Remember Vote Fraud: A Review - Part 1

[MelissaB]

This is a great review with some information I don't remember seeing. I could have just missed it because I been somewhat out of the loop. Check out the chart at the bottom. The more things change, the more the stay the same. I'll say it again: What the hell is going on in Ohio?

Remember Vote Fraud: A Review - Part 1
It’s Election Time, Don’t Let Your Guard Down

by Mark S. Tucker


http://www.opednews.com

On January 15, 2006, in OpEdNews, which has not been loathe to cover the issue, I wrote “Vote Fraud: Our #1 Concern - Exposing Lies Kills ‘The Fruit of the Poison Tree’ “, which can be read here:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mark_s___060115_vote_fraud_3a_our__231_c.htm

As June 6 draws near, however, the absolute silence in mainstream media on this issue should be causing extreme anxiety in most everyone. Not only is it the most important subject in our country, bar none (because nothing can proceed properly without a clean vote...nothing), but the indications of past prolificities of the debacle and the drop-dead likelihood of it occurring once again, when the conservative boat is in so precarious a position, is nearly 100%. The matter left to address, then, is: how widespread will it be?

This we cannot know until after all is said and done. Though I’m hoping for some scandalous exposés of fell activities caught amidships the very day of the elections, brought forth by zealous election watchers, with Republicans hip to the fact their scam is known, how much more sophisticated can we imagine the new wave of attack will be?

...snip

----------

In “Kerry Won”, by Greg Palast (Nov. 4, 2004 - TomPaine.com), we read that:

* Kerry won...Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry...CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state...Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded.

* ...in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes...Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks.

* In Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws-almost never used, allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified...But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.

* New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'

...snip

Allen L Roland’s “How The Election Was Stolen” showed this chilling stat chart:

* You may have seen the associated press story about the precinct in Cuyahoga county, Ohio that had less than 1,000 voters, and gave Bush almost 4,000 extra votes. But that turns out to be only the tip of a very ugly iceberg...In last Tuesday's election, 29 precincts in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, reported votes cast IN EXCESS of the number of registered voters - at least 93,136 extra votes total. And the numbers are right there on the official Cuyahoga County Board of Elections website:

Bay Village............................13,710 registered voters / 18,663 ballots cast
Beachwood..........................9,943 registered voters / 13,939 ballots cast
Bedford.................................9,942 registered voters / 14,465 ballots cast
Bedford Heights..................8,142 registered voters / 13,512 ballots cast
Brooklyn................................8,016 registered voters / 12,303 ballots cast
Brooklyn Heights.................1,144 registered voters / 1,869 ballots cast
Chagrin Falls Village..........3,557 registered voters / 4,860 ballots cast
Cuyahoga Heights..............570 registered voters / 1,382 ballots cast
Fairview Park .......................13,342 registered voters / 18,472 ballots cast
Highland Hills Village.........760 registered voters / 8,822 ballots cast
Independence......................5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Mayfield Village.....................2,764 registered voters / 3,145 ballots cast
Middleburg Heights.............12,173 registered voters / 14,854 ballots cast
Moreland Hills Village.........2,990 registered voters / 4,616 ballots cast
North Olmstead....................25,794 registered voters / 25,887 ballots cast
Olmstead Falls.....................6,538 registered voters / 7,328 ballots cast
Pepper Pike...........................5,131 registered voters / 6,479 ballots cast
Rocky River............................16,600 registered voters / 20,070 ballots cast
Solon (WD6)..........................2,292 registered voters / 4,300 ballots cast
South Euclid.......................... 16,902 registered voters / 16,917 ballots cast
Strongsville (WD3)................7,806 registered voters / 12,108 ballots cast
University Heights.................10,072 registered voters / 11,982 ballots cast
Valley View Village.................1,787 registered voters / 3,409 ballots cast
Warrensville Heights.............10,562 registered voters / 15,039 ballots cast
Woodmere Village.................558 registered voters / 8,854 ballots cast
Bedford (CSD)........................22,777 registered voters / 27,856 ballots cast
Independence (LSD).............5,735 registered voters / 6,226 ballots cast
Orange (CSD).........................11,640 registered voters / 22,931 ballots cast
Warrensville (CSD)................12,218 registered voters / 15,822 ballots cast



Lots more: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_mark_s___060529_remember_vote_fraud_3a.htm

[rpannier]

1. This vote fraud of which you speak and sources you cite

look almost like the fraud occurred in the United States. Clearly this is impossible as it would have been mentioned on all the major news networks and it would have been in all the papers.
Since no mention was ever made, I guess I am left to try and figure out which 3rd World Country these places are: Is this fraud in Venezuela?...I mean Faux News talks constantly about voter fraud in Venezuela and their 'dictator' Hugo Chavez. Possibly Lebanon? The people took to the streets in Beirut to protest Syrian involvement in Lebanese affairs. Maybe it's in the Ukraine or the Republic of Georgia? Again. People took to the streets in those countries to protest the government corruption of their political systems.
Well, wherever this fraud of which you speak is occurring, the people of that country need to take a stand or they will find themselves under the control of a dictatorship fairly soon.

[Stevepol]

2. Anybody know what the explanation is for the discrepancies?

Just wondered. I don't mean the real explanation which I assume is fraud and outright theft.

I mean what do the apologists say? Where do the unregistered voters come from, I mean assuming these figures are actually correct and do not represent what it seems pretty clear they represent? Massive population influx between the date of registration and election day? Massive population increases? Leaky condoms?

Is there some sort of Reluctant Registrant Responder dictum that would explain all these phantom voters?

I really would like to find out what the orthodox interpretation is, that is, among those who evidently feel that all elections in the US are above reproach, particularly if electronic voting machines are used or George Bush has been said to have won the election.

[OnTheOtherHand]

3. fact check

If you look at the presidential vote counts from these villages and wards, they aren't anomalous -- and as far as I know never were. Only the (essentially irrelevant) "ballots cast" totals were off.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x33600
check OP, posts #84 and #87

The bit about "those who evidently feel that all elections in the US are above reproach" is just poisoning the well, isn't it?

[mod mom]

4. Fact check: There is a mountain of evidence that has been gathered since

11/2. Of course there were many deadends that were later debunked. That does not mean that the fraud did not occur. Besides the incidents of vote flipping and questionable exit polls there were the incidents that occurred the old fashioned way: mis-allocation of machines, registration issues and purges in high Dem precincts, uncounted votes and dirty trick meant to disenfranchise (DEM) voters.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=429411&mesg_id=429411

[OnTheOtherHand]

5. well, the OP linked to apparent misinformation

Do you have an objection to my pointing that out? if so, please ask yourself why.

For that matter, I should state clearly that I am among the majority of political scientists who remain unconvinced that fraud altered the outcome of the 2004 election. If the solid evidence has appeared, it has been obscured by so much misinformation that we cannot find it. Maybe on balance that is somehow a good thing, but it would make my life easier if people winnowed before posting.

I admit that I am very tired of urging people here to protect their credibility. In another thread there is a lot of screwball speculation about why so many folks haven't accepted the fraud arguments yet. But right here -- look right here -- you are not defending the content of the OP, but you seem to think that it is somehow mean-spirited of me to challenge it. So, if only skeptics care about the difference between good arguments and bad arguments, then skeptics will never, ever be convinced. Why is that outcome acceptable to you? I don't get it. Do you really not care whether or not you are persuasive?

[MelissaB]

6. My apologies if I linked to something that is incorrect, but I'd be

interested in seeing the data on this quote: "... I am among the majority of political scientists who remain unconvinced that fraud altered the outcome of the 2004 election." I haven't seen any data on that. Maybe I missed it because I can't read every thread.

[OnTheOtherHand]

9. where to start?

You can easily find hundreds of books, articles, and conference papers by political scientists that investigate various explanations of Bush's victory in 2004.

How many books, articles, and conference papers by political scientists can you find that argue that Kerry got more votes in 2004? even that he may've gotten more votes in 2004?

As for stuff that addresses fraud arguments, you could try:

http://election04.ssrc.org/research/InterimReport122204.pdf
http://www.vote.caltech.edu/media/documents/Addendum_Voting_Machines_Bush_Vote.pdf
http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/Ohio2004/Ohio_precincts.pdf
many of my 1000+ posts

If I am missing a silent majority of my colleagues somewhere, could you point them out to me?

[Name removed]

12. Deleted message

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[OnTheOtherHand]

16. you might want to review the DU rules

Actually, your post is pretty funny. Certainly most of my colleagues are smarter than to try to speak out here on DU. Food for thought?

If you are capable of engaging the substance of the post to which you responded, by all means....

[Stevepol]

47. Here is the opening of the first report you cite.

I admit that what you say may be true, that you are among "the majority of political scientists who remain unconvinced that fraud altered the outcome of the 2004 election." I would question whether the "majority" of political scientists remain unconvinced, however. I think you'd have to do a poll of the political scientists to find that out. It's true at the university where I work that the poli-sci people know very little about the electronic voting issue, at least those I've talked to. They are slowly becoming educated I think.

I'm not sure the report you refer to is all that sure of its positions. Maybe I'm reading too much between the lines.

It seems to me almost everything in this report is qualified. There's no absolute statement about anything.

Note the following:

"of sufficient magnitude or scope to change the popular vote or Electoral College winner in the most recent presidential election. However, incomplete data and insufficient transparency of the election administration process do not allow for a conclusive statement regarding the accuracy or fairness of specific results at this time."
I assume the folllowing is a bow to the Reluctant Republican Responder thesis: "....reflect serious inadequacies in our election administration and oversight system that must be addressed in order to strengthen the integrity and credibility of the American electoral process. Key findings include: • 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." (prima facie evidence means dead certain proof, which as far as I know is impossible to supply when electronic voting machines are used where there is either no paper record or where there are no audits done. And apparently those who do the polls don't believe their polls are even relevant anymore, tho before recent elections people like Mitofsky were mighty proud of their sophisticated techniques)

And this bit sounds very much to me like a committee that is not too peachy keen on the present election system, despite not having "prima facie evidence.": "To restore public credibility in our election system, and to ensure the effective resolution of electoral process controversies in future elections, full and transparent collection and public disclosure of electoral process data are vital."

Anyway, here's the beginning of the report, a very interesting one to read by the way:

Based on an analysis of available data and reports, this National Research Commission on Elections and Voting working group finds no current evidence of irregularities of sufficient magnitude or scope to change the popular vote or Electoral College winner in the most recent presidential election. However, incomplete data and insufficient transparency of the election administration process do not allow for a conclusive statement regarding the accuracy or fairness of specific results at this time. Public doubts and remaining uncertainties over allegations in specific instances reflect serious inadequacies in our election administration and oversight system that must be addressed in order to strengthen the integrity and credibility of the American electoral process. Key findings include: • 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. • Recent studies noting disparities between county registration rates and voting outcomes in Florida, as well as apparent "machine effects" favoring George W. Bush, are of limited significance and cannot be considered as evidence of election fraud. • Ohio witnessed significant variability in wait times in some districts, sporadic instances of machine malfunctions, and possible voting tabulation errors, undercounts, and overcounts. Based on data available to this working group, it is extremely unlikely that the absence of these irregularities would have shifted popular vote tallies sufficiently to change the declared winner in Ohio. However, continuing uncertainty over the extent of irregularities merits closer public scrutiny and full disclosure of relevant data. • A definitive resolution of some allegations of malfeasance or irregularities in the most recent presidential election may never be possible, due to inadequate data and insufficient transparency of the election administration process in many states. • To restore public credibility in our election system, and to ensure the effective resolution of electoral process controversies in future elections, full and transparent collection and public disclosure of electoral process data are vital.

[OnTheOtherHand]

49. they are definitely not peachy keen on the current system

and neither am I. I hope this does not come as news! What I have tried to say over and over again (although Febble has been more diligent about repeating it) is that one does not have to believe the 2004 election was stolen in order to believe that the system is broken. This seems really obvious to me, but apparently it is not obvious to some of the people who posted on this thread.

Yes, indeed, the way scientists (even social scientists) are trained to operate is that we don't profess certainty where uncertainty is appropriate. Note, nevertheless, that the report leans heavily against the irregularities being decisive. I am not saying that everyone should agree with the report. I do think it would be very, very helpful for folks to understand that not everyone who disagrees with them is ignorant or corrupt. (If you already understand that, please don't read the preceding sentence as implying otherwise.)

Another point may be worth underscoring. The way I think about election fraud and irregularities is as a bunch of subjective probability distributions: 'That thing in X probably cost Kerry somewhere between 800 and 1500 votes, although it could have been as high as 5000 -- I don't think any higher. That thing in Y, well, I really think that's a zero, but it might be several thousand votes....' My current answer to the question, 'How likely do you think it is that Kerry got more votes?' or '...that Kerry should have gotten more votes?' (depending on the meaning of "should") is, more or less, the sum of those distributions. I don't start with "I think Kerry won" or "I think Kerry lost."

[Chi]

10. Sounds like someone was caught with their hand in the assumption jar.

And can't admit it 8)
:popcorn:

[OnTheOtherHand]

14. it is rather like "assuming" that biologists believe in evolution

I am not sure how one could prove that a majority of biologists believe in evolution. It is hard to draw a random sample of biologists, and of course there is no way to know whether they would answer honestly. I imagine there are dozens, perhaps thousands, of creationist arguments that haven't been explicitly refuted in the peer-reviewed literature. Maybe most biologists actually are convinced that God created the earth in six days, but just haven't said so.

And, likewise, maybe most political scientists actually are convinced that Kerry got more votes in the 2004 election, notwithstanding the fact that the literature overwhelmingly comes down on the other side. I mean, gee, isn't it just an Assumption that the literature reflects what the people who write and review it actually think?

Frankly, this seems like another utterly unserious intervention on your part, but then, I guess that is what the popcorn is for.

[Chi]

17. Perhaps you would rather send me IM's....

about items stuck up my Ass again,
till then I'll be waiting for you to back up your statement with a source.

The personal attack was a nice touch. 8)

[OnTheOtherHand]

18. I think it's an inference

If you were seriously interested in assessing whether most political scientists think the 2004 election was stolen, I imagine that you would go read some political science yourself. Ergo, an unserious intervention. And if you object to the inference, you certainly have it in your power to refute it.

As for the stick, I think that was a pretty reasonable inference as well, for reasons stated last time around.

[Chi]

20. I am truly NOT seriously interested in assessing whether most....

political scientists think the 2004 election was stolen.

I only seek to hold you to the standards by which you criticize others.
See...thats called honesty.

Still waiting on a source (or another IM)

[OnTheOtherHand]

22. I thought honesty entailed engaging arguments

You haven't engaged posts 9 or 14 at all, have you?

I'm serious. If I had said, "most political scientists are convinced that Bush got more votes," you would have a case, because I have no way of knowing what proportion of political scientists have thought seriously about the 2004 election. But to say that most political scientists "remain unconvinced" that fraud altered the outcome is utterly uncontroversial. I can point you at conference papers about the 2004 election if you want, but I think you already know how that will turn out.

So, if I had written that the majority of biologists accept evolution, would you have said that I had my hand caught in the assumption jar? if not, do you have a point?

[Chi]

25. No, honesty is about telling the truth....SOURCE? n/t

[OnTheOtherHand]

28. where did I not tell the truth?

Here's the MPSA program, you can search it for yourself:
http://www.kiva.net/~mpsa/2006FinalProgram.pdf

But wait. You are "truly NOT seriously interested in assessing" the truth of my claim. So there really is no point in presenting evidence, even though you are demanding evidence. Clearly this is an excellent use of my time.

So, if you don't care what the truth is, how could you possibly hope or claim to evaluate whether or not I am telling it?

OK, let me see if I can find something interesting to say.

Umm, yes, I assume that what political scientists write and publish indicates what they believe about the topics they study. And I assume that the major journals, conferences, and presses that I monitor offer a fair cross-section of what political scientists write and publish. OK, so my claim could be infirmed if (1) political scientists don't write and publish what they believe, or (2) somehow I am managing to read exclusively unrepresentative journals etc. (2) does not really detain me, so I am left with (1). Hence my analogy to biologists who only pretend to believe in evolution. Apparently some people do believe that biologists only pretend to believe in evolution.

Oh, sorry, I make another auxiliary assumption: that political scientists in subfields that don't touch upon the election are unlikely to accept en masse -- yet silently -- a view that professionals in the relevant subfields reject. Hypothetically, most comparativists 'might' believe almost anything about American politics, and I might not notice. I guess that would be sort of like biologists being convinced that cold fusion is a breakthrough power source. A physicist might not notice -- but how would large numbers of biologists form that opinion in the first place?

Did that help? Since you profess no interest in the topic you are belaboring, I remain unsure what could.

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

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

[Febble]

32. He's given you

the source, several.

And as you well know, the book you refer to was not a book on manipulating public opinion.

Is your problem that you think that OTOH is wrong about political scientists? Or that political scientists are wrong about the election?

His claim seems well sourced. Certainly better sourced than the OP.

Perhaps you would point to counter-evidence, if you believe it exists.

[Chi]

37. It's amazing how far you will go to back each other up

I'm surprised you waited this long for the tag team.

You can wait till next time to get a piece of me.

[Febble]

38. Actually, I'm prepared to back

anyone up if it looks as though they are being unfairly accused.
And boy, are your accusations unfair.

[Chi]

43. Please quote my unfair accusations. n/t

[OnTheOtherHand]

34. what on earth?

According to the search function, the word "tabulator" doesn't even appear in my posts in the last month.

How am I supposed to respond to the accusation that I "didn't tell the truth a few weeks ago" when you apparently can't even be bothered to say accurately what you think I didn't tell the truth about?

I admit lots of mistakes, often on my own initiative -- but I can't very well admit a mistake when I can't even tell what it supposedly is.

If you are waiting for me to walk back the fact that most political scientists aren't convinced the 2004 election was determined by fraud, well, it isn't in my power to walk back facts. I've told you why I believe it and how you could verify it, but you have stated on the record that you are "truly NOT seriously interested in assessing" it. I agree: you're not.

[Chi]

36. You asked, I answered.

"where did I not tell the truth?"

Point blank question...Is there evidence of tabulator fraud??
you shouldn't need a search function to respond, if your honest.


No I'm not waiting for you to 'walk back' on your statement about what the majority of political scientists think, I knew you wouldn't
do that after about 2 posts.
Considering the first thing you would have to know, is the number of political scientist that exist. The statement is impossible to back
up in the way you worded it.

"I should state clearly that I am among the majority of political scientists who remain unconvinced that fraud altered the outcome of the 2004 election"

I just thought it would be a efficient way to show others how interested you are in truth.

[OnTheOtherHand]

39. oh, malarkey

I have seen this show before. I half expect that next you will be asking me 'point blank' whether I shot unarmed Vietnamese civilians.

If you want to challenge something I wrote "a few weeks ago," point to it. If you want to discuss evidence of tabulator fraud, step right up. I've put my cards on the table time and time again.

No, I do not have to know the number of political scientists in order to say that a majority of political scientists aren't convinced that fraud determined the election outcome. I think you are smarter than that. As a matter of logic, that is akin to arguing that it is only an assumption that most ants are smaller than skyscrapers, because who knows how many ants there are anyway?

Remember, you are on record as being "truly NOT seriously interested in assessing" this issue. It's a bit late to start waving your arms about being interested in truth, no?

[Name removed]

42. Deleted message

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[Name removed]

44. Deleted message

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[Febble]

40. Sweet irony

"Considering the first thing you would have to know, is the number of political scientist that exist. The statement is impossible to back"

Well, there goes the argument that the exit polls are evidence that a majority voted for Kerry, no?

Seriously chi, can we back up a bit here?

The OP links to a review article that is, not to put too fine a point on it, lazy. The author (Mark S Tucker) is apparently a lot less informed than most DUers about what evidence, more than a year and a half after the election, has, or has not, been checked out. Some of his links are dead; others are to early editions of papers (Steve Freeman's for example) that have since been updated, and many more are to allegations that have been looked into fairly thoroughly, by DUers among others, and found to be at least more complex than they at first appeared. It strikes me as being a lazy piece of journalism, and while possibly marginally better than no journalism (although I'd dispute that) is not of a standard that the ER movement deserves.

OTOH pointed out one particular item that was looked into fairly early on DU and found to have a reasonable explanation. However, instead of a constructive thread devoting to sorting the rest of the wheat from the chaff in that article, we have a flame war about OTOH's claim that the majority of political scientists share his view that the problems associated with 2004 weren't outcome altering, a claim that seems self-evident. If a majority of political scientists were publishing articles about the theft of the election, don't you think that there would be OP's linking to those, rather than to a piece by a journalist too lazy to bother to check out his own links?

And the right question to ask, following that well-sourced claim, is not, I would have thought, whether it is true (though feel free to check it out if you seriously disbelieve it, but as you say yourself, it was just a test question), but what it says about the quality of the arguments that need to be made to convince skeptical political scientists.

I may fail to be flavor-of-the-month myself on DU from time to time, but I actually love it, because it is full of people who really care about American democracy, and who have the time, and the passion, and the energy to do something about fixing it, and it certainly needs fixing. And to do that we need on-the-ground investigation, data collection, number crunching, background knowledge, and the presentation of good arguments to those we would persuade. Skills and energy to do those all things can all be found here. But those skills and energy are wastefully dissipated when we have flame wars over whether evidence does or does not support a particular case, not to mention the motivations of those whose arguments we do not like. Sure, we should argue - I spend a good deal of time arguing with myself (and, indeed, with OTOH) about how to interpret evidence, as well as having constructive arguments on DU. Testing arguments to destruction is what makes a case water-tight.

But this kind of thread makes me sad. There is knowledge and expertise here, and we need to use it, not abuse it.

[OnTheOtherHand]

41. actually, I didn't even go that far

I said that a majority are unconvinced that fraud altered the outcome -- which is not quite the same as saying that a majority hold the "view that the problems associated with 2004 weren't outcome altering." I agree with you that the latter attribution is also accurate (unless, perhaps, one interprets "problems" very broadly). But -- further 'sweet' irony -- I was trying to tailor my claim as narrowly as possible, so that people would not leap to the conclusion that I was trying to shut off debate.

Yeah, right.

Thanks for bringing us back around. In a strange and, yes, depressing way, this thread has made my point much more thoroughly than I ever expected.

[Chi]

48. I find it far more ironic those who contend that the sample size...

of the 2004 exit poll is far too small to be used as a accuracy check,
making absolute conclusions based on such a minuscule sample.

If you want to point out who was nasty to whom first, I suggest you read this post (Chi points up at post 14)...

"Frankly, this seems like another utterly unserious intervention on your part, but then, I guess that is what the popcorn is for."

Why don't you lecture your 'wingman' about it.
I wasn't nasty, I was being funny.

[OnTheOtherHand]

50. well, I apologize for missing the humor

or perhaps not missing it, if your point is just that indeed your post was intended to be unserious. But as you continued to belabor the issue without any visible support, I glimpsed the humor less and less. Obviously.

Now: who is it "who contend(ed) that the sample size of the 2004 exit poll is far too small to be used as an accuracy check"? Surely not I or Febble. Bias is not a function of sample size. As I have mentioned before, the most famous biased poll (not an exit poll) in history -- the Literary Digest Landon-beats-Roosevelt survey -- was absolutely huge.

(EDIT to recast a sentence in past tense, as I hope is more appropriate)

[Febble]

51. (Febble assumes a stern glare)

Look, I don't care who started it, it's got to stop. There is work to be done.

There is nothing wrong with the sample size of either the exit poll or political scientists. It was a joke (what is wrong with both samples is that they aren't random; although that matters less for the political scientist sample if you argue that papers written are the relevant dependent measure. Whatever. As I said, it was a joke.)

And seeing as we seem to have a complete sense of humour failure around here (my own was short-circuted at the OP) let's get on with the job on another thread.

I will make one serious point before I leave:

If we on DU are serious about convincing people who are presently unconvinced that the American election system is insecure and unjust, then we need to be rigorous about our arguments. It is easy to preach to the converted. It is far harder to preach to the unconverted, and when the unconverted include what market researchers like to call "opinion formers", and when the relevant opinion formers include public opinion professionals and political scientists (the two professions whose opinion is likely to be the most relevant to an assessment of the probity of an election) then we need to get our arguments and facts straight.

So (and this is the same serious point) when a representative of one of those professions (one who, as you point out, is not only a political scientist but an author of a text book on public opinion research) tells us that his colleagues are, by and large, unconvinced by arguments that the election was stolen, then it is sensible to ask ourselves not "is that true" but "why?". And one answer, I submit, is that we (I speak collectively) are sometimes less than rigorous about weeding out the crap arguments from the good.

So let's quit fighting and start weeding. And if we find ourselves in irreconcilable disagreement about what constitutes a weed, let's agree to differ, and leave the mods to deal with the trolls. Neither OTOH nor I are trolls, moles or anything other than ruthless gardeners.

Peace. Or you are grounded.

[Chi]

56. BTW..speaking of lost quotes, ever place the Dopp quote?

[blossomstar]

26. Bingo!

[OnTheOtherHand]

24. by the way...

I don't know what you think of this flame war, but I think (or would like to think) it is weirdly disconnected from the content of the thread. There's lots of info out there, a lot of it rehashes old stuff, some is right and some is wrong. I would recommend being cautious about linking to compilations (especially if one doesn't know the compiler well), because the chances of something being wrong go way up. That said, anyone who posts here long enough will write or link to something that isn't right. It isn't a problem as long as we try to clean it up. At least, I think we should.

[MelissaB]

27. I hate flame wars.

That's one reason I don't read a lot of threads that you post in. They just seem to evolve into flames.

Also, there is a lot of information out there and neither of us are in a position to say exactly what is right and exactly what is wrong. I don't think either of us have that credibility.

[OnTheOtherHand]

30. the credibility isn't inherent

I think my record of presenting links, arguments, and evidence is a pretty good one, but I don't expect people to just go along. (I had better not, since they almost never do!) There are folks on the board whom I respect more than others because they support their analyses, but there is no one whom I assume is right or wrong on every point.

Some folks perceive me as polemical because, as it seems to me, they have lost the habit of honest disagreement on these issues. That is very, very dangerous. If people think I am a freeper, I can't imagine how they function in the real world. Really. I think it is very, very dangerous. If saying that most political scientists aren't convinced the 2004 election was stolen is enough to provoke a flame war, then, frankly, I don't think that is my fault. I think that is a problem with the board. I don't see how this movement ever wins half of what it wants if it can't deal with people who aren't convinced the 2004 election was stolen. I just don't see it.

[paineinthearse]

7. I am among the majority of political scientists?

Please provide the source of that claim.

[Febble]

8. Well, of course I don't know

but I expect he got a bit of a sense of the majority view amongst his colleagues here.

[Name removed]

11. Deleted message

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

[blossomstar]

13. Probably hit the nail on the head paineinthearse!

[OnTheOtherHand]

15. you really think so?

You think that a majority of political scientists are paid by Karl Rove?

Do you know anything whatsoever about political science or political scientists? What, specifically, would that be?

Would the slew of articles by political scientists arguing that Gore received more votes in Florida in 2000 affect your judgment?

Folks, you can jam your fingers in your ears, sing-hum "I'm not LIS-tening," and think that you are winning something, but I sincerely doubt that this is the case.

[Name removed]

19. Deleted message

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

[OnTheOtherHand]

21. I don't have time to correct all the faulty assumptions here

First, of course, is that anyone who disagrees with you -- whoever you are -- is probably being paid to do it. Sweet.

I don't know what you mean by "credible," but it is your word, not mine. Nor did I say that I didn't believe that there was voter fraud. In responding to posts, it is often useful actually to respond to the posts.

Yes, many people in Ohio got stuck waiting in the rain. And some were turned away without voting. And many (but not that many) said that when they pressed Kerry, "Bush" came up.

Why you feel the need to claim that I am denying these things -- well, you should sit down with yourself for a while and think about that. Do you find that this approach is working well for you in everyday life? Really, do you?

[blossomstar]

23. I'm surprised that a political scientist doesn't know the definition

of "credible". Look it up.

[Febble]

33. Um...

I think you'll find that it was you who claimed that OTOH was trying "to say that the past election was a credible one".

It is not up to OTOH to find out what you understand his view to be. I do not recall OTOH ever saying anything resembling your paraphrase.

It is, in fact, possible to believe that the 2004 was corrupt, and yet not to believe that Kerry won the popular vote, or, even Ohio. I don't believe that Kerry won the popular vote, and I think it is unlikely that he won Ohio. The fact that I do not know either of these things for sure is indicative that the election result was not easily "credible". The very fact that my current view has had to be based on a fairly exhaustive weighing up of various kinds of supplementary evidence, and not simply on the official result, is what is wrong.

[Stevepol]

45. why would the "ballots cast" figures be "essentially irrelevant"?

[OnTheOtherHand]

46. because they don't affect any outcomes

It makes no difference whether the report says "Kerry 1200, Bush 1100, ballots cast 2320" or "Kerry 1200, Bush 1100, ballots cast 4700."

Of course if there were actually over two thousand undervotes, or (in the other direction) if there were phantom votes (more votes recorded for the candidates than ballots cast), that would make a difference. But in this report, the ballots-cast numbers were the only anomalous results reported.

[Stevepol]

52. How do you know they "don't affect outcomes"?

I talked to a rep for Micro-Vote one time about the Boone County IN glitch (2003 I believe) in which 144,000 votes were recorded as cast in a county with 19,000 eligible voters (is that not the same thing as "registered voters"?)

He seemed to accept that such an absurd difference was highly "relevant." He blamed it on the technique used to display the results on the screen in a special room set up to show to reporters and others. I think his explanation perhaps had some merit (though his statements about other things made me distrust his honesty on that issue as well).

Let's take a hypothetical set of numbers. Let's say in one county there are 10,000 registered voters but when the votes are cast there are actually 23,000 votes. You're saying that those extra 13,000 votes are "irrelevant"? I mean even without knowing who voted for whom, doesn't it make you suspicious of something?

Are you saying that the difference here (-13,000) can actually be explained as just an over-vote, rather than a result of "fraud." I'm afraid I don't get it. I'm no expert on these election dynamics, but it seems to me that the two ought to line up pretty well. Maybe there are a lot of "unregistered" voters who cast ballots. If that's true, where do those voters come from? I mean surely in the majority of cases the numbers should pretty well match up!? Am I missing something?

[OnTheOtherHand]

53. Boone County, IN 2003 seems to have been a different scenario

I assume you are referring to this: http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/031113votingglitch/

You may know better than I, but my interpretation of that story is that it probably affected the candidates' running totals as well as the total ballots cast. Obviously, candidate totals matter.

I don't know whether there were any reports on the Cuya BOE web site that had incorrect candidate totals, but based on the DU thread I linked to earlier, I don't think the overall totals were affected.

"Let's say in one county there are 10,000 registered voters but when the votes are cast there are actually 23,000 votes. You're saying that those extra 13,000 votes are 'irrelevant'? I mean even without knowing who voted for whom, doesn't it make you suspicious of something?"

Suspicious, sure, but my suspicions are omnidirectional. Until and unless someone rebuts posts 84 and 87 in the DU thread I linked to in #3 above, I think this issue has been covered.

(Whoops, I will say a bit more later, but I have to run.)

[OnTheOtherHand]

54. OK,. more on this particular sort of problem

The key here is that the reported "ballots cast," at the ward or municipal (city/village -- umm, I think those are the right names, I have been in New York a bit too long) level, appear not to be the actual number of votes counted, by a long shot.

As message 84 in the other thread reported, the ward totals didn't match the precinct totals. (This may have been true even for the candidate totals -- without a fresh copy of the posted results, I can't tell.) However, the county totals did match the precinct totals. This makes sense to me, because I think we all would have noticed if 93,000+ votes had been subtracted from Bush and/or Kerry in Cuyahoga County.

Message 87 offers the mechanism by which the ward totals are inflated: absentee votes are counted in multiple wards. Totally wacky, but totally harmless if indeed the county totals weren't affected.

AFAIK Time for change still thinks there was vote deletion in Cuyahoga County, and he could be right (I really don't know one way or the other -- although I think in part he tends to expect a higher turnout than I would). Sort of the opposite problem.

[Senator]

29. Hours-Long Poll-Tax-Lines ARE Election Fraud

You can agree that such poll-tax-lines for poorer, browner, Dem-er Americans are ok with you, or not.

If it's not ok with you, you can work to impeach/remove this never-legitimate regime ASAP, or remain complicit with their actions.

There's on ONE moral, patriotic option.

--
www.january6th.org

[Febble]

35. Most definitely not OK

And it may interest other posters on this thread to know that OTOH, myself, and a number of political scientists who do not believe that the inequities of 2004 (Walter Mebane, for example) actually affected the outcome of the presidential election in terms of either the electoral college vote or the popular vote have devoted considerable time and energy to uncovering the disenfranchisment of Hispanic and African American voters in Ohio or New Mexico in 2004 or in Florida in 2000.

What seems strange, at times, about ER on DU is that those of us who like to sift evidence carefully, and who are prepared to reject faulty evidence and arguments even when it supports our case, are frequently accused of being complicit in the actions of "the regime".

I do not, and never will, believe that it is OK to use bad arguments and evidence to make a good case, and indeed, continue to believe that if you want to make your best case, it is as well to be sure exactly what evidence and arguments do, and do not, support it. I agree that the evidence for systematic disenfranchisement of brown minorities is all too good, and that it is a disgrace to democracy. But I do not consider myself "complicit" in that disenfranchisement because I reject arguments that claim that vast numbers of votes were digitally stolen. when those arguments are based, IMO on faulty reasoning from the data. Nor do I believe that good arguments that digital voting is absurdly vulnerable to corruption are helped by faulty arguments that such corruption put Bush in the White House.

If we are going to work together to fix what is rotten in American democracy, it would be nice to agree that if an argument is refuted, or a piece of evidence innocently explained, that those who do the refuting or the explaining are not complicit in undermining the case for election reform, but, on the contrary, play an important role in developing a convincing exposition of that case.

edited: some ands to ors for accuracy.

[Melissa G]

55. Hi Febble, You know me, I usually avoid the flame wars but

I was reading a novel recently that made me think of these particular forum conversations. The author was talking about university professors and their arguments. The paraphrase is something about how intense ( perhaps even vicious?) academic arguments can get because the stakes are so low..(perhaps even irrelevant?) The quote made me smile and think of all the academics I know...

There is a necessary fixation on minutia when one studies something that interests one.. Hairsplitting is what academics do. It is what we pay them to do and how they create their identities. Activists are bigger picture folks who want to take action and change the world. When these two groups talk the academic can usually say that the activist is not being careful enough with x facet of the discussion. The activist might also reasonably say the academic is missing the point of the preponderance of the evidence and is lost in hairsplitting while in this case, elections are stolen. The truth probably walks somewhere in between...
While I am sure that you and OTOH don't agree about the preponderance of evidence showing the fraud, I'll be interested to see what you think of Freeman's book when it comes out next month...

edit punc..

[Febble]

57. Well....

that doesn't sound to me terribly like a good characterisation of what is going on here. I think the stakes are pretty high. And we are not exactly talking about hair-splitting. Millions of stolen votes versus an election in which corruption and injustice probably didn't change the result isn't exactly what I would call a hair-split.

Although what might be a hair split is whether it matters, and my own view is that it doesn't. What matters is the corruption and injustice, whether or not it affected more Democrats than Republicans (yes) and whether or not it affected the outcome (possibly, but probably not, IMO, in terms of electoral college vote, almost certainly not, IMO in terms of the popular vote). And the insecurity of digital voting systems matters too.

And I don't think the split is necessarily between academics and activists anyway, or it shouldn't be. It's more a difference between qualitative and quantitative analysis. At the data collection end (the anecdote end, if you like) the evidence for corruption may be overwhelming, and while each incident needs to be checked out (some do turn out to be innocent) at a qualitative level, much of the evidence is excellent. It's at the quantitative level that the "academics" tend to chime in, and it is at this level that I think the evidence is much poorer.

My sense is that what has happened is that the qualitative evidence (much of it good) has been multiplied by a single quantitative piece of evidence (the exit poll discrepancy) to give the answer "stolen election" and I don't think that piece of math works, simply because the exit poll discrepancy does not bear that weight. I thought it did myself, at first, but I now believe that not only does it not, but it actually works the other way - it imposes fairly severe constraints on the quantity of vote-stealing that could, statistically speaking, have occurred.

But I think the flames tend to start when this is misunderstood (well, some of them, and I don't absolve myself from responsibility for the misunderstanding). Those of us who believe that the exit poll constrains, rather than magnifies, the qualitative evidence are not, in general, attempting to debunk the qualitative evidence. We are just trying to add it up (seeing as we have concluded that we cannot multiply it).

The other ignition point, of course, is when we attempt to demonstrate that the exit poll discepancy is NOT indicative of widespread massive fraud. Here is where I part company from Steve Freeman, and indeed Baiman et al. And I'm afraid that I not only do not not find the exit-poll-indicates-fraud analyses convincing (skepticism) I think they are actually faulty (disagreement). That isn't hair-splitting, I think it's important.

But it certainly doesn't invalidate the case for urgent election reform!

[Melissa G]

63. Sigh... this observation does not lend itself well to posts..

But I'll try again..IMHO The really interesting things in life are things that are examined in minute detail... these things contain mysteries that one is passionate enough about to want to unravel...These same things are usually only interesting at that level to others who share the same passion. (Scene Cut to my husband rolling his eyes when the topic of election reform comes up at any gathering we are at..don't EVEN get her started..he will say..)
For the person so fixated, these topics inspire interest and even wonder and awe..For an academic, artist or hobbyist, enough interest to build a career, life or significant waste of pleasurable time, respectively.

I like academics and hang with a lot of them. I hear many stories about the politics of academia. For a person who has spent a lifetime listening to these stories from the outside, the characterization from the novel rings wryly true. It also, IMHO, underlies a lot of habits that academics still have when talking to non academics..This, for me, is a cause for smiling...

Activists have their own sets of idiosyncratic habits that can be equally amusing but one must not be taking oneself too seriously as either an activist or academic to enjoy the chuckle...
Best,
Melissa

[Febble]

64. OK, I find academics

amusing too at times. Like when I find myself waking up at 2.00am and asking my husband a question about theta oscillation generators in the dorsal anterior cingulate.

So if that was your point, fair enough. But I wouldn't say the stakes are particularly low, nor that attention to detail always obscures the big picture. Sometimes attention to detail radically alters the big picture, and lack of attention to detail can result in a big picture that is seriously misleading.

And I do think that if one wants to make a quantitative argument, it is good to get the quantities in the right ballpark. I don't think "millions of votes" is the right ballpark. Which means that I think the activist argument is at its strongest when it focuses on qualitative detail. Those queues in Ohio tell a far truer and more tragic story than a p value with a lot of spurious zeros.

[Melissa G]

65. Hi Febble, Well, at least you caught my drift.. I thought you might...

I never said attention to detail Always obscures the big picture..just sometimes...

There are, of course, the times when the right detail lights up the whole forest...which is one of the reasons one puts up with endless detail folks...

I know what it is to obsess on the obscure. I sometimes sit for hours (not exaggerating) in strange poses and chant for a minimum of 31 minutes a day in gurmukhi...yep, my details are the cause of much eye rolling in my family...ps..3-6 in the morning is the best time for this!

[OnTheOtherHand]

58. yeah, your analysis seems skewed

Not to call out people by name, but I certainly don't accept that some of the folks who have weighed in on this thread are "activists" with a "bigger picture" than Febble's. I can't direct you to posts, because they have been deleted. These folks may or may not be activists, but if they can't even keep their posts up on DU, I do not like their chances of promoting positive change in the outside world.

I think your post is very unfair to activists here on the board. I think most activists realize that one pays a price for insisting upon "facts" that aren't facts, and flaming anyone who disagrees. Calls for false unity aren't "activism," and opposing them isn't "hairsplitting." (And, no, I am not claiming to know all the facts.) Note that I say "insisting upon." There is no great price for just being wrong about something; that is the human condition. But when we are loudly, stubbornly, and abusively wrong, then we pay a price -- or, actually, the entire movement pays a price.

Do you actually think it is irrelevant whether Freeman is right or wrong? If you do, have you asked him to withdraw his manuscript because the stakes are so low? This "hairsplitting" idea seems totally one-sided in application to me, but maybe I don't understand yet what you are saying.

As for what I will think of Freeman's book: judging from conversations and Freeman's presentation in Montreal, his thinking doesn't seem to have changed much since he presented in Philadelphia in October. His arguments there were radically unpersuasive, and I would be happy to explain why. (Of course I can't yet comment on the arguments he hasn't yet presented.) I do not think it is hairsplitting to consider whether or not the exit polls indicate vote miscount on the order of nine or ten milllion votes. I think activists deserve some guidance as to how Freeman's argument will go over (and has gone over) with relevant experts, and why. Some will continue to blame fear, or careerism, or Rove money. I do not apologize for believing that activists deserve better arguments than that. In fact, I think most activists have better arguments than that.

[Melissa G]

66. I did not direct this to you, otoh. I would be relatively sure

you would both miss my point and disagree in a long winded fashion...

Many folks have a lot of reasons for reading and posting here...There were the folks who were trying to make a difference in election reform. There are folks who come here to keep up with their education about what is happening in the movement and or media and those who just want to hang with other who share their experience. There are also those who want to disrupt and spread misinformation. When TIA was about there were those who were likely paid to hang out because of the way they disrupted 24/7 when other folks would need to be holding down a job...

Lots of folks with lots of motivations...The election reform movement is also made up with folks with lots of different agendas. I don't agree with all of them..I doubt any of us do. I do believe Truth will out. I also know that various folks with various agendas will try to obscure truth...regardless of what movement or truth we are talking about.

I said something about you to you along time ago and as far as I can tell it STILL seems to be true. I asked "Where is the body of work that you are putting forward that furthers the cause you reference in your second paragraph. Could you send me a link? TIA had a body of work at which you were fond of taking potshots. Freeman has papers (and very soon a book) at which you seem to like to take aim. You seem to make a habit of shredding others without putting much coherently forward of your own for others to critique.

Yes, I'm sure you will find this analysis to be skewed as well but it does not keep me up nights..

[OnTheOtherHand]

67. I'm not sure why you assume

that Febble took your point and I missed it.

My work is available on my home page, http://inside.bard.edu/~lindeman/ , as well as in hundreds of DU posts. If you don't agree that bad arguments hurt the cause, then, well, I have to admit that that does keep me up nights. Not that I care what you think about me; your apparent conviction that I should be singled out for "shredding others" is merely weird. I do care about actions. I don't just want people here to talk about truth, I want them to honor the truth. I want them to use true arguments, because it matters. If you are citing Freeman, you are using untrue arguments, and that alarms me. Shouldn't it?

[Melissa G]

68. I've followed most of your posts until the last couple of months...

It was often tedious but I did follow them. The ability to not take yourself too seriously had not
been much in evidence...That is not the case with Febble..

I don't necessarily agree that what You assess as a bad argument Is a bad argument.

I guess I can live with being called weird but this is not the first time i have told you about shredding others. We had this discussion in pms when you first arrived.

I hear you maintaining that Freeman uses untrue arguments. Which are you referring to? Very shortly a book full will be out...

[OnTheOtherHand]

69. I think we can all agree that Febble is funnier than I am

but it is a bit disheartening to have to wonder whether you have gleaned anything else from all our posts taken together.

"I don't necessarily agree that what You assess as a bad argument Is a bad argument."

No, of course not, and I don't expect you to. Honoring the truth doesn't entail agreeing with me; I don't agree with myself half the time, which is probably one reason why you think I am long-winded. But I do think honoring the truth entails either engaging the substance of arguments or else reserving judgment.

Freeman's untrue arguments? Here is a short partial list. I could do it in detail, but I don't know whether any part of it bears further discussion right now.

* Freeman maintains that "logic... and experience" testify to exit polls' high accuracy, but they don't. No "logic" maintains that exit polls should be bias-free, and there are many examples of inaccurate results, including the 1992 U.S. exit polls. (One could argue that the 1992 election must have been riddled with fraud -- but then the argument from "experience" is circular.)

* Freeman cites Ukraine 2004 as evidence of exit poll accuracy, but it isn't; the two exit polls in the run-off differed from each other by more than the U.S. exit polls differed from the official returns. (I think he also implies that the exit poll results were used to overturn the result, which they weren't, but it is hard to keep track of who says what about that. In Montreal he said something off the cuff about 'huge headlines' about the exit polls in Ukraine; actually, so far I haven't found any U.S. news source that headlined the exit polls. CNN did refer to them in a caption at least once.)

* Freeman said in October that there was "no independent evidence" of non-response bias in the 2004 exit poll or other exit polls. There is considerable independent evidence of non-response bias in the 2004 exit poll. Also, there is very considerable evidence from other exit polls, including experimental evidence that is difficult to argue around. (This is a huge, huge problem: Freeman has encouraged a lot of people to buy into the idea that non-response bias is some weird excuse that Mitofsky made up, when actually it is something that survey researchers worry about all the time.)

* Freeman attaches great importance to the lower mean red shift in paper-ballot precincts -- but controlling for location (urban/rural), there is no statistically significant difference between these and other precincts.

* Freeman said that for the non-response bias account to hold, it was "practically a mathematical necessity" that reported completion rates should be higher in Democratic precincts -- but it isn't.

* Freeman cited higher red shift in states with Republican governors, but his finding hinges on states where the election machinery was controlled not by the governors, but by Democratic secretaries of state or (in New York) non-partisan election board.

* Freeman wrote, "There’s no PLD (red shift) at all in the Kerry strongholds, but the discrepancy is highest on the right side of the spectrum.... In fact, the stronger Bush’s support, the greater the disparity.... If fraud were afoot, it would make sense that the president’s men would steal votes in GOP strongholds, where they control the machinery of government...." Actually, there is red shift in "Kerry strongholds" (just eyeballing a graph, it looks like over 20 points in at least five precincts) ; there is no monotonic (one-directional) trend for red shift to increase with Bush support; there is no basis for the assumption that "the president's men... control the machinery of government" in all the "GOP strongholds"; and even if they did, there aren't enough red-shifted "GOP strongholds" to put the outcome in doubt.

* In Philly, Freeman said that for Mitofsky to claim "that the exit polls did not indicate a victory for John Kerry, is stunning. He might as well stand before us and say 'blue is red.'" But Kerry's apparent lead in the Ohio exit poll was within the margin of error, even assuming zero bias, so Ohio was too close to call, and there is nothing "stunning" or Orwellian about Mitofsky saying so.

* In Philly, Freeman said, "When a company cooks the books or when a scientist fudges figures, a contradiction is created.... When an irreconcilable contradiction exists, it is a sure sign that something is amiss.... NEP had to enter into a Wonderland of numbers." The "irreconcilable contradiction" is basically TIA's old argument about too many Bush 2000 voters. But if Freeman had only Googled the 2000 exit poll, he would have found that it had the same problem in the opposite direction: too many Clinton 1996 voters. If he had checked other exit polls, he would have found that they routinely overstate the prior winner's vote share. Given some of the epithets that have been hurled at Mitofsky (I could direct you to some here on the board), I find that combination of polemic and laxity very hard to stomach.

* Freeman has never responded to Mitofsky's observation that red shift doesn't correlate with improvement in Bush's performance from 2000 to 2004 ("swing") -- a very strange non-finding if red shift measures fraud. We have discussed this issue extensively on the board. See also my home page, passim, especially the first two working-paper links. (There is the further problem that red shift doesn't correlate with Bush improvement over the pre-election polls, either.) I don't know whether non-arguments count as untrue arguments, but in academic debate, it is definitely bad form to ignore objections.

I stopped at an even ten. Most of these, in my professional opinion, are big problems -- and I don't think my opinion is at all unusual.* Everyone makes mistakes, but it is uncommon in academic discourse to make so many mistakes, so enthusiastically, and all in the same direction. So, when Freeman presents his work as that of a "survey expert," it poses ethical dilemmas for the entire profession.

*EDIT TO ADD: Actually, I imagine that most of the relevant professionals haven't read the work, so it is probably unusual even to have formed an opinion on, e.g., 'what Freeman says about Republican governors.' What I should say is: I haven't encountered many survey researchers or analysts who would argue Freeman's side of most of these points. (A few are at least open to interpretation.) The people whom I find arguing Freeman's side tend -- like Freeman himself -- to be knowledgeable in other fields.

[Melissa G]

71. EEEKK!! Now you want me to conflate you with Febble???

Now There's an image that could keep me up nights... a transatlantic, two-headed creature with both east coast and british accents, spewing forth statistical obscurities which, unfortunately for me, are not at all very interesting to me personally...

Did you have a chat with Dante and try to create a personal ring of hell just for me???

I'll have to answer the substance of your post more coherently later... after I've recovered from this mental, visual onslaught and have thoroughly washed this image out of my head...:crazy:

[OnTheOtherHand]

72. OK, I'll keep the wall of fi-- umm, the light on for you n/t

[Melissa G]

73. Okay, I finally gotten that nasty image out of my head...

What I have gleaned from your posts taken together is that very little of what the two of you post furthers the cause of election reform.

I know you state that you believe that you are a crusader for truth..maybe, maybe not... but from my perspective it is certainly truth with a small t not a big one...

My experience is that your (and I am giving you the benefit of my very large doubt) 'truth' is the kind of onslaught of small, niggling, alleged factoids/questions and re frames to different perspectives that makes conversation searching for Truth cumbersome, if not impossible. I do not necessarily believe that you are trolls or freepers, although this is a disruptive technique commonly used by them here on DU... Febble assumed I was accusing you of freeping and ought to know better from our PMs. I am direct. If I think something I will tell you. If I thought you were a freeper, I wouldn't waste my keystrokes.

IMHO, what you do is sometimes worse than trolling or freeping because it oppresses good debate in irrelevancies with two people who have quite good skill sets that could IMHO be better used. Obviously, your lives, your choices though....The infinite only allots us so many breaths. I prefer not to waste mine attacking other peoples' work so I have been avoiding your posts for the last couple of months but since you asked...

Anyway, re Steve Freeman, (who is IMHO a hell of a lot easier to read than your work, even if I am trudging through ungainly amounts of statistics while I am doing it in either case...)I forwarded your list of " untrue statements".
I don't think he was particularly impressed with your list...he said he was finishing a paper this weekend that he will likely post that should address your cr.., er.. concerns.

[OnTheOtherHand]

76. in other words, you haven't considered the content

In what universe is it a small, niggling, alleged factoid/question whether John Kerry lost by three million votes or won by close to seven million? Are you actually asking me not to care about the answer to that question because it isn't the best use of my time? Wow.

And, while it may be a small, niggling, alleged factoid/question whether the memos that 60 Minutes used to document Bush's Air National Guard dodges were authentic, the upshot was that the story became all about the memos and not about Bush's dodges. We got absolutely clobbered when the mainstream media ran with bad evidence, despite all the good evidence. Did that not happen?

Frankly, Scarlett, it doesn't matter much what Freeman is impressed with. What matters is how much damage he does by being compulsively readable and persuasive to people who don't know the field, and totally unconvincing to people who do. Maybe not very much -- maybe it doesn't matter what people who know the field think. We shall see.

[Melissa G]

78. LOL..I'm sorry Mark, you are just not a very convincing Rhett....

But it did give me a good chuckle trying to make that image come up..:rofl: have to get back to you after Sunday..non cyber reality calls...

[OnTheOtherHand]

79. naw, I have no desire to sweep you off your feet... n/t

[Febble]

70. Oh, I take myself seriously enough

or at least, I hope that the occasionaly levity in my posts does not give you the impression I am doing this for fun. I am in deadly earnest.

And I am in complete agreement with OTOH. I think there are serious flaws in Freeman's arguments, and I think that if you would read OTOH's work carefully (and, indeed, mine) then you might come to understand those flaws. If you can see holes in his extremely cogent counter-arguments then I am sure both of us would like to know exactly where those holes are. They may exist. But simply stating that you "don't necessarily agree" doesn't make us any wiser about the basis of your disagreement.

And the reason I am in deadly earnest is that I think that American democracy is in drastic need of reform. And if the case for reform is coupled to arguments that simply cannot be sustained (and, pace Robert F Kennedy, many of them can't be), then the task of convincing those who need to be convinced of the rightness of the cause is made one heck of a lot harder, as, I fear, will be the task of getting Democrats to vote at all.

Consider what you no doubt regard as an outside possibility: that OTOH and I are right about the exit poll evidence (and most of this is about the exit poll evidence), and that Freeman and Baimain (and Kennedy, who relies on Freeman and Baiman) are wrong; that while there was rank injustice in 2004, there was not massive, widespread theft. IF this is the case, it has extremely important implications for both Democrats and anyone interested in the cause of democratic (small d) justice.

OK, you still think we are wrong. Fair enough. It is possible that we are. But we are both fairly well informed, our views are fairly widely held by experts in the relevant fields, so it is at least possible that we are right. In which case, those implications are worth considering.

And, right or wrong, they may shed some light on what might motivate both of us to continue to debate the exit poll case on DU, despite being regarded in some quarters (as implied by your post) as freepers or moles.

[Melissa G]

74. I did read your stuff carefully for the first several hundred posts or so

As you might remember it did not remotely convince me. As you are a more interesting writer than he who you seem to want to conflate yourself with, I will probably occasionally read more of your posts.
Re experts and their opinions.. well that's a longer conversation than I have interest for..At least quite a lot of the public now statistically believes the election was likely stolen so there is hope that Truth will out..

I just stumbled into helping with some Freeman research and gratefully the book is done! Please do not mistake me for a statistics or exit poll junkie...I prefer to spend my non-work non-election reform time chanting mantras in obscure positions..wahe guru, wahe guru, wahe guru, sat nam, sat nam, sat nam, wahe guru....praying for the planet in general and sometimes even shrub in particular...sat nam, sat nam, wahe guru...

[Febble]

75. Well, the thing is, Melissa,

that you say you read the posts and are not convinced by my arguments, and you are very friendly about it (to me, anyway, if not to the colleague with whom I have worked on the analyses) but you do not say what you find unconvincing.

I realise you are not a statistics or exit poll junkie - but in that case, what is the basis of the lack of credence you give my arguments? Do you just like Steve's conclusions better?

I rather like them myself. It does not lead me to be persuaded by them, however, as they appear to be reached via some fairly profoundly flawed bits of reasoning, and actually run counter to some rather better (IMO) bits of reasoning that, astonishingly, despite the fact that the analysis in question was presented to Steve, by Warren Mitofsky, months ago, at their debate in Philadelphia, and also by email, he did not appear to have considered until the weekend before last when OTOH and I sat down with him and presented them to him in person on the back of a handy envelope in a bar in Montreal.

I am still awaiting, from Steve, a more substantive response to that analysis (which was indeed done by me) than the suggestion that the analysis in question might have been done wrong. Indeed it might, but it was pretty damn thorough. If all Steve can say in response to it that it might contain a mistake, then I'm afraid I'm tempted to say - well how do you know that yours don't? I don't think either of us thinks the other is stupid. But I do think his analysis contain errors, not because it is possible, but because I have identified them.

The two people who have offered serious critiques of the analysis presented by Mitofsky in Philadelphia are DUers TimeForChange and Eomer (I don't count Kathy Dopp's, I feel bound, in honesty, to refer to it). I think it is robust in the face of those critiques, but at least TfC and Eomer provided good counter-points. Steve has, so far, provided none.

The analysis in question is presented here, by Mark Lindeman

http://inside.bard.edu/~lindeman/slides.html

and by me (with more jokes)

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Febble/3


The latter presentation provoked some interesting comment.

[Melissa G]

77. Hi Febble, I'm pretty sure I did say at the time what I found unconvincing

since back then I was following all this in more detail but since i found it so un compelling i don't really remember..

I forwarded your last post to Freeman as well as otoh's

I am currently unearthing my house for a party that my husband is giving tomorrow for his colleagues...as unearthing is a more apt word than I would like it to be...I'll have to leave this to after Sunday...
Regards,
mg

[Febble]

80. Well, no you didn't

say at the time what you found unconvincing.

I have already told Steve what I find problematic about his analyses, and he asked me, reasonably, whether I'd done a sensitivity analysis on the swing-shift correlation. I told him that how sensitive the correlation would be to fraud depended on the variance hypothesised, but I haven't heard back. As soon as he tells me what variance he needs to account for I shall plug it into my model.

The trouble is the less the variance is postulated in fraud, the less convincing his own correlations are. If there are supposed to be striking correlations indicative of fraud in the state level data, as he maintains are being "neglected", then we would expect to find a striking correlation between redshift and swing, and we don't. So I don't see how he can have it both ways. The more shifted votes he wants me to find in the non-significant swing-shift correlation, the less he can have his "overwhelming" neglected correlations.

Have a good party.

[Melissa G]

81. well, yes I did say why but I remember using the word irrelevant

about your work and so I think you did not like my reasoning.. I was going back through some of the old posts to find the exact one which i think was about a house burning down while you want to check out the color of the drapes or some such rhetoric....when I realized that I was preparing for LAST year's annual party at our house while we were having this same discussion..ARRRHHHH...So now i would say that I think this particular argument is irrelevant and a waste of life..so I'll just let it go at that before it gobbles up any more of my breath..
Very Best,
Melissa

edit for last year's link to part of the discussion
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=374482#374541

[BeFree]

59. Thank you, Melissa

That is one great article.

It is nice to know that the DU forum is a very important place. It is making inroads into the thinking and planning of the election system. Our opposition shows evidence of our POWER.

Really, the whole thing is a no-brainer: given the machines, the history of elections and the subsequent rewards for stealing just enough votes, there is no correct thinking individual who can deny the system has been manipulated by the criminal enterprise in control of the system.

Why, we've just read, right here on DU, that a majority of political scientists have very little confidence in the system, or in it's outcome of the counting of the votes.

Damning, and as stated, a no-brainer.

[New Earth]

60. no no no no no no no no no no no no

no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no


election fraud. it's election fraud.
*sigh*

[New Earth]

61. i just wrote to this guy

and asked him to change his vote fraud :blush:


:spank:

[New Earth]

62. he replied

and insists that 'vote fraud' is better linguistically. i'm fuming, so i'm going to keep my thoughts to myself. it was very nice of him to reply though. i'm sorry but anyone who keeps using that phrase, to me, is hurting the cause.

:mad: