report

This text relates to the differences between the way exit polls are conducted in other counties - Ukraine. Many have noted that US can't be compared to Ukraine because of the difference in the way he exit polls are designed. US exit poll is designed for demographic analysis. Ukraine is designed for election verification.

In a system where a president is elected by popular vote, a properly designed exit poll would work better for this purpose (detecting fraud), although that is not the current system for electing the U.S. president. And the design of the sample would greatly affect whether fraud could be detected in a local area or broadly across the electorate.

Recent elections in Venezuela and Ukraine suggest that there could be a growing interest in this particular application, perhaps focused on new democracies. This is actually a fairly straightforward sampling issue, although it is distinct from news organizations' interests on Election Day. And it would be more expensive because the quantity of data (number of interviews) required would be much larger.

[merwin]

3. WTF, the popular vote in each state determines the electors!

There wasn't a national exit poll. It was a state-based exit poll conducted nationally, from what I understand.

[euler]

7. Then these guys...

must all be idiots:

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

JUST KIDDING. See page 5

There are actually two sets of exit polls that are conducted simultaneously -- a national poll and then a series of state polls. The national sample is based upon interviews conducted in a sample of approximately 250 precincts (out of an estimated 185,000 precincts in the United States), and the state-level samples are based upon smaller samples of precincts.

[chorti]

15. actually the national is built on 4 regional polls

The national poll is simply built on the four regional polls. They are simply added together (weighted by region) to form the national poll. The regional polls use some of the same precincts as the state polls, but not all precincts used in the state polls are used in the regional poll. The regional polls are built to get an accurate regional (and, therefore, national) demographic. The national poll had about 13,000 respondents, which is just the sum of the four regional samples.

All told, in the 51 state/district exit polls, about 100,000 were polled. Because we have an electoral college system, the exit poll is meant to get a very representative sample from each state. But the aggregate of the state polls may give a rather different result than the national poll because they are drawn from two different samples. You can contrust an alternate national voting demographic by creating a national weighted average from the 51 state exit polls. Anyone want to take that on?

[Goldeneye]

9. There was no national exit poll?

[Duncan]

6. Hmmm

But no explanation as to why in the vast majority of cases there was a Bush lean? No matter what the MOE, the consistent lean to Bush can not be explained away. Who funded the "National Research Commision on Elections and Voting"? This is spinning like a top and I don't have time to research this now, so if you can substantiate that this "commision" is not biased, please do.

[euler]

28. See post #14 for bias suggestions

If you can't take the time to glance at the other work they have done, then I can't help you. It's all there on their web site. Just read their own words, and review their sources. Decide for yourself.

The "the consistent lean to Bush can not be explained away" has been explained away, but no one in this forum wants to hear it. Again with a little motivation you can determine this for yourself. Use Google, or search DU archives.

[Time for change]

34. I think that one evidence of bias

is the fact that this report makes a big deal out of dismissing "early" exit polls because they were incomplete. That's a red herring if I ever saw one. Why complain about "early" exit polls, when the final exit poll had Kerry up by 2.6% nationally, and 4.2% in Ohio.

[euler]

38. OK. Consider this:

Let us stipulate that the report doesn't say anything about the early exit polls, and that the report does not dismiss the early exit polls, and it does not call them 'incomplete.'

If we do that, then all the conclusions made in the report are still valid. In other words, their argument that exit poll data cannot be used to prove fraud one way or the other does not depend on when the early exit polls were released, or on whether they dismiss them or not.

Here is another statement made in the report:

Nevertheless, some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale (state or country) are accurate or whether fraud might be involved in an election. A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different.

Again, these statement does not depend on when the early exit polls were released, or whether the report dismisses early exit polls or not. The statement is true, either way.

[chorti]

39. and then they say:

"Their results ... are best suited for determining the difference between the two leading candidates and whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them." I wonder how many times they edited this section? It is such academic gobbly-guck. OK, let's see, exit polls should not be used to investigate whether the results in a state are accurate but instead should be used to determine the difference between Bush and Kerry. Give me a break. This can only be called spin. Oh, is it true that the final edit belonged to a PR firm?

[Time for change]

46. First of all

I was just using their discussion of the "early" exit polls as the most obvious evidence that the people who wrote this report are biased. So I don't think it's fair to stipulate that the report doesn't say anything about early exit polls, since it does. I like to look for bias in what people say, rather than in who they are.

With regard to the rest of the report, I don't agree with that either.
For some reasons why I don't agree with it, see my post # 36, below on this thread. I quote from Conyers' report (I know, you might believe that his report is biased), and also add some of my own ideas to it at the end.

I could have added a lot more to that, but I didn't feel like writing any more. Have your read Steven Freeman's two reports which go into much detail on why exit polls are more likely to be an accurate reflection of voter itent than "official" election results? I believe that he makes a much better case than this NRC report.

So if you've read those I'd be interested to hear what parts you disagree with and why. Otherwise, I'd be interested to hear what parts of my response in post # 36 you disagree with and why.

[euler]

64. Answers

I disagree with Freeman for the reasons stated in this paper:

some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale (state or country) are accurate or whether fraud might be involved in an election. A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different.

This critique covers Freeman's work as well.

By the way, I was already convinced that Freeman's paper was bunk before I read this particular paper. How ? The exit poll was designed and implemented by Mitofsky and Lenski. Mitofsky and Lenski have remarked more than once since the election that the exit poll numbers are not suited to election verification, and that any attempt to draw such conclusions are meaningless.

Once I learned about, and read the Mitofsky and Lenski remarks, I decided to assume that Mitofsky and Lenski - the designers of the exit poll - know more about it's capabilities than I do. Others have taken the other path: They have decided that they know more about the design of this exit poll than Mitofsky and Lenski - the actual designers of the exit poll. One path is rational, the other is not. I leave it to you to figure out which is which.

Finally, I don't know who wrote the Conyers report, but I suspect it was a staff member of his, drawing on information from Freeman, Arnebeck (SP ?) and some particular DU threads. Can you can show me that their credentials top those of Mitofsky and Lenski ? or, for that matter, these 6 people ?

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

[Time for change]

81. The text that you bolded in this response is a statement --

not an argument.

I don't know who those 6 people are, and that's not the point. I judge what people have to say on the basis of what they say, not who they are.

They make a whole bunch of statements to the effect that exit polls are not designed to assess who won an election. Well then, what is their purpose? To assess what demographic groups voted for which candidates? They can assess what percent of people who attend church once a week (which is a smaller sample than the total population) voted for which candidates, but not what percent of the whole population vote for the candidates?

I'd like to ask to some questions, to see where you're coming from on this:

1. Do you believe that the purpose of pre-election polls is to predict the winner of the election?

2. Do you believe that pre-election polls are better at predicting the winner of an election better than exit polls?

3. If your answer to #2 is yes, then please see my post # 36, where I explain why exit polls are much better at predicting than pre-election polls, and tell me if you disagree with any of those points, and name just one advantage that a pre-election poll has over an election poll for that purpose.

And as far as whatever Mitofski and Lenski have said, they have repeatedly refused to officially release the results of their polls (although these have been leaked) or any detailed explanation of their interpretation of them, so I don't really think that they are part of this argument. As Dr. Freeman says, "With all due respect to the integrity and professional competence of Messrs. Lenski and Mitofsky, even Nobel Laureates subject their conclusions to review".

What Dr. Freeman does not say, but which I will add here, is that Mitofsky and Lenski owe their livelihood to the MSM and might be reluctant to say anything that the MSM would not want them to say.

[euler]

123. Answers

"I don't know who those 6 people are, and that's not the point."

It may not be the point, but it may enlighten you to see post #103 and #109.

"Do you believe that the purpose of pre-election polls is to predict the winner of the election?"

It all depends on it's design. If it's designed for prediction that it can be used to predict. On the other hand, if it's designed to enable the media to call the election, then it can do that as well, provided the design makes doing so reliable. The design of the exit poll depends on who is paying for it. Media pays for it in the US. Media driven polls won't give the answers to the questions being asked in this forum.

2 & 3: I could answer these, but to what end ? This poll was designed in a way that precludes it's use for election verification. A comparison between pre-election polls and exit polls won't change that.

Mitofsky conducted the first US presidential exit poll in 1967. He is considered the 'father' of the exit poll, and is arguably the number one exit poll expert on the planet. He designed the 2004 presidential exit poll and conducted it, so if Mitofsky has no place in this argument, we must live on different planets.

He has never released the raw exit poll numbers and I doubt he ever will (he refers to them as 'meaningless,' so that might explain the fact that he doesn't release them.)

"What Dr. Freeman does not say, but which I will add here, is that Mitofsky and Lenski owe their livelihood to the MSM and might be reluctant to say anything that the MSM would not want them to say."

So he's lying ? Have you taken the time to read the body of Mitofsky's work from 1967 until now ? I know it's extensive, but it's all in journals that I can't afford to subscribe to. However he is quoted extensively in several scholarly works freely available and I have read those, including this one if your interested.

http://www.cpsa-acsp.ca/papers-2004/Docherty%20and%20others.pdf

If he is lying, than from what I have read, he has lied consistently. So, I can't disprove the suggestion that he might be lying, but it seems like you should try to come up with examples, before throwing it out there will nilly.

What about these authors ? Are they afraid of MSM too ? By the way, the first guy in the list is quite famous. He wrote a 33 page analysis of the 2000 US presidential election that concluded that Bush stole the election. See post #109.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

[Time for change]

139. I'll just respond to your points and then

suggest how this argument could be settled.

Again, I don't care that much what credentials these people have. Anton Scalia is widely regarded as a brilliant jurist with impeccable credentials, but at the same time his opinion in Bush v. Gore is widely ridiculed by knowledgeable legal scholars as one of the two or three worst Supreme Court decisions in its history. And as far as one of these guys saying that more Florida voters intended to vote for Gore than Bush in 2000, that's a no-brainer and certainly doesn't qualify him as a liberal.

If you don't believe that pre-election polls are designed to predict winners (or rather predict where the race stands at that moment), why on earth do both parties and the media conduct so damn many of them? Do you really think that there is another reason for doing them?

If the reason that Mitofsky hasn't released the raw numbers is because they are meaningless, that certainly doesn't explain why he won't release his own detailed interpretation of the numbers. If his objective was to prevent misinterpretation of his poll, that is exactly what he would do. Anyhow, I didn't exactly say that he was lying. Let's just say that I think that he's evading and "spinning".

I scanned through the link that you provided, and I didn't see what quotes from Mitofsky support your argument that he has been consistent in his pronouncements. If you could point me to a particular page that you think makes that point, that would be helpful.

Anyhow, what I think would at least partially settle this argument would be to see the results of Mitofsky's polls, and their comparison with actual results, since he has been in the business: Presidential polls, Senate, House, Gubernatorial -- I don't know exactly what polls he's done, but I'm sure that there are a considerable number.

I suspect that it would be very difficult if not impossible to get hold of this information, otherwise we would have seen it posted by now. But I think that that information would answer a lot of questions and also make a lot of the other arguments on both sides of the issue trivial by comparison.

So please let me know if you have any idea of how to get this information. I would love to see it.

[davidgmills]

105. Have you ever heard of serendipity?

My father, who was a PhD biocehmist and professor of both medical and gradutate schools, was always fond of talking about the serendipity effect and how sometimes experiments produce surprising results, never contemplated by their original design.

Many great discoveries have been made this way.

It is such a bogus argument to say that because an experiment wasn't designed for X to say that it can't be used for X after looking at the data.

Data is data.

Freeman made the point that just because it is claimed that this data was used for demographic studies doesn't rule out its use as a fraud detector.

[euler]

154. Well, I did see the movie.

I can't remember her name, but she's hot.

I'd do John Cusack in a New York minute : ))

[Mistwell]

112. They ALWAYS lean Democratic

Check the last four Presidential election...in other words, every single election with national exit polls. ALL of them leaned towards the Democrats in the unweighted polls. They gave an explanation, that it is much easier to poll in urban areas than rural, that earlier polls pull more from the east than the west, and that Democrats seem more willing to talk than Republicans. However, no matter how many times that explination has been given, people here still seem to think nothing has ever been explained.

If every poll leans Democratic every time...isn't it at least possible it's an issue with the exit poll rather than with fraud?

I believe there was fraud...I just don't believe the exit polls is the persuasive evidence of that fraud.

[davidgmills]

195. No. Isn't it more likely

That the exit polls have always been right and the count wrong?

It is such a stupid assumption to believe that the count has always been right antd therefore the past polls have been wrong. The myth that the count is right and therefore the polls must be wrong is a myth we must dispell. The actual count is a much harder far more complicated thing to do accurately than a statistical analysis. Yet we mythologize the count and demonize the stats.

It is time to realize that the tabulations in the past have been wrong not the exit polls. The exit polls get corrected to match the wrong count.

Counting 100 million anything is fraught with problems. It is much more likely to produce big errors than statisitics.

The polls are like a quartz watch. The actual count is like a grandfather clock. If you really have an important event to get to on time, which one would you trust?

This democratic "bias" has not been a bias at all; it has been a chronic and systematic democratic undercount.

[EFerrari]

8. Here's a link to the org that sponsored this report. That should

be the first question. SSRC is also a client of the PR firm Geto & deMilly in NYC.

I don't know many academic groups that are represented by PR firms?

http://www.ssrc.org/inside/about/board_of_directors.page

[Igel]

11. Do you have a link for the PR firm/SSRC connection?

I've never known the SSRC to have a political bias that wasn't reflected widely in the Social Sciences. Any bias they have is sort of "in the air".

They're not really an academic group. They support academics, including grad students. They dish out a lot of money; I suspect some large portion ultimately must come from the government.

Full disclosure: They've coughed up money for me for part of a summer session in Brno. So did the somehow related ACLS. (Different years.)

[EFerrari]

12. If you look at the Press contact, it's the PR company. n/t

[Igel]

16. Tx. n/t

[euler]

19. Any bias they have is sort of "in the air"

I like that. I'll probably use it somewhere, if that's alright.

[Igel]

33. Sure. n/t

[euler]

14. A few facts. You make the call.

This a complete list of the National Research Commission on Elections:

R. Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology
Henry Brady, University of California, Berkeley
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
James Fishkin, Stanford University
Benjamin Highton, University of Califoria, Davis
Jane Junn, Rutgers University
Alexander Keyssar, Harvard University (chair)
J. Morgan Kousser, California Institute of Technology
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri, Kansas City
Margaret Levi, University of Washington
Jeff Manza, Northwestern University
Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
James Morone, Brown University
Richard Pildes, New York University
Nelson W. Polsby, University of California, Berkeley
Samuel Popkin, University of California, San Diego
Douglas Rivers, Stanford University
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan
Janelle Wong, University of Southern California

I've Googled a lot of these names. Any honest person would be hard pressed to call them biased. But, you decide.

This commission publshed many reports on the 2004 Presidential election. You can view then here: http://election04.ssrc.org/data/

Among them are:

--Obstacles to a Democratic Election: Reports of Electoral Problems in Key U.S. States during the 2004 Election

--Election Protection Election Day Incidence

--Testimonies from the New Faith Baptist Church Public Hearing, Columbus, Ohio

--Free Press: The Franklin County Courthouse Public Hearing, Columbus, Ohio

--Effect of Voting-Machine Allocations on the 2004 Election: Franklin County, Ohio

--Voter Protection Center

--Richard Hayes Phillips's Testimony (He argues that statistically, Kerry should have received more votes than he was credited in nine Ohio counties.)

--Sherole Eaton's Testimony )the Hocking County Ohio Deputy Director of Elections, describes the work performed on the tabulator computer and recommendations of a Triad Systems employee )


Also from Mark Blumenthal (Mystery Pollster):

the report is a uniquely fair, rational and exhaustive review of the available evidence on all the major vote count controversies

He describes himself as a liberal.

You make the call.

[Philly Buster]

18. I appreciate your work on this issue

I've never liked the practice of calling elections based on exit polls. In both '02 and '04 the media got screwed on exit polls and had to wait for votes to actually be counted before calling an election. That's as it should be.

[kamqute]

137. Euler is being helpful by presenting the other side so we can attack it

but YOU, on the other hand, Philly Buster, are clearly far too dense to understand the information being presented to you, given your post count as an indicator that you have been around the block a bit. Ever wonder WHY the exit polls don't match? I'm not going to make my response to this information now, because I haven't fleshed out all the nuances and it's really not my place, but I can tell you that I can already start thinking of responses and this is not some kind of validation of your crazy theory that exit polls must be a terrible instrument, despite the fact that they work better the more paper and hand-counting is involved in any area, independently of any external factors influencing their usage ('cept..well..you know)

[euler]

17. Some question whether report authors are biased

You can make your own call on this one. It's easy to do.

See post #14

Google commission member names

Go to the actual web site and read reports they produce.

Please don't say things like. "They have a PR firm" as if that somehow makes them biased. If they are biased, then their output will show it. Read their work and, read what they put up on their web site.

http://election04.ssrc.org/data/

[EFerrari]

23. Hi, euler. I didn't say "they have a PR firm as if that makes them

biased." I said, they have a PR firm. I don't know these people from Adam and until I do, I can't assess their work.

I have found that two of the Board members are on the Council on Foreign Relations, another wrote policy for the IMF and a third is connected to Xerox. Is any of that damning? I don't know. Gathering information.

I worked in academia for too many years to read one report and take it as gospel or read about a group for a few minutes and determine their motivation, bias or lack of bias.

[euler]

26. OK. Thanks.

[EFerrari]

25. One thing that does set off an alarm for me, their claims are

sort of sweeping. Most reputable scholars tend to be conservative in their language because the authors don't want to get nailed when the counter-examples rain down :)

And, that could mean very little or nothing as to the validity of the conclusions in this particular report.

/spelling

[mdb]

20. So you went from debunking "exit polls"

To this does not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud.

Well I see your moving closer to reality any ways. By the way in foreign countries they use exit polls to determine if fraud resulted in the election.

[euler]

22. Well, I was just about to post a big question mark in response...

...but now I'm laughing. A little slow sometimes.

[ROH]

30. Cam Kerry specifically used the word "fraud":

http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011105W.shtml:
"Were there people who were disenfranchised? Yes. Were there mistakes and irregularities and fraud? Yes." -- Cam Kerry

Presumably Cam has evidence to substantiate that comment.

What is your opinion on this? Whatever the pros and cons of the specific points that have been raised and discussed in this whole issue, considering the evidence in total do you think that on the balance of probability there was major election fraud?

[euler]

35. I honestly don't know.

We'll have to show the disenfranshisement was intentional or planned.

It appears to me that around 70% of the resources are spent on trying to show that exit poll discrepancy proves fraud, or are spent on fraud research that depends on the notion that the exit poll discrepancy proves fraud. This effort is wasted.

If these resources can be shifted to real issues, we may be able to prove the disenfrancisement was planned and intentional.

The problem to me, as you point out with your statement that "Presumably Cam has evidence to substantiate that comment," is that presumably, she would release it if she had it. Why wouldn't she.

[Karenca]

40. "Presumably Cam has evidence to substantiate that comment," is that presum

ably, she would release it if she had it. Why wouldn't she. "

OH, poor Euler...
You have NO idea how you just gave yourself away with that statement. :silly:

[catgirl]

41. She? Euler? Did Cam recently have a sex change?

[anaxarchos]

42. Republicans have problems with democrats and women...

Thus... Democrats are women. It kinda makes sense.

[Karenca]

45. yeah. 'girlie-men" .........nt

[Karenca]

44. ha ha

:evilgrin:

[Karenca]

52. I still want to know why

he think's Cam is a girl.....Hello???

[catgirl]

54. I thinks he's gone

[Karenca]

55. yeah, i think you're right .......... nt

[Igel]

169. Sorry, I knew Cam Kerry was a 'he' because I saw a

picture, and read about his background. Otherwise, I'd be stuck.

Not all "Camerons" are he's. Diaz, anyone?

Once knew a couple whose names were Carmen and Tony. Carmen was the 'he', Tony the 'she', but you'd be surprised how many people got it backwards.

Talk about judgmental and being overwilling to label people.

[ROH]

43. Important Interviews and Open Letter

Will Pitt has posted these two interviews recently:

January 6 Interview of Rep. John Conyers with Will Pitt:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010705W.shtml

January 10 Interview of Cam Kerry:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011105W.shtml

Have you read either of these interviews?


Also on January 10, Rep. John Conyers put out this open letter:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=275577&mesg_id=275577

Have you read this letter?


Three quotes from the interviews and the open letter:

* "But I hasten to add that until we complete our investigation, I don't know if it will change the result or if it won't change the result." -- Rep. John Conyers

* "Were there people who were disenfranchised? Yes. Were there mistakes and irregularities and fraud? Yes." -- Cam Kerry

* "First, my investigation of Ohio voting irregularities is not over. In an effort to get as much information confirmed and circulated in advance of January 6, many valuable leads still need to be pursued and I pledge to do so. Substantial irregularities have come to light in other states during the course of this investigation and I will also pursue those leads. While there has been powerful opposition to my efforts and personal attacks against me as a result of my efforts, I want to assure you I remain steadfast." -- Rep. John Conyers


One important point to emphasize: the investigation is not complete - it is continuing.

[ROH]

48. Jimmy Carter's Comments in September 2004

http://www.katv.com/news/stories/0904/176019.html

"Carter said in an opinion piece in Monday's Washington Post that despite changes designed to eliminate voting problems in Florida, conditions for a fair election still do not exist.

Carter wrote that a repetition of the problems of 2000 - when some Floridians said they didn't have confidence their votes were counted - appeared likely."

and

http://blog.johnkerry.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=2962

"The Carter Center has monitored more than 50 elections, all of them held under contentious, troubled or dangerous conditions. When I describe these activities, either in the United States or in foreign forums, the almost inevitable questions are: "Why don't you observe the election in Florida?" and "How do you explain the serious problems with elections there?"

The answer to the first question is that we can monitor only about five elections each year, and meeting crucial needs in other nations is our top priority. (Our most recent ones were in Venezuela and Indonesia, and the next will be in Mozambique.) A partial answer to the other question is that some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.

The most significant of these requirements are:

• A nonpartisan electoral commission or a trusted and nonpartisan official who will be responsible for organizing and conducting the electoral process before, during and after the actual voting takes place. Although rarely perfect in their objectivity, such top administrators are at least subject to public scrutiny and responsible for the integrity of their decisions. Florida voting officials have proved to be highly partisan, brazenly violating a basic need for an unbiased and universally trusted authority to manage all elements of the electoral process.

• Uniformity in voting procedures, so that all citizens, regardless of their social or financial status, have equal assurance that their votes are cast in the same way and will be tabulated with equal accuracy. Modern technology is already in use that makes electronic voting possible, with accurate and almost immediate tabulation and with paper ballot printouts so all voters can have confidence in the integrity of the process. There is no reason these proven techniques, used overseas and in some U.S. states, could not be used in Florida.

It was obvious that in 2000 these basic standards were not met in Florida, and there are disturbing signs that once again, as we prepare for a presidential election, some of the state's leading officials hold strong political biases that prevent necessary reforms."

[Karenca]

53. Euler, Btw , CAM IS A GUY!!!! ........... EOM.

[euler]

59. Karenca, catgirl and anaxarchos have...

...apparently lived a mistake free life. I congatulate them.

--clapping sound here--

[ROH]

83. The interview link I gave in post #30...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/011105W.shtml

The first line of this interview reads: "I spent some time today with Cameron Kerry, the younger brother of Senator John Kerry."

[Karenca]

87. OH!!!!! .NO!!!! NO!!!!!, It's not that we don't ever make mistakes..

I find it EXTREMELY peculiar that you don't have a clue about Cam. Kerry. :evilgrin:

Maybe you should have done some homework: read up and get familiar with the Democratic party, before you flooded the boards with your exit poll theories.

It might have helped the credibility gap.

[stirringstill]

70. Perception = Power

It does seem to me that a lot of time and energy has been spent on analyzing partial exit poll data currently available, but it is not wasted because if you notice, most everyone who actually posts on the exit polls demands "full public release" of the data to make more definitive statements and every good analysis out there of the released/leaked data is increasing the demand that they actually release the damn raw data. Why the hell don't they release it? Let me guess. Either they really fucked up the polling or the election itself "has issues." Until the entire raw data set is public WE don't know SHIT, we just know what we have stinks. I've never cussed this much before in post but it's late and well I'm sick and tired of being told by EXPERTS what the data (I'm not allowed to see) indicates or will indicate when it is indeed released. This is a PR stunt if there every was one. Academics know better than anyone that it is a joke to publish without showing the data. Words backed up with more words but no raw data mean NOTHING. Period.

This is a REAL issue. Why? Because perception can be manipulated through exit polls and all data and methodology related to exit polls should be entirely open to the public and scrutinized as much as actual voting technologies. They are wedded. Why do you think historically the duty of reporting vote tallies was performed by the same consortium that did the exit polling. This nation has a history of manipulating exit polls in other nation's elections to validate or invalidate the perception of an election's validity. We must be on guard for these same techniques operating at HOME. Even if the vote count is right, the airwaves have been filled with exit poll info (or disinfo) such as % evangelicals or the moral voters or youth turn out. Hey, wonder how much a misinformed electorate costs? This information if not accurate pollutes Democracy.

By the way, Cam is Kerry brother and thus is not a SHE!

[euler]

125. You miss their point

They argue that data cannot be used to verify the election in any way. It can't be used to prove fraud. It can't be used to disprove fraud.

Yes, if they were to analyze the data, they would have to show the data they are using. But, if they analyzed the data, they would have to ignore their own thesis - that the data cannot be used to verify the election.

Does that make sense? If no, let me know. I can probably come up with an analogy to make it easier.

*****************************************

Why the raw data isn't released: If the raw data is meaningless, why would anyone release it? To accept this answer you must accept that exit poll experts know more than you do about exit polls and what they are capable of telling us (depending on it's design). I had to do it. But, I could be irrational.

"This nation has a history of manipulating exit polls in other nation's elections to validate or invalidate the perception of an election's validity"

Please provide some links and sources for these claims.

[thanatonautos]

142. This assertion that the raw data is meaningless strikes me as very odd.

Why the raw data isn't released: If the raw data is
meaningless, why would anyone release it? To accept this answer
you must accept that exit poll experts know more than you do
about exit polls and what they are capable of telling us
(depending on it's design). I had to do it. But, I could be
irrational.

I realize that Mitofsky apparently did at some point say the raw
data was meaningless, but with all due respect to his undoubted
talents as an exit pollster, it's clearly a ridiculous thing to
say.

Mitofsky presumably would never assert that the results of his
exit polling are meaningless, and clearly the tabulated results
are based on the raw data, having been arrived at by a number of
transformations on the raw data.

The transformations are essential in interpreting the raw data,
and they need to be released along with the data themselves.

However, meaning clearly resides in both transformations and
data, since without the data, there is certainly nothing to
report at all.

The interim SSRC report that you cite, in the conclusion to the
section on exit polling discrepancies states the following:

Recommendations for Future Research and
Reform: More definitive tests of current theories seeking to
explain exit poll discrepancies will require full disclosure of
both the raw data and specific weightings and other refinements
used to transform them over the course of Election Day.

...

To ensure that the public and researchers are fully able to
assess the significance and limitations of current and future
exit polls, this working group recommends that methods data, and
weighting procedures should be fully disclosed for all exit polls
in accordance with accepted public opinion survey research
practices, such as those endorsed by the American Association of
Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the National Council on
Public Polls (NCPP). The timely disclosure of such information
would allow public observers to ascertain the significance and
limitations of purported findings.

It's odd that the authors would make such recommendations if they
regard the raw data as meaningless.

They argue that data cannot be used to verify the election in any
way.

This overstates the case the authors make by quite a bit. They
argue -- apparently without fully understanding the design of
current exit polls, since full public disclosure is obviously
lacking -- that the design of current exit polls limits their
usefulness in verifying election results in certain ways, to wit:

Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the
United States are not suitable for use as point estimators
for the share of votes that go to different candidates.

On the other hand, they immediately continue:

Their results, in conjunction with other elements of statistical
models used by the National Election Pool (NEP) and the decision
desks of their news organization members, are best suited for
determining the difference between the two leading candidates and
whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them.

Now, this may be irrational.

But it seems that some, not inconsiderable, tension exists
between your statement that the authors argue the data cannot be
used to verify the election in any way and what the authors
actually do state: that one can decide on the basis of exit polls
in conjunction with other elements of statistical models whether
it is safe to call a race for one candidate or another.

This would seem to imply the authors accept that some predictive
power exists for the exit polls. When such a prediction is not
borne out in the official tallies, I think we are certainly then
more than justified in asking what has gone wrong.

[stirringstill]

144. No YOU missed MY point

I'm not arguing that their data can be used to verify the election. My point is if they refuse to show the raw data then the exit polls must be assumed to be worthless and potentially FRAUDULENT. Of course the expert pollsters know more than I do about polls, but I am a scientist and thus cringe at the thought that someone would be unwilling reveal how they arrived at a conclusion. A mathematician producing an answer but no proof! A biologist with secret lab notebooks! They would be laughed out of the profession.

[thanatonautos]

160. It is a laughable position to refuse to fully reveal the data and methods:

on that point there is no doubt whatsoever.

[nodictators]

179. I'd like to know how Mitofsky detected "Democratic Overstatement"

He said that he "sensed" it in mid-afternoon on Election Day. as far as I know, he's never said how he does it.

I'd also like to know if he sensed Republican Overstatement in Ohio.

With thousands of democratic voters, many of whom were black, that had to leave the excruciatingly long lines in their precincts, which had only 3 voting machines for one thousand or more registered voters, without having gotten to vote, there surely there must have been some Repub Overstatement.

Apparently, Mitofsky hasn't sensed it yet.

[Igel]

170. "Fraudulent" implies intent, which is quite different

from being in error. One can easily be in error--especially with complex sampling techniques--without having intended to present incorrect results as accurate.

Since he's saying that the results were inaccurate (at least at the point where people assume accuracy), we have to assume a rather convoluted scenario. He intentionally released the early results, stating that they weren't for distribution, and later said they were meaningless (at least as people tried to read them), knowing for a certainty that people would ignore him.

[buddysmellgood]

172. So even if you could see the raw data, and even if that raw data showed

that 20 states reported outside the "margin of error," we are now prepared to say that it means nothing.
Just because the odds of all of these states being off in favor of Bush are unbelievable does not mean we can't find a way to rationalize our way out of it.
What a load of horseshit.

[rumpel]

31. So did they employ a different method in the Ukraine?

[euler]

58. See post #57

[Mistwell]

113. Ukraine's was flawed well beyond MOE

Given that Ukraines exit poll for even the second, closely watched election was flawed well beyond their margin of error...I fail to see your point. If Ukraine is the example, then it tends to show that the US exit poll is useless for fraud detection.

[many a good man]

32. Maybe the UN should fund exit polls in US to verify

There is little likelihood that the member organizations in the NEP would be willing to support the costs of such a design.

How many countries use exit polling to validate results? Who pays for it? Are their findings considered "actionable"?

The US is a stumbling colossus that could potentially wreak havoc on the rest of the world. I would think the United Nations of Earth would be happy to pony up to pay for the cost of validating elections and hopefully prevent another mad man stealing the controls of the most powerful military on the planet...

[euler]

57. How many countries use exit polling to validate results?

I know that Germany does. See for example here:
http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/what_about_thos.html

Venezuela does.

I almost certain that Ukraine does. See, for example here:http://qev.com/reports.international.ukraine99exitpoll.htm

This is a analysis of the 1999 Ukraine presidential election. It states:

snip

Exit polls are an important resource both in understanding and promoting the political development of a country. They serve three purposes: 1) exit polls provide an independent measure of the integrity of the voting process; 2) they make the balloting process more transparent and give news organizations something to report on election night when public interest is highest; 3) they provide a profile of the electorate which is of substantial political and sociological value.

snip



Exit polls are an important resource both in understanding and promoting the political development of a country. They serve three purposes: 1) exit polls provide an independent measure of the integrity of the voting process; 2) they make the balloting process more transparent and give news organizations something to report on election night when public interest is highest; 3) they provide a profile of the electorate which is of substantial political and sociological value.

[Helga Scow Stern]

73. There was an attempt to get UN oversight of the election,

but the Republicans wouldn't allow it:

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/groundwar?pid=1969

(In response to the request and letter to the UN below)

House Republicans shot back with concerns about the infringement of US sovereignty and passed an amendment to a foreign aid bill banning US tax dollars from supporting any UN mission to monitor votes. In a compromise, the State Department decided to invite the less-controversial multinational OSCE to see if US elections measure up to international standards.

Here is the letter the CBC (?) wrote to Kofi Annan:

For Immediate Release
Contact: John B. Townsend II, Communications Director
Phone: [phone]
Tuesday, July 6. 2004


HOUSE MEMBERS WILL DISCUSS REQUEST
TO UNITED NATIONS TO MONITOR ELECTION
Rep. Johnson Spearheads Effort to Invite International Body

Washington, D.C. - The request by several Members of Congress to the United Nations to send observers to monitor the upcoming Presidential election has sparked interest around the globe. At this juncture a dozen House Members have signed the letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Thursday morning those Members who have signed the U.N. letter will hold a news conference on Capitol Hill to discuss the ramifications of their request.

”We are hoping that our action will alleviate the nation from the suffering it took in 2000 when things went awry at the ballot box,” said Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, who is spearheading the effort. “We are hoping our action will restore confidence in the electoral process. We are hoping that every registered person gets to vote and that that vote is counted.”

Moreover, according to a status report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, “When the right to vote is infringed, whether by poor planning or intentional actions, the nation as a whole suffers.” The news conference is slated for Thursday, July 8, 2004 at 10:00 A.M, in the House Radio/TV Gallery (Room H3-21).

WHAT: News Conference: Members of Congress Request U.N. To Monitor Election

WHO: Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson
Representative Corrine Brown
Representative Julia Carson
Representative William Lacy Clay
Representative Joseph Crowley
Representative Elijah Cummings
Representative Danny Davis
Representative Raul Grijalva
Representative Michael Honda
Representative Barbara Lee
Representative Carolyn Maloney
Representative Jerrold Nadler
Representative Edolphus Towns

WHEN: Thursday, July 8, 2004, 10:00 A.M.

WHERE: Radio/TV Gallery, U.S. Capitol, Room H3-21

TEXT OF LETTER PROVIDED BELOW

July 1, 2004

The Honorable Kofi Annan
Secretary-General
United Nations
New York, NY 10017

Dear Mr. Secretary-General:

We, the undersigned Members of Congress, hereby request the Electoral Assistance Division of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs to send election observers to monitor the presidential election in the United States scheduled for November 2, 2004. We are deeply concerned that the right of U.S. citizens to vote in free and fair elections is again in jeopardy.

As you may know, the 2000 presidential election was steeped in controversy. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan federal agency, investigated widespread allegations of voter disenfranchisement and questionable practices in the state of Florida relating to the purging of names from voter registration lists, methods of balloting, and the independence of counting and certification procedures. In a report released in June 2001, the Commission found that the electoral process in Florida resulted in the denial of the right to vote for countless persons and further that the “disenfranchisement of Florida’s voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters” and in poor counties.

Moreover, Florida was not the only state in which voters were wrongfully denied their right to vote and have their vote counted. Experts have concluded that over half of the votes that went uncounted nationwide during the last election were cast by "nonwhite voters." In Florida, the Commission found that black voters were "10 times more likely than non-black voters to have their ballots rejected" - a result that experts say is typical of states across the country. The election was finally determined by the U.S. Supreme Court which prevented further counting of the votes in what has been widely criticized as one of the most politicized and improper decisions in U.S. jurisprudence.

As the next Election Day approaches, there is more cause for alarm rather than less. In April of this year, the Commission issued a status report which found that despite promised nationwide reforms relating to voting equipment, voter list maintenance, poll worker training, election certification, and reinstatement of ex-felon voting rights, adequate steps have not been taken to ensure that a similar situation will not arise in the coming election. Rather, upon evaluating the current state of affairs, the Commission concluded “the potential is real and present for significant problems on voting day that once again will compromise the right to vote.”

The right to vote, and have votes counted, in free and fair elections is a cornerstone of representative government. In addition to violating amendments 15, 19 and 26 of the U.S. Constitution, and laws adopted pursuant to it such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the events in Florida violated the right to vote as it is enshrined in several international instruments that the U.S. has either agreed to, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 21), or ratified, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (article 25) and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (article5).

As a member of the international community, we firmly believe in the importance of international human rights law and its applicability and relevance to the U.S. Given the deeply troubling events of the 2000 election and the growing concerns about the lack of necessary reforms and potential for abuse in the 2004 election, we believe that the engagement of international election monitors has the potential to expedite the necessary reform as well as reduce the likelihood of questionable practices and voter disenfranchisement on Election Day.

In addition, we believe that international oversight is critical in this election not only because of the role the U.S. has in the world, but also because the issues related to the methodology of elections inside the United States, such as the use of electronic and paperless voting technology, are likely to have international impact. The danger that these methodologies could become a standard to be exported and emulated involves broader issues of democracy that should be of concern to the United Nations and the international community as a whole.

For all these reasons, we urge the UN to favorably consider this urgent request.

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/tx30_johnson/HouseMembersUnitedNationsElectionMonitor.html

[Time for change]

36. Conyers' report disagrees

The Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff: Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio:

After pointing out that there was a discrepancy between the Ohio exit polls and the official vote tally in Ohio of 6.7%, the report goes on, "It is rare, if not unprecedented, for election results to swing so dramatically from the exit poll predictions to the official results."

Later in the report, "... prominent survey researchers, political scientists and journalists 'concur that exit polls are by far the most reliable' polls".

Not specifically mentioned in the report is the fact that exit polls are far more reliabe than pre-election polls, for several reasons:
1. No chance for a voter to change his or her mind.
2. No need to guess who the "likely voters" are.
3. Don't have a problem in reaching any portion of the population (for example, cell phone users will be missed in pre-election polls)

Does anyone claim that pre-election polls are not used to predict winners? Since exit polls are much more accurate than pre-election polls, if they claim that exit polls can't be used to predict winners, what does that say about pre-election polls? And if polls aren't used to predict winners, why are they done so frequently?

[Mistwell]

115. The pre-election polls were obviously flawed

Pre election polls constantly showed directly contradictory leaders in a difference well beyond their margins of error. So the answer is yes, Pre-election polls blatantly and obviously are not very good at predicting a winner in a close race.

This sentence: "It is rare, if not unprecedented, for election results to swing so dramatically from the exit poll predictions to the official results"

Is a blatant and total fabrication. EVERY SINGLE PRESIDENTIAL EXIT POLL EVER CONDUCTED in it's pre-weighted form showed a similar dramatic swing from the official results. EVERY SINGLE ONE. It's only after they are weighted that they have any history of accuracy...and after this one was weighted it too was equally accurate.

[Time for change]

146. I think what you mean be "weighted"

is that when it was seen that the exit polls had Kerry winning by 3, and the "official" results had Bush winning by 3, they "weighted" the final exit polls by taking 3 points away from Kerry and giving them to Bush. Very scientific weighting process.

[anaxarchos]

37. Actually, this report dates from before Christmas...

It has been heavily commented on by both people on the web and by left sources like the Nashua Advocate:

http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2004/12/news-electio...

More importantly, it was brought up by flintdem just one day ago in this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x281082

The spin you are trying to put on it was heavily criticised...

You mention none of this however.... and bring this up as if it were earth-shaking and new.

Your tactic is at best dishonest and disruptive.

I have no idea if you are these things but I think I won't be taking you seriously from here on out.

[euler]

60. Did you read my post ?

You say:

"The spin you are trying to put on..."

Spin ? I didn't say anything. It's all quotes from the paper I link to. How did I spin it, if I didn't say anything ?

[anaxarchos]

62. You post a duplicate thread...

...but without any reference to the context of the original. You pass off as new what is really old. You seek heat and smoke, not light.

Did you read mine?

This is not an honest discussion.

Shoo....

[euler]

65. It's hard to reference something that you have no knowlegdge of

I've seen dozens of duplicate threads here on DU. I've never assumed those posters did it on purpose. I assume they are like me - they do not read every single post in this forum, and they sometimes they go an entire day without logging on. Is this a radical position to have ?

Besides, the previous post does not raise all of the issues raised here.

Is this not a honest discussion ? I haven't lied. Have you ?

[intheflow]

136. This nasty tone is uncalled for.

It is not reasonable to assume everyone has read and retained everything that was ever posted anywhere on DU. <eye roll>

You're new, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you really don't know how to play nicely with your fellow DUers.

[chrisclub]

49. "...weighted to the actual outcome of the election. "

Dead give away that this is Rove spin.

These guys justify changing the final poll data to match the output from the vote counting machines.

How much more fraudulent can you get?!

[euler]

56. You have accepted the conventional wisdom on DU...

...without checking the facts yourself. Exit polls have always been re weighted to the actual vote, and they always will be. That's how exit polls are conducted. It's not a secret. Google works well.

Read this paper on the 1988 presidential election.

ftp://ropercenter.uconn.edu/United_States%5CNBCWSJ/USNBCWSJ1988-NATELEC/version2/usnbcwsj1988-natelec.pdf

Paragraph 1 states: "The data were weighted to correctly reflect
the outcome of the election."

Check out this link:

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/the_difference_.html

It explains all the steps exit pollsters take throughout the night:

Check out step 4:

Once the polls close, NEP gathers actual results for the precincts sampled in the exit polls and gradually combines the exit poll results and the actual vote counts into an evolving hybrid of projections.

Check out step 5:

Once the actual results have been counted in the wee hours of election night, NEP re-weights the results of each exit poll so that the vote preference on the poll matches the actual count.

If you think this issue is important enough, you could use Google yourself to read more about exit poll methodology. Let me know if you don't want to learn about this topic on your own, and I will send you more links.

[davidgmills]

110. We have always done something the wrong way

so we will ontinue. We have always assumed that the actual tabulation was correct and whenever the exit poll disagreed with the actual tabulation we have (stupidly) presumed that the exit poll was "wrong" and so we "weight" the exit poll to conform with the actual tabulation.

The old mechanical clock on the wall never keeps good time, but we will always set our highly accurate quartz watches by it.

[fooj]

50. Cheating is cheating. Period.

I'm sick of this BS...all we hear about are OTHER countries exit polls and how they are used to determine fraud. Whatever-the whole thing makes me sick! They could sit me down in front of a 1000 page report and it wouldn't make a difference to me. Bottom line- the bastards cheated! AGAIN! Period!

[Mistwell]

116. The foreign country polls are wrong too though

See, the problem is that in a close election, even foreign country exit polls are seriously flawed. Take the Ukraine election. The second election, one of the most closely watched and monitored elections in the history of the planet, had an exit poll result that varied DRASTICALLY from it's margin of error when compared to the official results. Had their election bee as close as our US Presidential election results, they too could have had the same exact problem we have.

Foreign exit polls are not the magic bullet some folks here seem to think they are. They indicate fraud only in a race THAT IS NOT CLOSE.

[jazzjunkysue]

51. My friend was a poller, and he told me this. Not reliable. True. Sorry.

This is the long technical version of what a friend of mine says. He was one of the pollers, and he even was the one who wrote the program that turned the exit poll to match the real vote. That's the way it works. The exit poll is only to predict in future elections who the catholics might go for, or who the senior citizens choose, etc. It's not accurate enough to give you a 3 point spread between candidates. It's not for that.

So, even though I really believe Ohio and Florida were stolen, the exit poll is not proof of it.

[intensitymedia]

61. i don't want to call you the "L" word, but I don't believe this is true

If your exit poller (sic: is "pollster" in your dictionary?) "friend" (yuck, who have you been hanging out with?) tells you that "he" wrote the contamination program, let's have a little proof, some detail of evidence of any kind to indicate that what you say is anything more than a pipe dream, because I think what you say here is pure disinformation, an "L" word phenomenon, posted here to disrupt by a smirking chimp freeper.

To claim after the fact that you know from some special on high Authority what the NEP Exit Poll actually "is" for, is utterly specious. The networks hired Mitofsky and Edison to call the election for them in advance, like every Exit Poll everywhere. To suggest otherwise is to assume that we're more like chimps than you are.

Whatever you say you believe.

Che de Vera

[Dancing_Dave]

63. Martha Kropf is the sister of my best Junior High buddy

Greg Kropf.

I'm sad that she's involved in this cover up.

We do need better exit polls with larger samples, but the exit polls we've got are more reliable than the totally corrupted technological vote "counting" system we've got. These statistical geeks are missing the point that wherever large discrepencies between the exit polls and official tabulations raised suspicions, investigation of the official conduct of the election and the firms involved, completely confirmed those suspicions.

:puke:

[euler]

66. Can you give me the link to the documents that...

...support your claims ?

[pauldp]

67. Yeah but the MSM's refusal to release the raw data IS Prima Facie Evidence

IMO Just more stench to the stench pile that was the 2004 election. Add that to the death of HR 2239, Diebold, ESS&S, the voter supression etc. etc. etc.

Fair Election? Prove It!!!

[Time for change]

84. And much more than that

The extra-ordinary lengths to which Fraudwell and his Ohio Republican election officials have gone to prevent a thorough hand recount in Ohio (see the Conyers report) seems to me to be prima facie evidence of election fraud in Ohio. Think of it! These people are willing to commit numerous federal crimes just to prevent a hand recount of the vote.

[glitch]

180. Exactly - why not just count the votes? Obviously they can't and still win

All their effort to not count the votes speaks for itself.

[Mistwell]

117. It's not their data

The raw data does not belong in any way, shape, or form to the MSM. It's one company, and they own it. They have all the copyright on it, and they chose not to release it for a long time, if ever. I want them to release it...but I'm not going to go around blaming others who have no control over it for the lack of a release.

[pointsoflight]

68. This is an OLD report that has been HEAVILY criticized.

[euler]

85. Where ? Links ?

Is the criticism from experts ? Need more to go on here if you want to converse.

[euler]

194. Links ? Where ? Stll waiting

[intensitymedia]

69. Your report is a bunch of academic swamp gas

which only tries to discredit the NEP exit polling proof of fraud without giving any concrete reason or methedological critique.

It's not enough to assert some argument by "design" and "exit polls as currently administered in the United States" - don't make me puke, this is pure disinformation. That 'design' crap sounds like it comes from some kind of anti-darwinian pinhead argument that tries to reify "intelligent design" as a placeholder for the Hand of God guiding our lives, while asserting that this group KNEW enough about the supposed "design" of exit polls (which they have no way of knowing, since Mitofsky and NEP haven't made their methodology public) and creating some kind of phony distinction between 'good' exit polls elsewhere where we MIGHT be able to call an election and 'useless' exit polls here which for some mysterious reason are a completely different creature ... they assert ... with no proof... just assert ...

it's just a stinking cloud of swamp gas.

anyway, i'm filled with the suspicion that arguing this is the same as arguing with chimps.

so a last caution to freepers, chimps and wannabe tyrants: we're going to change the world. Don't get in the way.

Che de Vera

[euler]

86. OK, then, I won't argue with you.

[johnaries]

71. This post is meaningless.

Prima Facie means "on it's face". Prima Facie evidence requires no further evidence and is irrefutable "proof" in a court of law. So, OF COURSE Exit Polls are not Prima Facie evidence. Personally, I haven't seen a single post here that said that they were. However, it is still strong evidence.

Even though the"current design" may not be well-suited for determining whether "certain aspects" worked well or not, when so many patterns begin to emerge as have been demonstrated by some such as TIA, these patterns can not be ignored and should be cause for concern and investigated.

Also, although there are many factors that can affect the accuracy of exit polling, the fact that there has been no good explanation found for the polls to be SO FAR wrong is further cause for investigation.

Finally, when the poll discrepencies are considered in conjunction with all of the other "irregularities", then the argument that the poll data is "evidence" becomes even stronger. Although, it is far from the only evidence, and not even the strongest evidence.

It is the other evidence that is presented in so many threads and links here that leads most DU'ers to believe that the exit polls were closer to being correct than the vote count. NOT the other way around!

[righteous1]

80. Sure, why go outside and SEE if it's raining when you can rely on

weather reports and historical climate data to know for sure

[Mistwell]

118. Uhhh

"Prima Facie evidence requires no further evidence and is irrefutable "proof" in a court of law."

In the words of Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means."

Prima Facie evidence is not irrefutable proof. It's a rebuttable presumption. If something is prima facia evidence, it means that the burden of proof is shifted to the other side to disprove it...not that it is irrefutable proof.

For example, if you walk into a room and a guy has a bullet hole in his head, a gun in his hand, and an apparent suicide note, that is prima facia evidence of a suicide. The burden shifts to someone who suspects murder to show that it was not a suicide.

And yes, I am a lawyer.

[johnaries]

131. I stand corrected. Thank you! But, my point is still that

I don't think anyone here believes that the exit polls are Prima Facie evidence, but a "red flag".

The fact that the discrencies between the exit polls and the vote counts are so large indicates there is a HUGE problem with one or the other. When you look at the patterns that emerge, it becomes evident that the problem is systemic. When you consider all of the problems and "irregularities" reported during the voting process, many of us "myself included" believe that the evidence shows that the bulk of the problem was in the voting process, not in the exit polling.

Thank you for the clarification! :hi:

[Mistwell]

133. Im with you mostly

I agree that it looks like fraud happened, particularly in Ohio. I am unsure myself if it was enough to tip the balance away from Kerry, or if it simply meant that Bush actually won, but by fewer votes than those reported.

I just personally think the exit poll stuff is a red herring that is distracting us from getting at any actual evidence of fraud. I don't think the exit poll data is unusual, since it basically matches the unweighted date from prior years. All it proves is that, like always, the exit polls don't work so well for predicting a close race.

[johnaries]

135. I think that in some cases opening a discussion with the exit poll

issue can be useful in talking to someone unaware of all the voting problems, but I agree with you that it is time to focus our energies on other areas that are easier to prove or disprove.

Having said that, now I'm beginning to wonder why I even bothered to post to this thread in the first place!

C'mon folks! We've got bigger fish to fry than re-hashing the polls!

[Mistwell]

138. Seriously

Why is so much energy spent on statistical analysis of untrustworty exit poll data when you have friggen eyewitness reports of intimidation, messing with the computers, messing with the 3% recount, long lines, wrongfully disallowed provisional ballots, etc.?

It's just infuriating to me that this red herring gets so many posts every day, and folks like TIA lure good people into this massive distraction that is so easily refuted while the more solid evidence of fraud gets mostly ignored in the shuffle.

[Karenca]

72. Whoooo!! 30% of Americans now believe Bushass stole the election!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x284842

[fasttense]

74. Wait they contradict themselves.

They state "Their results, in conjunction with other elements of statistical models used by the National Election Pool (NEP) and the decision desks of their news organization members, are best suited for determining the difference between the two leading candidates and whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them."

So these exit polls are designed to tell the news media if it safe to call the election for one party or the other. So the exit polls were right on target until late in the evening.

Only after adjusting for the actual vote did these exit polls call the vote for Bush. Sooo to me this indicates a serious problem.

Does anyone else see this?

[Time for change]

82. That is exactly right

They claim that exit polls can't predict elections by themselves, but when combined with the actual vote count they can predict elections. I guess that's because they have to wait until the actual vote count starts coming in, in order to know if massive election fraud has occurred. If it has, then that proves that the exit polls aren't going to work this time.

Furthermore, we all know of numerous examples in every Presidential election where a state is called immediately after the polls close, with 0% of precincts reporting. I remember distinctly that they called Michigan for Gore in 2000 immediately after the polls closed, and the final vote margin in that case was only about 5%.

[Mistwell]

119. That is not what that sentence means

It means that you can tell if it is a close race or not. If there is a gross difference between the two candidates, then you can call it based on the exit poll. However, if it is a relatively close race, then you cannot. It's not meant to be used to call close races, because the MOE is not meant to apply to the vote count for each person, but to the demographic data.

[thanatonautos]

161. Fascinating: the MOE does not apply to the vote count for each person

nevertheless you can tell if it is a close race or not ...
even though you don't know the MOE in the
vote count for each person.

But the MOE does apply to the demographic data.

I'm probably going out on a limb here, but it
doesn't sound to me as if you actually have any
idea what you're talking about.

Now be honest, do you?

[thanatonautos]

162. self delete (duplicate)

[fasttense]

166. The purpose of the exit poll,

according to you, is to let the media predict how much someone is going to win, not WHO is going to win. The media does not spend millions of dollars on a poll that can only predict the point spread but not who will win. I find that very difficult to believe. The point spread can easily be predicted by polls before the election. Everyone knew this was going to be a very close race. Why do they have to spend ten million dollars to find that out?

[davidgmills]

75. What a Crock!

Just goes to show I guess that you can find six PhD's to put their name on nearly anything.

Four or five pages of conclusions -- zero pages of analysis.

Premise, well these polls are just not accurate enough to spend our time seeing if they might or could shed any light on anything. They were not designed to see if they could be a check on election fraud so since they weren't designed to be a check we won't bother to see if they could be. End of analysis.

[euler]

109. Some people outside DU my fault one....

....of the 6 authors of this report for being politically biased.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University: His resume is here -http://macht.arts.cornell.edu /

His analysis of the 2000 presidential election was famous for a while. He proved that Bush stole the 2000 presidential election.

His entire analysis can be read here: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/overvotes.pdf

More about the authors of this report in post #103.

Thanks

[davidgmills]

143. Didn't read the whole thing

But its clear that his article is an indicment of how badly we tabulate votes and had they been tabulated properly Gore would have won Florida.

Which proves my point about our defective tabulations. When we know our tabulation process is so bad, why do we keep saying exit polls are "wrong?"

All we seem to be doing is "correcting" them to be as wrong as the tabulations.

[MadisonProgressive]

76. Congrats, euler!

You have proven that people at DU do not get tombstoned for having opinions contary to the majority of DU'ers. You have to be nasty about it for that to happen. Most freepers could do well to learn from your example.

[Karenca]

88. Hi Madison ..... SEE

Post #35.

Read Carefully.....:evilgrin:

[MadisonProgressive]

90. I just did - I'm not sure what you meant.

[Karenca]

92. Well. It's like this.....

Obviously, the OP thinks Cam Kerry is a girl...so......

silly:

[MadisonProgressive]

96. ROTFLMAO

I guess I didn't read it closely enough!

[Karenca]

97. :))

:spank:

[Stevepol]

89. I'm not sure anybody really understands this as I do.

First of all, while it may be true that 2 + 2 = 4 it all depends on where the calibration is done and who is doing the calibrating, as well as a number of factors extraneous to the calculation itself. Most such computations exist for the purpose of refining and exfoliating the continuums that are to be found in an academic setting where the results can be easily recorded and reported and thus are hard to confuse; however, in other settings (and here we should make it clear that each setting has many different sectors or population norms to design into the operation), the results are almost impossible to verify because of the various social-economic variables like language or the vocabulary used to designate the digits to be used in the operation (in this case additive or, in other words, addition). Of course, in defense of the operation as recorded, it can be said that efforts have been made to deal with these "design effects" central to such conclusions and of course in every other case where this operation has been used it has proven to be, if not entirely reliable, at least reliable to a substantial degree, as long as the purpose for which it was used agreed with my biases and with the inherent protocols of the scions embarking their barbeques in fromage. But that of course in itself shows how difficult it is to use the terms except when the purposes for which it is used are limited to those purposes for which the operation was specifically designed.

In other words, to jump to the conclusion that 2 + 2 = 4 would be hard for me in my position as a PhD from a highly respected institution to entirely substantiate or verify. The problems are too various and too profound to allow for a summary judgment.

[MadisonProgressive]

91. I'm not a PhD, but I'm pretty sure 2+2=4. Sounds like you're not

a math major.

[Stevepol]

93. But I could do a helluva job debunking Freeman's paper.

Freeman is entirely too straightforward and obvious. Clearly, his analysis disguises some serious flaws that only somebody like me and others can detect and unmask. Care to join me and we can write a paper to accompany the one euler is so proud of? The US is obviously much different from anywhere else in the world so exit polls are meaningless here. Of course it is true that any other particular place in the world is also different from the other places in the world, so exit polls that work in other countries are obviously irrelevant there. In sum, exit polls are irrelevant everywhere and in all places simultaneously.

[MadisonProgressive]

95. I think you're outnumbered in your premise.

[thanatonautos]

163. I will be happy to coauthor such a paper.

I could not agree more; the issues involved are most
subtle. Bumpkins like Freeman have made them appear
far too simple.

I have a PhD in Physics and have spent a great deal of
time studying abstruse topics such as General Relativity
and String Theory.

As a result of some cogitation it has become clear to
me that the issue of the dependence of the accuracy of
exit polls on position on planet earth can only be resolved
by constructing Fermi normal coordinates around each
and every polling location and performing appropriate
parallel transport of the polling results, which are
actually vector fields, not scalar fields as Friemann
naively assumes. Only after this correction can one
renormalize the results to those which are currently
obtained at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

(Lat: 38.88963, Long: -77.01427, approximately)

I believe our little paper may well create a
revolution in the field of exit polling.

Please let me know by e-mail if you would be interested
in a collaboration.

[Stevepol]

178. On second thought, I think you could do a better job than I could.

There's no need for multiple authorship to expedite obfuscation.

[fasttense]

167. Sound more like you have a degree in philosophy.

Thanks for the laugh.

[bleever]

104. LOL! Excellent disquisition on eschewing obfuscation.

[euler]

108. I completely agree.

[MadisonProgressive]

140. I'm not surprised.

:hurts:

[super simian]

94. Explaining vs. Explaining Away

I confess that didn't read the whole article, or even the whole post since all the bolding really annoys me. Don't say that you are just posting the article without comment when your bolding throughout clearly hammers home your own point of view!

Secondly, no one with a grain of sense would ever believe that exit poll discrepancies prove anything, or could constitute the proof of anything in a court of law. These discrepancies are simply -- if taken either alone or as part of a history of exit polls as a means of predicting the outcome of elections -- evidence that either needs to be explained or explained away. This collection of academics choses to explain them away and for anyone who starts with the premise that election 2004 was not stolen, this offers a convenient argument.

The exit poll discrepancies have been likened, I believe, to a smoke alarm going off. If a smoke alarm goes off, it doesn't prove that your house is on fire. It is just a warning signal that you can either explain, or explain away. Maybe the oven needs cleaning, or the toast is burning, or you located it to close to the stove. However, if you just explain it away in your own mind and don't bother to get up and look, your house might burn down with you inside it.

I would never question the credentials of this collection of academics, that is not the point here. The problem with academia is that it is set up for each scholar or researcher to either prove or disprove his or her particular point of view based on a set of established facts or research or methology or an accepted body of knowledge. By that token, I can prove that Shakespeare wasn't reallly Shakespeare, or that the Big Bang never happened, or that time really moves backwards, or that the dinosaurs all died of smoke inhalation, or that America was first discovered by the Chinese, or that the Sphinx is really 10,000 years older than we think it is, or that Charles Dickens hated his mother, or that Freud was a closet homosexual, and I haven't proven anything that would hold up as evidence in a court of law. Then some other academic can come along and write a dissertation or publish a peer-reviewed article that elegantly disproves any one of these theories. That's the way academia works. Any academic can be used as an "expert witness" for either side.

Therefore it is a waste of time to post an article like this with all of the helpful bolding to guide the reader's eye since most of the people on this forum aren't looking for ways to explain away an overwhelming body of evidence that points to another stolen election in 2004. In and of themselves the exit poll discrepancies may or may not be evidence of something, but for most of us here the point is that they may well be part of a larger pattern that points to systematic, deliberate, and widespread voter disenfranchisement that was intended to put * in office regardless of the voters' intent, and appears on the face of it to have succeeded.

[Karenca]

98. You said it all..... Euler, you see, there is

nothing more to say.
We're working to expose the stole election....You keep posting theories on exit polls.

We will never give up. John F. Kerry IS the President of the United States, and it will be known.


Those exit theories are meaningless here.

[euler]

107. Those exit theories are meaningless here.

They are meaningless bcaue they can't be used to prove or disprove fraud. They can't even be used as a smoking gun. I, and several others in this forum, have been saying this all along. Thanks for the reinforcement.

As you know, a lot of people in the forum disagree with us. If it's OK with you, I will keep posting for their sake.

[euler]

99. Yes, you do have a point.

You're right, bolding is spin. I'll post a correction.

[euler]

101. I agree with some of your remarks.

But first, do you think bolding is a problem for a significant number of people. If there is a consensus on this, I'll dispense with it future posts.

The authors did not start from the premise that election 2004 was not stolen. They started from the premise that, the exit poll does not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud. But, it does not constitute prima facie against fraud either.

The underlying point is that it is not possible to use the exit polls to explain OR explain away fraud. They aren't saying there is not fraud. They are saying that it's not possible to tell one way or the other whether fraud occurred or not by using the exit poll data.

They are saying that if you want to disprove fraud, or even look for a smoking gun, you have to look somewhere else other than the exit poll.

I still haven't persuaded you of anything. Thanks for pointing my error and thanks for the posting tips.

[super simian]

127. What is your premise?

Hey, euler! :hi:

BTW did you ever answer the question about why you pretended to know who Cam Kerry is? Not that everybody has to know, my son is a very committed Democrat and didn't know, but he didn't pretend to know, either.

As to whether the bolding bothers a lot of people, I don't know, but you put it very well when you said it was a way to spin these findings (presumably) to promote your own point of view. Another poster down thread also makes the point that you can pick and chose which parts of the findings you want to emphasize to suit your own agenda and that in the end you may have done a disservice to these researchers.

You write: "They started from the premise that, the exit poll does not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud. But, it does not constitute prima facie against fraud either."

And that just about sums it up, doesn't it!

My point is about the premise that you start from, because that’s what you set out to prove, and I get the feeling that you are trying to prove that there was no election fraud. If not, why bring up a study that doesn't prove anything one way or another and then try to spin it so that it "proves" that the exit poll discrepancies are irrelevant?

My premise -- and I think I can speak for a vast majority of the posters on this forum -- is that there is a preponderance of evidence that suggests that the election was rigged to the extent that we now have the wrong president in the WH for 4 more years. But I mean <sarcasm> what's a wrong president now and then, could happen to any country </sarcasm>?

Well this particular wrong president lied this country into a war that is costing tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives and billions of dollars that we could make much better use of and destroyed an entire country that we had no business destroying. Not only that, but his tragic policies established a climate that condoned torture and broke international laws established at the Geneva Conventions and destroyed any moral authority this county had or may ever have again to bring democracy to the dark corners of the world. He has also set about destroying public education, dismantling the infrastructure of this country, abridging our civil liberties, and attempting to rewrite the Constitution so that it serves the agenda of the neoconservative religious right. In fact, we are closer to fascism than we have ever been as a nation, and may be already there.

So this is a very serious case of oops the wrong president and this is why so many of us are so upset.

[seaclyr]

114. Could not have said it better! n/t

[emcguffie]

100. Excuse me, Euler, but --

I'm just a dumb bunny no-nothing, I'm sure, but when things are put into context, with the DREs and people in certain states complaining about their vote jumping to Bush, with statistical oddities that make strange patterns, AND these exit polls, which have never, ever been off like this, it is, shall we say, extremely strongly suggestive of widespread fraud.

Of course, you can't take that to the bank, but it SHOULD get you an investigation, at the very least. Gee,are we throwing up our hands and saying, no, these exit polls weren't intended to be used that way, so let's completely ignore them?

I haven't looked at it in a long time, but isn't it so that in states with paper ballots, that were not important states, the exit polls did very well?

Doesn't one wonder when one sees the bias going the same way, over and over and over? Random? Really? Randomly all going off the same way, repeatedly? "Random" glitches that all favor Bush? And this is in "battleground" states. People do not behave that way, Dem or Rep. They are people, with their own different propensities. You CANNOT explain a statistical sample's bias by saying, oh, well, Dems do this and Reps do that. They are NOT ALL ALIKE.

Excuse the capitals, but I can't see why anyone would want to ignore the exit polls, unless they want Bush in office or just don't care or aren't paying much attention.

And the people who stayed in line, the people that were voting that never had before, or those that did once in a blue moon, most of them were trying to vote for Kerry. People in that vast middle, who weren't sure, they weren't passionate about who they were voting for. And most of them broke for Kerry. This election got all those folks who never vote because they think it doesn't make any difference -- minorities, African Americans, Latinos -- out in droves.

I'm ranting, I realize, but it does get me going.

I was so afraid this would happen. And it did. How very convenient for Bush to get the lead so late in the day, after it was clear that Kerry was winning. Republicans vote late? No, they don't. At least, that's not what they say. Republicans vote early. Then where did all those late votes come from?

I'm absolutely clear about what happened. I have no doubt whatsoever. I just wish I could be more convincing. But I'm going to work on that, and then start visiting people.

[Mistwell]

120. Incorrect assumption

"AND these exit polls, which have never, ever been off like this"

Yeah, except that they were off like this EVERY SINGLE TIME, EVERY ONE!

Every single unweighted exit poll (like the one we are disputing) since exit polls started in 1988 in the US has been off by a similar amount (sometimes more). And no matter how many times that is posted, somehow people here still seem to think that this was some massive abberation. It's not. To conclude that this poll shows fraud because of it's unweighted data is to conclude that every single US President election since 1988 had massive fraud (sometimes without electronic voting, and 3 out of 4 times it ended in the Republicans losing the actual popular vote anyway).

[euler]

152. Actually, there is an explanation...

...that does not seem to got much respect in this forum, but that does get a lot of respect in the academic community.

It's called non-response bias. Google it - it's not as if this bias has not been recorded.

[Karenca]

126. Em. Why is Euler trying so hard to dissuade us?

:think:

Sad, don't ya think?

Actually pathetic...Edited to add 'PATHETIC'

[Igel]

171. Some people don't like it when others have their own facts.

Euler's one.

They don't like it when a person (let's call her Shirley) say the exit polls are always right, when they're not; when Shirley says the exit polls were based on random samples across the country, when they weren't; when Shirley says exit polls are prima facie proof of fraud, when they don't much bear on the question; when they use statistical formulas when they clearly don't understand how they have to be used to be meaningful; when they say Mitofsky's polls must mean X, when he himself says they don't.

I don't care if 99.999% of DUers believe that the exit polls were delivered by the ghost of JFK to Howard Dean, engraved in platinum, or fished from a sewage pond from a large pig farm by Mitofsky. But it rankles when DUers confuse belief and knowledge, opinion and fact, wishing and reality.

What I find difficult to understand is why people have such a need to clutch at something that appears to substantiate their side, when there's enough evidence elsewhere.

[euler]

193. Sorry. Not true.

"these exit polls, which have never, ever been off like this"

see post #190

[waz_nc]

102. These are not key findings in this report

I'm not sure why you chose to post the segment of the report you posted, why you emphasized the statements you did, or why you refer to them as key findings. People need to read the report. It actually provides a road-map for the type of research that needs to be done to test hypotheses, regarding the impact of voting machine type, voting machine allocation, provisional ballot standards etc., in such a manner that the results cannot be refuted logically even by skeptics. They encourage the use of natural experiments, and assuming fraud occurred these will provide the strongest evidence of it. I would refer people the study in Snohomish County, which has been discussed in this forum, as a good example of a natural experiment that provides evidence of fraud.

http://www.votersunite.org/info/SnohomishElectionFraudInvestigation.pdf

Although I don't agree with everything in the authors' concluding statement, it actually reminds me quite a bit of the statements in Kerry's emails since the elections---that the results need to be fully investigate to confirm the legitimacy of the election. People should also remember that this is an interim report based on the data and analysis available at the time it was written. They may reach very different conclusions in the final report as more data (e.g. raw unadjusted exit poll data, precinct level data, etc) become available and are analyzed.

CONCLUDING STATEMENT This interim briefing report concludes that fears of widespread election fraud based on national exit poll discrepancies or county voting patterns in Florida are not supported by the balance of publicly available evidence at this time. Continuing public allegations of irregularities in polling place conditions, voting machine distribution, vote counting, and provisional ballot administration in Ohio merit scrutiny of all available data and evidence. While these authors do not believe that the alleged irregularities in Ohio, if confirmed to be true, are of a sufficient magnitude to have changed the winner of the popular vote in that state, we believe that a systematic, nonpartisan review of all available evidence is necessary to confirm that the results of the election are legitimate.

Throughout this report, we have emphasized that full data disclosure and transparency of the election administration process are absolutely necessary to restore confidence in the American election system, reduce the likelihood of irregularities occurring in the future, and resolve allegations of misconduct should they be made. Although the authors of this report do not believe at this time that the current election was "stolen," we nonetheless acknowledge that nonpartisan observers will never know with full confidence whether all aspects of the most recent election were administered according to applicable laws. This is because the necessary data are either not collected or not publicly available, and because many details of the election administration process in most states and counties are not fully disclosed to outside observers. In the wake of the 2000 election, some states have passed new "sunshine" laws that have significantly improved the quality and availability of information needed to assure the integrity of the election process. Recent legislation passed in Florida may serve as a model for some of these reforms.

Thus, based on lessons learned from the current election and additional analysis now being undertaken for a final report, the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting strongly endorses new national standards to ensure the collection and dissemination of baseline electoral process data in all future elections, including but not limited to: ballot-level demographic and voting outcome records; polling place training and election administration practices and conditions; machine distribution, functionality, calibration, and residual vote rates; precinct- and county-wide registration and voting records; numbers of absentee, provisional, and spoiled ballots; and records of new registration requests received, processed, and accepted. Especially because the American electoral system is now entering a dynamic period of change-- with new technologies and upgrades of methods of tabulating votes-- it is vital that a robust system for monitoring and auditing election processes be built and deployed as soon as possible. Citizens must be confident that every eligible voter has a chance to participate in our elections and that when they do their votes will be tabulated as they were cast.

[euler]

106. Nothng in this post contradict in any way anything in my post.

One of the primary reason for this is that all I did was quote the report, and highligh some passages. I made no commentary. Since (almost) all you did was quote from the same paper, our 2 posts are mutually reinforcing. I agree with everything in your post.

[waz_nc]

121. I wasn't' trying to contradict you

It's a good report. I appreciate you posting the link. I just think that it is unfortunate you emphasized the aspects of it you did. There is a lot of information in the report that could be valuable to people in this forum, unfortunately, I'm afraid that many of them will never read it. By posting and emphasizing the segment of the report that discusses the limitations of analyses based on incomplete exit poll data, your post makes it seem like that is the focus of the report, when in fact it is not. Consequently, it seems like many people are reacting to your post and not reading the report. I was hoping that by pointing out other aspects of the report, I could stimulate interest in it and get more people to read it.

[euler]

103. Some posters on this thread are...

...saying things like:

"But, Conyers report says..."

"But, TIA says..."

"The authors of this report are in on the fraud..."

"The authors of this report are politically biased..."

"This is so bogus"

I asked people concerned about the authoirs qualifications, to type the names into Google and see who the authors are and then make your opinion. At least one poster did do this. Now I am doing it here:

The first author listed is interesting. Some have cslled him biased, but not in the direction you might think.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University: His resume is here -http://macht.arts.cornell.edu / But what I found more interesting is his 33 page analysis of the 2000 presidential election and his conclusion:

"Examination of 2000 election ballots in the decisive state of Florida shows that a plurality of the voters there intended to vote for the Democrat, Al Gore, and not the Republican, George W. Bush, notwithstanding the fact that the legal and political process produced a victory for Bush."

The entire analysis can be read here: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/overvotes.pdf

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)

"Professor Brady received his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. His areas of interest include Quantitative Methodology, American and Canadian Politics, and Political Behavior. He teaches undergraduate courses on political participation and party systems and graduate courses on advanced quantitative methodology. He is former president of the Political Methodology Group of the American Political Science Association. His current research interests include political participation in America, Estonia, and Russia, the dynamics of public opinion and political campaigns, the evaluation of social welfare programs, and the impact of computers on social policy making. Brady has co-authored two books. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada in 1992-1993. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) was featured in an American Political Science Review symposium in 1997. Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics."

His entire Bio is here: http://www.polisci.berkeley.edu/Faculty/bio/permanent/B... /

Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota

Guy-Uriel E. Charles is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology. He received his B.A. degree in Political Science, cum laude from Spring Arbor University in 1992 and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1997 where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. He is also finishing a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He clerked for The Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and has taught as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toledo School of Law prior to joining the University of Minnesota. He is an attorney and a member of the Michigan Bar Association. Professor Charles teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, civil procedure, election law, law and politics, and race. He is the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year 2002-2003 at the University of Minnesota Law School.

His entire bio is here: http://www.law.umn.edu/facultyprofiles/charlesg.htm


Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1998.
M.A. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1992.
A.B. Brown University, magna cum laude, Political Science, 1990.

Highton Publications

-----“Who Reports? Self-Reported Versus Proxy-Reported Voter Turnout.” Public Opinion Quarterly. In press.

-----“Beyond the Roll Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress” (co-authored with Michael Rocca). Political Research Quarterly. In press.

-----“How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Registrants” (co-authored with Raymond E. Wolfinger and Megan Mullin). State Politics and Policy Quarterly. In press.

-----“Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States.” Perspectives on Politics 2 (September):507-515.
-----“Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion.” Political Behavior 26 (June):181- 200. 2004.
-----“White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress.” Political Behavior 26 (March):1-25. 2004.
-----“Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the 1998 Congressional Elections.” Public Opinion Quarterly 66 (Spring):1-18. 2002.

-----“New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States” (co-authored with Arthur Burris). American Politics Research 30 (May):285-306. 2002.

-----“The Political Implications of Higher Turnout” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). British Journal of Political Science 31 (January):179-192. 2001.

-----“The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). American Journal of Political Science 45 (January):202-209. 2001.

-----“Senate Elections in the United States, 1920-1994.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (July):483-506. 2000.
-----“Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Voter Turnout.” Political Behavor 22 (June):109-120. 2000.
-----“Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). Political Behavor 20 (June) 9-104. 1998.

-----“Easy Registration and Voter Turnout.” Journal of Politics 59 (May):565-75. 1997. Other Scholarly Publications
-----“Alternative Tests for the Effects of Campaigns and Candidates on Voting Behavior.” In Capturing Campaign Effects, Henry Brady and Richard Johnston, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. In press.
-----“How Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Shape the California Electorate (co-authored with Jack Citrin). San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. (95 pp.) 2002.
-----“Voting: Turnout.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser and Paul J. Baltes, eds. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. 2001.
His entire bio is here: http://ps.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/vitae/BenHightonCV.pdf

Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
PDF Resume is here (sorry, couldn't copy paste): http://k.web.umkc.edu/kropfm/vitae.pdf

Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

Professor Traugott studies the mass media and their impact on American politics. This includes research on the use of the media by candidates in their campaigns and its impact on voters, as well as the ways that campaigns are covered and the impact of this coverage on candidates. He has a particular interest in the use of surveys and polls and the way they are used to cover campaigns and elections. His most recent book is The Voters' Guide to Election Polls.

His entire Bio is here: http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/mtraugott.html
Original Message
"Exit Polls: National Research Commission on Elections Report"
Posted by euler
National Research Commission on Elections and Voting

released a report titled: INTERIM REPORT ON ALLEGED IRREGULARITIES IN THE UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2 NOVEMBER 2004

The authors of the report are:

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

The main web site is here: http://election04.ssrc.org/research/academic /

The report is here: http://election04.ssrc.org/research/academic /

Key Findings:

Discrepancies between early exit poll results and popular vote tallies in several states may be due to a variety of factors and do not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud in the current election.

On November 2, early exit poll results showing significant leads for John Kerry in several battleground states were leaked to the public via the Internet. One consequence was that observers could see shifts in the exit poll results through the afternoon and evening on the websites of both news organizations and well-known blogs, raising suspicions that the early exit poll results were correct and that the actual vote totals had been manipulated or reflected administrative or tabulation errors.

Although these disparities have alarmed many observers, for several methodological reasons there is no a priori reason to believe that these differences reflect problems with the actual vote tallies. Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the United States are not suitable for use as point estimators for the share of votes that go to different candidates. Their results, in conjunction with other elements of statistical models used by the National Election Pool (NEP) and the decision desks of their news organization members, are best suited for determining the difference between the two leading candidates and whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them. Furthermore, the current design of exit polls is not well-suited to estimating whether certain aspects of an election functioned properly or not (for instance, efforts to assess whether particular types of voting machines were accurate). The usefulness of exit polls as currently administered in the United States is limited by (a) the sampling of a relatively small number of precincts, (b) the difficulty of knowing whether a random sample of voters was contacted at each precinct, and (c) the difficulty of combining Election Day information with data on absentee and early voters.

Because exit polls may not obtain a strictly random sample of voters at each precinct, exit pollsters typically weight their data to adjust for non-response and for known characteristics of the population. The problem of estimation is further complicated by the fact that partial data, such as were released in the afternoon on Election Day, are often unadjusted, not yet weighted for known attributes of the population or historical patterns of voting behavior. An unusual increase in turnout could introduce additional biases with regard to any or all of these assumptions. For the independent analyst examining the results of exit polls after Election Day, these issues are complicated by the fact that exit poll organizations do not typically disclose details regarding the source and quality of raw data or the transformations that have been performed on them. By the time that exit data are archived, they have been adjusted for such things as patterns of non-response and weighted to the actual outcome of the election. Thus, because of these and other limitations intrinsic to their sampling methods, current exit polls are not well-suited for estimating differences in measures like turnout or vote division by voting device, as the samples are not designed to reflect counties, or even specific county groups. There are other forms of statistical analysis, based upon designs that look like a natural experiment, to address some of these issues, and these analyses will be pursued by researchers when the appropriate data on election returns become available. Nevertheless, some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale (state or country) are accurate or whether fraud might be involved in an election. A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different. To validate results in specific precincts or from particular machines, the designs would have to incorporate larger numbers of interviews with voters leaving the polls for precision. And the stratification strategy would also need to be different, focusing on a combination of machine types and geography, for example, including a larger number of precincts at the first stage. There is little likelihood that the member organizations in the NEP would be willing to support the costs of such a design.


Your message
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Message
...saying things like:

"But, Conyers report says..."

"But, TIA says..."

"The authors of this report are in on the fraud..."

"The authors of this report are politically biased..."

"This is so bogus"

I asked people concerned about the authoirs qualifications, to type the names into Google and see who the authors are and then make your opinion. At least one poster did do this. Now I am doing it here:

The first author listed is interesting. Some have cslled him biased, but not in the direction you might think.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University: His resume is here -http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/ But what I found more interesting is his 33 page analysis of the 2000 presidential election and his conclusion:

"Examination of 2000 election ballots in the decisive state of Florida shows that a plurality of the voters there intended to vote for the Democrat, Al Gore, and not the Republican, George W. Bush, notwithstanding the fact that the legal and political process produced a victory for Bush."

The entire analysis can be read here: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/overvotes.pdf

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)

"Professor Brady received his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. His areas of interest include Quantitative Methodology, American and Canadian Politics, and Political Behavior. He teaches undergraduate courses on political participation and party systems and graduate courses on advanced quantitative methodology. He is former president of the Political Methodology Group of the American Political Science Association. His current research interests include political participation in America, Estonia, and Russia, the dynamics of public opinion and political campaigns, the evaluation of social welfare programs, and the impact of computers on social policy making. Brady has co-authored two books. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada in 1992-1993. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) was featured in an American Political Science Review symposium in 1997. Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics."

His entire Bio is here: http://www.polisci.berkeley.edu/Faculty/bio/permanent/Brady,H/

Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota

Guy-Uriel E. Charles is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology. He received his B.A. degree in Political Science, cum laude from Spring Arbor University in 1992 and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1997 where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. He is also finishing a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He clerked for The Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and has taught as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toledo School of Law prior to joining the University of Minnesota. He is an attorney and a member of the Michigan Bar Association. Professor Charles teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, civil procedure, election law, law and politics, and race. He is the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year 2002-2003 at the University of Minnesota Law School.

His entire bio is here: http://www.law.umn.edu/facultyprofiles/charlesg.htm


Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1998.
M.A. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1992.
A.B. Brown University, magna cum laude, Political Science, 1990.

Highton Publications

-----“Who Reports? Self-Reported Versus Proxy-Reported Voter Turnout.” Public Opinion Quarterly. In press.

-----“Beyond the Roll Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress” (co-authored with Michael Rocca). Political Research Quarterly. In press.

-----“How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Registrants” (co-authored with Raymond E. Wolfinger and Megan Mullin). State Politics and Policy Quarterly. In press.

-----“Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States.” Perspectives on Politics 2 (September):507-515.
-----“Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion.” Political Behavior 26 (June):181- 200. 2004.
-----“White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress.” Political Behavior 26 (March):1-25. 2004.
-----“Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the 1998 Congressional Elections.” Public Opinion Quarterly 66 (Spring):1-18. 2002.

-----“New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States” (co-authored with Arthur Burris). American Politics Research 30 (May):285-306. 2002.

-----“The Political Implications of Higher Turnout” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). British Journal of Political Science 31 (January):179-192. 2001.

-----“The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). American Journal of Political Science 45 (January):202-209. 2001.

-----“Senate Elections in the United States, 1920-1994.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (July):483-506. 2000.
-----“Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Voter Turnout.” Political Behavor 22 (June):109-120. 2000.
-----“Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). Political Behavior 20 (June):79-104. 1998.

-----“Easy Registration and Voter Turnout.” Journal of Politics 59 (May):565-75. 1997. Other Scholarly Publications
-----“Alternative Tests for the Effects of Campaigns and Candidates on Voting Behavior.” In Capturing Campaign Effects, Henry Brady and Richard Johnston, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. In press.
-----“How Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Shape the California Electorate (co-authored with Jack Citrin). San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. (95 pp.) 2002.
-----“Voting: Turnout.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser and Paul J. Baltes, eds. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. 2001.
His entire bio is here: http://ps.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/vitae/BenHightonCV.pdf

Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
PDF Resume is here (sorry, couldn't copy paste): http://k.web.umkc.edu/kropfm/vitae.pdf

Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

Professor Traugott studies the mass media and their impact on American politics. This includes research on the use of the media by candidates in their campaigns and its impact on voters, as well as the ways that campaigns are covered and the impact of this coverage on candidates. He has a particular interest in the use of surveys and polls and the way they are used to cover campaigns and elections. His most recent book is The Voters' Guide to Election Polls.

His entire Bio is here: http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/mtraugott.html

[KansDem]

122. "Free Republic" displays Martha Korpf report from 2000 election

"Study Refutes Beliefs about Punch-card Voting"

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Jan. 12, 2001 #350
Contact: Heather Haas
[phone]

Study Refutes Beliefs about Punch-card Voting

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- In the wake of the 2000 presidential election, two widespread perceptions emerged: that punch-card voting equipment was prevalent in counties with a large minority population and that members of lower economic classes are more likely to use punch card and other antiquated balloting equipment.

A study authored by Martha Kropf, assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and Stephen Knack, associate fellow with the Center for Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector at the University of Maryland, contradicts these beliefs. "Who Uses Inferior Voting Technology?" concludes that there is "little support for the view that resource constraints cause poorer counties with large minority populations to retain antiquated or inferior voting equipment."

The study analyzed county-level Census data combined with voting equipment data from Election Data Services, Inc. In a state-by-state analysis, the authors found that in a majority of states, whites, the non-poor and Republican voters are more likely to reside in punch-card counties than African-Americans, the poor and Democratic voters.

Other key findings of the study include:
(more)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/983149/posts

Comments include:
Counties with punch card systems tend to have higher incomes, higher tax revenues, and larger populations than do counties with more modern voting equipment.

In other words - the whole 'minorities are being disenfranchized' argument is a load of crap.

African-Americans are more likely than whites to live in counties that use electronic voting or lever machines, in which "overvoting" is impossible if the equipment is programmed correctly.

This conclusion bothers me considering the history of voter fraud in the democratic party.

I am so tired of hearing about disenfranchisement. If someone is forced to pay a poll tax or is physically restrained from voting, that's disenfranchisement. If the voter is inconvenienced or is too stupid to follow the directions, that's natural selection.

Today we have a wake up call (I hate that phrase, too) regarding court appointments. We see how dangerous a courtful of judges self-endowed with a legislative mandate can be.

It's unbelievable isn't it. Fox News said today that "the ACLU successfully argued that African-Americans were most likely to make mistakes on punch-card ballots...although the ACLU has no idea why this is."

Anyone besides the ACLU makes that kind of claim and they're called racist.

And my favorite...
I don't remember any problems with punch cards here in Florida until Al Gore & company showed up.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

I don't know anything about this researcher but it seems to me if you want to discredit an issue like exit polls vs. "official tallies," then having someone like Martha Korpf on the team would be an asset...

[euler]

124. Well, so far we have...

...one author who could be biased toward the right, and one author that could be biased to the left:

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University: His resume is here - http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/ But what I found more interesting is his 33 page analysis of the 2000 presidential election and his conclusion:

"Examination of 2000 election ballots in the decisive state of Florida shows that a plurality of the voters there intended to vote for the Democrat, Al Gore, and not the Republican, George W. Bush, notwithstanding the fact that the legal and political process produced a victory for Bush."

The entire analysis can be read here: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/overvotes.pdf

Perhaps if we collaborate, we can succeed in proving the report was written by a balanced panel of experts - which is, of course, the ideal authorship configuration for locating the truth. KansDem, what do you say ? Partners ?

[KansDem]

128. Sure...

Although I must admit I find the fact that the Korpf report was published only a little more than two months after the 2000 election a little suspicious. I mean, why pursue this (and during winter break when most faculty are out of town!) unless there was an agenda involved?

Besides, in the wake of Armstrong Williams's declaration, who's to say these people aren't on somebody's payroll?

edited for spelling

[euler]

151. Exactly............................

[euler]

111. There is one author of this report...

...that I think it is safe to say is not biased or hostile in any way.

See post #109
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=284055&mesg_id=285939&page=

See post #103 for more information about the authors of this report.http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=284055&mesg_id=285895&page=

[chrisclub]

129. 100's of Tobacco Scientists said smoing is OK

Remember the scientific studies sponsered by the tobacco industry parading dozens of scientists around to boast that their studies showed no harmful effects from tobacco in the 1950's, 1960's?

Same thing here.

[righteous1]

132. That argument is totally specious, those scientists were

"working" for the tobacco companies. If you have evidence that these people are working for the Bush campaign, I'd like to see it

[euler]

150. insert -----theme form twilight zone-----

right here.

[Stevepol]

130. This original report is a good exampleof gobbledygook and what

happens when a group of authors get together and try to write a single paper that tries to adjust the differneces between the various authors without ever saying anything. It's a little like the 9/11 report.

Take just a couple statements at the very beginning of the report.

(1) It says that there is "no a priori reason to believe that these differences reflect problems with the actual vote tallies." INTERPRETATION: Does this sentence mean that there's no reason to believe the exit polls? "No reason" at all? If you told that to a math instructor you'd get thrown out of class. In other words, are they saying that exit polls do not do what they are said to do? That they don't do what they do in every other country where they're used? That they don't do what they do in this country when they are used in states that use paper ballots or that have paper ballots and a truly random system of auditing in place? Freeman in his paper cites the results in Germany where the AVERAGE differential from the predicted result is .25%, well within any margin of error. The results of the exit polls in Germany are so accurate that they are used to determine the winners until the vote can be counted by hand, a process taking about two weeks. Are the authors of this article saying that the Germans are cretins to rely on such polling data? Maybe the polls are reporting lies. Is that what the authors are suggesting? Are the authors disputing the branch of mathematics known as statistics? Why did they need to stick in the "a priori" when it wasn't necessary? Just to take up space?

(2) The authors, working together as a team apparently, hanging on each other's every word, say: "Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the US are not suitable for use as point estimators for the share of votes that go to different candidates." INTERPRETATION: It must be admitted they have a way with words, which is evidently why they use so many of them when they could use 1/4 that number and write something quite a lot clearer. When they qualify their remark by saying "as currently designed and administered in the US," do they mean that polls have not yet developed to the level where they can be used with confidence? Or is it just in the US where the problem lies? If so what are the specific differences between exit polls as administered in the US and those administered, say, in Germany? Are they referring to the language differences? The fact that Americans can't be trusted while German respondents can? Maybe they could just have said that "exit polls cannot accurately predict the vote." That's all that sentence says it seems to me. And if that's true then all they're saying is that exit polls are useless. And by the way exit polls are really not "predicting"; they're just "sampling" a population. All the more reason that they can indeed be trusted. Either that or you can throw out the science of statistics altogether which seems to be what the authors are suggesting should be done with regard to the 04 election.

[righteous1]

134. They are saying that when looking at the discrepancy between

the exit polls and the vote tallys, they find nothing to make them believe that the vote tallys are inaccurate, therefor the exits must be flawed.

[euler]

148. I hope to...

...answer some of your questions.

You say: "Does this sentence mean that there's no reason to believe the exit polls?"

I say: No. It means that, given the design of this exit poll, it's not possible to use the exit poll numbers to prove, or disprove fraud. The exit poll is still valid for the purpose it is intended.

You say: "are they saying that exit polls do not do what they are said to do?"

I say: Exit polls do what they are designed to do and no more. Please consider this quote from the report:

"some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale show... that fraud might be involved in an election. A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different. To validate results in specific precincts or from particular machines, the designs would have to incorporate larger numbers of interviews with voters leaving the polls for precision. And the stratification strategy would also need to be different, focusing on a combination of machine types and geography, for example, including a larger number of precincts at the first stage."

If you want a exit poll that can be used to verify the actual vote count, then as the authors say, "the designs would have to incorporate larger numbers of interviews with voters leaving the polls for precision. And the stratification strategy would also need to be different"

In other words, an exit poll that can be used to verify the actual vote count requires that it be conducted with a methodology that can deliver such results. This particular exit poll was NOT conducted that way; therefore, it can't be used to question the vote count.

You say: "The results of the exit polls in Germany are so accurate that they are used to determine the winners until the vote can be counted by hand"

I say: This question helps me make my argument. Exit polls in Germany are nothing like exit polls in the United States. Go here to see the difference:

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/what_about_thos.html

The German exit CAN be used to verify the actual vote count because they conduct their exit poll in such a way to make election verification possible (they make sure their respondents are a true random sample). If the US conducted exit polls like the Germans do, we could verify the actual vote count too.

You say: "When they qualify their remark by saying 'as currently designed and administered in the US,' do they mean that polls have not yet developed to the level where they can be used with confidence? Or is it just in the US where the problem lies?"

I say: No. What they mean is that the customer who paid for the exit poll (MSM) did not request an exit poll that can be used to verify the election. MSM, as they always have, asked for an exit poll that would enable them to make really cool statements about demographics. Such an exit poll costs about 10 million dollars. Had they asked for the additional requirement that the exit poll provide them with the means to verify the actual vote count, they would have had to pay about 10 million more, because a exit poll like that is hard to implement. It's all about cost. In Europe someone pays the price for an exit poll that can be used to verify the election. In the US, No one does - yet.

[intensitymedia]

158. how do your "experts" claim to know the "design" of the NEP Exit Polls?

Euler baby, one of the things that makes your posts reek of arrogance is the assumed presumption that your "experts" have any clue at all about the "design" of the NEP exit polling methodology.

Do you have a shred of proof?

I thought not. So without that, every single assertion in the rather smarmy article you cite is baseless and false.

Enjoy your lunch

Che de Vera

[euler]

192. Maybe it's because Mitofsky published the methodolgy...

...on his web site.

http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/aboutmitofsky.html


My lunch was good. Thanks.

[bleever]

156. Hi, Stevepol. If no one has yet done so, I'd be honored to be the

first to say, "Welcome to DU".

I think your baby v. bathwater posts have been truth-laden, and a little hard to understand for some good soldiers involved in hand-to-hand combat here. Praise to you, and to them all.

:hi:

[Machiavelli05]

141. Its all a right wing conspiracy!!

They fixed this too!!!!

Just wait till TruthIsAll does his own investigation - he'll get to the bottom of it

[euler]

145. That's what I'm afraid of

---shaking in my boots---

[GetTheRightVote]

147. * must have paid for this report as well as Armstrong's reporting

:kick:

[euler]

149. I wonder how much he paid ?

[proud_Kucitizen]

153. What is your explanation

for why all the exit polls that were wrong all deviated toward Bush and mostly in swing states.

[Igel]

174. Euler seems to be out to lunch on this subthread.

So I'll give it a shot.

First, there's no need for somebody arguing the polls are inconclusive to have a pat explanation. Killing somebody's analysis is a whole lot easier than coming up with one you think is right.

Second, without knowing the details of the methodology, it's a rough call to definitively state why the early numbers are wrong (We know a lot of Mitofsky's methodology, but not crucial little details.)

First, his samples aren't random. Well, ok, they are. You have to define the terms. HIs samples are random and not random at different levels. I don't think he chooses his precincts randomly, at least not entirely randomly (and therefore not randomly). But within a precinct he has folk culling every nth (5? 4? 10?) voter, which is pretty random; and he keeps track of non-respondents, putting them into categories that he thinks are meaningful. He then goes back when it's all over to see how people in each category actually did vote, and assumes all non-respondents in a category voted exactly as those who did respond voted.

Since he doesn't choose precincts entirely randomly, he has to make assumptions about the overall makeup of the population that votes. Those assumptions go into the model. If 1% of his respondents are black, and he assumes 11% of the final voting population will be, he has to extrapolate; if the final result is 25%, he's screwed. The same goes for every other group he includes in his model: party affiliation, race/ethnicity, class, sex, etc.

This means that seeing voter turnout by precinct can make all the difference, and if his model's wrong, his early numbers are wrong: if primarily black precincts have 30% turnout, not the 60% he assumed, he's so screwed. Note this correction doesn't depend on the voting *results*, just turnout. If these are the final numbers he merged in his polls, TIA has no real basis to complain, unless there are large unresolved discrepancies between votes cast and votes counted.

But since Mitofsky also has to deal with nonrespondents, he has to look at how the precincts he measured actually voted. Because he may be mistaken in how he extrapolates voting patterns for nonrespondents. Let's assume that 50% of Latinos didn't respond; those that did went 80% dem. The initial model would predict that 99% of all Chicanos went dem, even the 50% that didn't respond. But lo and behold, Mitofsky checks and two predominantly Latino precincts went 40-60 Bush/Kerry. Two conclusions: fraud, or the extrapolation was wrong and non-respondents weren't a random sample.

And, finally, he has *people* e-mailing and calling in poll results. If the poll worker he hired in a key precinct makes a mistake and transposes numbers, mis-totals those in a given category--whatever--you're going to see weirdness later, after the polls close and all the detailed results are uploaded to the computer.

I don't know if these were the sources of his error. They're just possible sources.

[euler]

190. I don't know.

However, I do know the same phenomenon has occurred in US presidential exit polls in every election since 1988. So, this is not unique to this particular presidential election.

http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/12/have_the_exit_p.html

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005178.php

So, we can conclude that either these 5 presidential elections are fraudulent or there is a systematic problem with the way exit polls are designed and/or conducted which extends across 5 elections over 16 years

This question has been raised before in this forum. The consensus in this forum is that all 5 elections were in some way fraudulent. The reasoning is that since Mitofsky and other pollsters are so good at what they do, there is no way they could mess up the exit poll 5 times in a row.

But then, the counter argument is that if all these elections are fraudulent, how can it be kept secret for 16 years ?

Now, I don't know what causes this phenonemnon, so I can't explain it. But I do know we won't find the cause by looking at and analyzing exit polls.

[euler]

155. Correction

Early in the life of this thread, someone said I was spinning this report. I replied that my post was almost entirely made up of quotes from the report, and not my own words. I further noted, that if I said nothing substantive about the report, then I can't be spinning.

Someone pointed out to me that I 'bolded' some passages that were not bolded in the original, and by doing so, I spinned this report. I think this is about right - despite not writing anything original, by 'bolding' some passages, I spinned.

This has nothing to do with the central thesis.

[proud_Kucitizen]

157. so your point is not to really make a point

There are plenty of experts especially mathematicians who think it's peculiar that the exit polls deviated so much especially in only one direction.

[intensitymedia]

159. Oiler's gassy, vague, generalized obscurantist attack on the NEP Exit Pol

ls reveals itself to be a false discussion disguising a lame attempt to distract from the obvious. The point being evaded: concrete numbers, facts, probability, as discussed by TIA, Freeman and others, are overwhelming proof in evidence of a fraudulent election. None of this has even been addressed by Oiler's oily academic allies, nor by his contributions to this thread, which merely wants to divert our attention from the very, very obvious.

In throwing up a smokescreen gobbledygook 'report' by a bunch of faceless academics - who really wrote the words of this document? all of them? any? - and whose content Oiler has not defended on any occasion except to repeat their unfounded utterly baseless assertions, well, with all that you start to feel that the aim is not to discuss anything, but merely to dissipate the power of the data, so the real point will be lost.

The concrete results of the NEP exit polls are damning and profound - and overthrow any argument that this election was honest.

Oiler doesn't want anyone to confront the enormity of that, so offers a kind of abstract swampy trap of pseudo-expertise and academic double-talk that avoids confrontation with the overwhelming logic and force of the numbers shown. Nor are any of the assertions in the cited article argued from evidence. Instead, we're treated to a bloviating and oppressive re-assertion of smarmy opinions, from a committee of academic hacks. I say "hacks" intentionally, because the article's writing - as well as its logic - are so bad that they appear to have the intent to deter any intelligent discussion. Just start to parse it out, as a couple of others have already done on this thread, and you'll hit the same walls.

It's the kind of obscurantist junk that doesn't stand up in the light of day when people look closely at what its words conceal.

For one thing, if you're to believe Oiler's stinky article, the writers of it would all have to "know" the "design" of the proprietary poll of which its author, Mitofsky et al, has refused to divulge even the contaminated results, let alone the path by which he arrived at those results.

That's all very stinky. As is Oiler's point and thread, which I hate to contribute to because there is no 'understanding' waiting at the end of the rainbow, no payoff for our attending to bad writing and bad social science scholarship. The truth is if you buy what oiler and this article's authors are saying you'll only end up dumber, more ignorant of the evidence flooding in on us everywhere, rather than more energized and politically empowered, which is what the Exit Poll evidence demands and requires.

We're changing the world. Don't get in the way.

Che de Vera

[Stevepol]

164. Amen. Right on, IntensityMedia! n/t

[euler]

191. You are absolutely right.

"The point being evaded: concrete numbers, facts, probability...None of this has even been addressed"

The central thesis of the report is that it's not possible to use statistics on the 2004 exit poll data to make any kind of reliable statement about the veracity of the election. If they tried apply statistics to the numbers, they would be contradicting their own thesis.

"The concrete results of the NEP exit polls are damning and profound - and overthrow any argument that this election was honest."

This argument seems to work well in this forum, among other DUer's. Don't we want to get other people to agree with us? If so, we need a different argument.

Did you ever wonder why MSM never took our 'devastating' exit poll thesis seriously - why they never wrote a story about it? MSM uses fact checkers and outside experts to vet potential stories. I can guarantee you that MSM looked at these exit poll theories and hired outside experts to vet them. But the exit poll theories don't pass muster and the outside experts hired by MSM told them that. Ergo, no story. When you build your arguments on faulty reasoning, no one will pay attention (except in this forum.)

[euler]

189. Yes there are.

TIA, Freeman and Baiman (SP?) Any others that you know of?

[seaclyr]

165. This whole business of "not intended for the purpose" gets pretty silly.

Whether something is intended for a purpose or not misses the point. The question is more whether something is useful. Can a butter knife loosen or tighten a screw in a pinch - of course it can, even though it's not intended for that purpose. Do the exit polls mean something, in the sense of having useful information? Of course. Does it make sense to dismiss something as meaningless without exploring it at all? I don't think so. I'm with Super Simian on this. Differences between exit polls and vote counts that systematically favor Bush mean something that should be explored. If it turns out that there was a problem with the exit polls, then so be it. But we would have learned something along the way. And, we all know, there are far too many experts out there who are either blinded by their own opinions or are easily persuaded to endorse someone else's opinion, especially someone with influence. So - in my opinion - we should think for ourselves and investigate what looks odd or suspicious.

[flintdem]

183. What if we can never tell?

I have had problems with proving fraud with this data all along because of its design. Pardon me for quoting (and elaborating) from another of my posts:

In terms of what the data can and cannot "prove"... In my experience if a colleague or reviewer tells me my data is not "suitable" (to use the language of the NRC report) for the analysis I am doing -that is usually a kiss of death for the analysis. I cannot convince them with that dataset. If they are not "well-suited" I probably have an opportunity to defend the validity of my usage. But now I have to do more than just show my results, I have to convince others that my usage of the data is valid and that I am measuring what I claim to be measuring- a much more difficult job (which hasn't been done with any of the analyzes here- lots of results, no validity proofs). I also have to rule out other competing hypothesis that might also explain my finding.

To claim finding a fraud of 2%, in precincts with 50 interviews for the whole day, strains credulity. Regardless of precinct size, your odds are 1 in 50 of interviewing someone whose Kerry vote was electronically changed (very easy to miss them). Match that with the idea (pushed by Mitofsky) that "bush voter aversion to pollsters" only requires an average of one aversion per precinct, adding one more Kerry respondent (and one less bush) to also produce a 2% shift. The result- you cannot prove one hypothesis (aversion or fraud) over the other with this data (a recount with a paper trail could though prove fraud, but not a data analysis- a recount showing a pattern would be proof). Jump the precinct interviews to 200 respondents, add more than one interviewer to insure wire to wire coverage and actually have supervisors check the distance between the pollsters and the exits and in the aggregate across the nation or state you can produce a convincing design and possible case for fraud.

Yes, the data shows a Kerry skew but the NRC is saying that the exit poll isn't a fine enough analysis to prove fraud or any other argument for that matter. It just shows the skew- which nobody is arguing doesn't exist! It can't prove WHY the skew exists. Which leaves us arguing about what we WANT to believe, not what the data PROVES. I have always thought that a recount is what would settle the issue, but the statistical analysis populating these threads border on meaningless. Yes, there is a consistent skew. Yes, it cuold be fraud. Yes, it could be bad poll design. Yes, it could be bush voter aversion. Yes, it could a combination of all three or some other unmentioned cause. This data won't tell us which it is.

[seaclyr]

187. Well, that's quite possible of course

and I didn't mean to imply that exit poll skews all by themselves are necessarily persuasive. My point is that those skews do count for something and if, for example, people hypothesize from them that the vote tallies may be distorted and investigate the latter thoroughly then that's a good thing. I think perhaps one should also differentiate between understanding something and being able to persuade others. My sense is that what transpired in the election can be understandable. In my experience there's a lot of overlap in the way people think, so if there was fraud then it can be figured out, given time, effort, persistence and perhaps a little luck. Persuading others, though, well that's another story!

[bush_is_wacko]

168. I am so past the exit polls at this point!

The evidence that MANY engaged in intimidation, misinformation, bribery, vote switching, and MANY other fraudulent behavior INVALIDATES this election ever bit as much as exit polling.

Our election was no more legitimate than the Ukraine election. In fact, I think the Ukrainian re-vote was probably rigged similar to how our MAIN election was rigged.

The GROWING trend is that voters on both sides of the aisle question whether THIS many discrepancies are acceptable. Americans are finally starting to read and research for themselves. What we should all be doing is pointing them all in the right direction, to sources we know do their research and provide reasonable information.

**** is getting himself in trouble on a regular basis these days. The TRUTH will prevail. It is only a matter of time.

[waz_nc]

173. I agree and I wish people would read the report

This interim report examines a whole range irregularities in the election and it makes recommendations for investigating them. Furthermore it calls for the release of the raw data from the exit polls and full disclosure of the sampling methods and weighting procedures so that analyses can be conducted to determine the significance of the discrepancies.

[bush_is_wacko]

175. Yeah, I have sent a link to EVERYONE on my email list.

Some of them are probably completely ignoring me by now, but some of them may be passing this information forward. It seems to me that is the ONLY way to spread the word quickly at this point. 102 pages is a lot of information to get through, but even if they pick and choose a few paragraphs they are more informed than they were the day before.

I have heard a lot more people talking about this kind of stuff at restaurants and other public venues. I make a point of bring it up every time I go out to eat so that others will "overhear" some of my information. I have noticed people start to get real quiet when I'm talking so they CAN overhear. Try it sometime it's fun!

[waz_nc]

177. Thanks!

I'll try your suggestion the next time I go out to eat.

[GettysbergII]

176. The CFR and the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting

The National Research Commission on Elections and Voting was created by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in October of 2004 allegedly as a non-partisan independent initiative intended to bring scholarly research, knowledge and perspective to bear on improving the integrity of the electoral process, regardless of the outcome of the November 2nd election. http://election04.ssrc.org/pressrelease/October2004.pdf


However in my mind this is very unlikely since the SSRC itself appears to be a tool of the corporate elite as of the 16 members of the SSCR Board of Directors, I¡¯ve been able to identify at least five including the Chair of the Board as being members of the Council of Foreign Relations simply from checking the SSCR¡¯s own biographies or the Board members own Curriculum Vitae.

http://www.ssrc.org/inside/about/board_of_directors.page

Lisa Anderson - Chair of the Board

One of the world's leading experts on the Middle East and North Africa, Professor Anderson was named Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University in 1996. She has served as chair of Columbia's political science department and director of Columbia's Middle East Institute. The author of several books and 35 scholarly articles on the subjects of state formation and regime change, Anderson most recently has served as a member of the editorial committee of Comparative Politics, as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and as a board member of Human Rights Watch.


Barry Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-8 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997). He is a member of the Bellagio Group of academics and economic officials. Professor Eichengreen has published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system. His books include Toward a New International Financial Architecture (Institute for International Economics, 1999), Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton University Press, 1997), European Monetary Unification (MIT Press, 1997), and Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1992).

http://www.cfr.org/pub5373/press_release/council_on_foreign_relations_establishes_commission_on_future_international_financial_architecture.php

CFR Commission on the Future International Financial Architecture

Barry Eichengreen is John L. Simpson Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. Dr. Eichengreen was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund from 1997-98.


Stanley N. Katz

Stanley Katz is President Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies, the leading organization in humanistic scholarship and education in the United States. He is a noted authority on American legal and constitutional history and has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History, and as vice president of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Faculty, the Newberry Library, the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage, and is the president of the Center for Jewish Life and the director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University.

http://www.nhalliance.org/testimony/1994/94testimony-skatz.html
I (Stanley N. Katz) am, for instance, a trustee of the National Humanities Alliance, Southern Methodist University, the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Supreme Court Historical Society, the British-American Arts Association, Independent Sector, and the Institute of European and Asian Studies (Chicago) I serve as chairman of the boards of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and the Papers of the Founding Fathers, Inc. I am an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. My life is pretty much devoted to working for the humanities.

Orville Schell

Professor Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research associate at the university's Center for Chinese Studies. He serves on the boards of the Yale-China Association and Human Rights Watch, and is a member of the Pacific Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. Schell was a founding editor of the Pacific News Service. He has written 14 books, many of them about China; the most recent, Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood, appeared in 2000. Mr. Schell is a long-time contributor to the New Yorker, as well as to such magazines as the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation and the New York Review of Books.


Kathryn Sikkink

Kathryn Sikkink is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina, The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp) and Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order (1999). She is also the recipient of the International Studies Association's Chadwick Alger Award for best work in the area of international organization (1999). Sikkink is currently researching the influence of international law on domestic politics, focusing on human rights, transnational social movements and networks, and on the role of ideas and norms in international relations and foreign policy. She is on the international advisory board of the International Studies Review.

http://www2.cla.umn.edu/faculty/cv%5C487%5Csikkink.pdf

Professional Activities listed on Professor Sikkink¡¯s Curriculum Vitae:

Grants, Awards, and Fellowships:
Distinguished Teaching Award: Award for Outstanding Contributions to Postbaccalaureate, Graduate, and Professional Education, 2003
Member, Council on Foreign Relations, 2002-
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2001-
Member, Society for Comparative Research, 2001-
Fulbright Scholar Award (Argentina) 2001-2002 (Visiting Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires)
Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order, 2000
International Studies Association Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations, 2000 (Awarded to Activists Beyond Borders).
Twentieth Century Fund Grant for book on the Origins and Effectiveness of U.S. Human Rights Policy, 1994-1995.
Social Science Research Council, Research Fellowship in Foreign Policy Studies, 1991-1993
Scholar of the College, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, 2000-2002
McKnight-Land Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota, 1991-1993.
Social Science Research Council, Latin American and Caribbean Program, International Doctoral Research Fellowship, 1984-1985.
Doherty Foundation, Princeton University, Doherty Fellowship for Advanced Study in Latin America, 1984-1985
Institute for the Study of World Politics, Fellowship, 1984.


While I have not done any research as yet on the members of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting, I will tell you I reject out of hand an allegedly independent research group that¡¯s so directly connected to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the corporate elite¡¯s most famous behind the scenes apparatus of political policy control. To get a basic understanding of how the CFR operates, please read Behind the Bipartisan Drive Toward War by Laurence H. Shoup. (Laurence H. Shoup wrote one of the most academically respected analyses of the CFR in 1997. In fact in the For Further Reading section of the Council on Foreign Relation¡¯s own website, Peter Grosse, managing editor and then executive editor of Foreign Affairs from 1984 to 1993, writes:

The most important critical analysis of the Council is: Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977)

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2003/shoup0303.html



Although not a well-known organization, and only occasionally mentioned in the media, the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has been prominent in behind-the-scenes foreign policy formation in the U.S. for over three quarters of a century. The CFR is the publisher of Foreign Affairs, which calls itself ¡°the most influential periodical in print.¡± But the Council is much more important than that. In the words of Council members Marvin and Bernard Kalb, the CFR is ¡°an extremely influential private group that is sometimes called the real State Department.¡± Richard J. Barnet, another Council member, stated that membership in the organization could be considered ¡°a rite of passage for an aspiring national security manager.¡±

The importance of the Council stems from its role as the central link that binds the capitalist upper class and its most important financial and multinational corporations, think tanks, and foundations to academic experts in leading (mainly eastern) universities, and government policy formulation and execution. The CFR¡¯s goals are to continuously work out the general framework for American foreign policy and to keep public debate within ¡°respectable¡± bounds, that is, acceptable to the corporate power structure and the wealthy upper class it serves.

Through its financing, leadership, and membership, the Council is close to the largest multinational and blue chip corporations, including big oil companies, industrials, life insurance companies, law firms, and investment and commercial banks. In recent years, for example, leading corporate benefactors of the Council have included ABC, AOL Time Warner, American Express, Aramco, ATT, British Petroleum, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Chevron Texaco, Citigroup, Corning, Deutsche Bank AG, Exxon Mobil, Federal Express, J.P. Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Morgan Stanley, Nike, Pfizer, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Prudential Financial, Shell Oil, Sony, Toyota, UBS PaineWebber, Verizon Communications, and Xerox.

So, please excuse me, a common working man, if I don¡¯t accept this ¡®independent research group¡¯ of the corporate elite any more than I accept the less than transparent control of the electronic voting and tabulation machines that are owned and operated by the corporate elite nor the selective eyesight of the media that reports on the less than transparent elections which is also owned and operated by the corporate elite nor do I accept the rational for the Iraqi War which benefits noone but the corporate elite but is being paid for with the hard earned money of the American working person as well as with the blood of our children and with a mortgage on their future.

But I do think this answers one question that¡¯s been perplexing many of us regarding who exactly the Democrats were so concerned of offending by challenging the electoral vote on January 6th. As Shoup points out once the CFR makes it¡¯s position known it fully expects all ambitious Democrats and Republicans to fall in line behind it. This, of course, leaves us, the vast majority of America, without a political party to represent our interests.

The purpose of these studies is to influence both government and wider publics. The studies program is scholarship at the service of corporate interests, bringing together business and government leaders with leading academics, as well as a smaller representation from foundations, think tanks, and leading media. After extensive study and discussion, a consensus is usually reached and an article for Foreign Affairs or a full length Council on Foreign Relations book is produced. The article or book represents the views of the author, but it is widely and correctly understood to result largely from the efforts and thinking of the entire group.

Given the close interlocks of personnel between the CFR and the U.S. government and the bipartisan nature of the Council, it should come as no surprise that CFR views are clearly reflected both in the Bush administration¡¯s foreign policies and the policy positions taken by leading Democrats in Congress. Democratic Party leaders in the House and Senate, a number of them also members of the Council (for example Gephardt, Kerry, Graham, Lieber- man, Dodd), have generally supported the Republican foreign policy agenda and most Democratic Senators voted for authorizing President Bush to go to war preemptively against Iraq at his own discretion. As of early January 2003, the current Democratic presidential candidates are almost all pro-war. As mentioned above, key members of Bush¡¯s own foreign policy team (Powell, Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Tenet, Negroponte) are also members of the CFR and are actively planning the military and diplomatic aspects of a war on Iraq.

For further readings on the CFR, Laurence Shoup¡¯s 1977 book Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy has been reissued and is available at Amazon. Also Shoup published a second article on the CFR in the October 2004 edition of Z Magazine entitled Bush, Kerry, and the CFR that is available online to subscibers at http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Oct2004/shoup1004.html. (I¡¯ll be happy to email a text copy to anyone that sends me their email address

Finally a google of "Social Science Research Council " "Council on Foreign Relations" shows 4,440 results.

http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&q=%22Social+Science+Research+Council+%22+%22Council+on+Foreign+Relations%22+&btnG=Google+Search

[super simian]

182. Nice Work!

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: :bounce: