Posted on 05/05/2005 5:51:12 PM PDT by RWR8189
Russ Baker —an investigative reporter and essayist—is a longtime TomPaine.com contributor. He is involved in the development of a new not-for-profit organization dedicated to revitalizing investigative journalism in America . To read more about the problems in the 2004 presidential election and proposals for reforming our electoral system, see Best Of TomPaine: Election Irregularities In 2004.
Back in January, I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com questioning widely circulated claims that the election in Ohio had been stolen. I had done some poking around, anticipating that at least some of the frightening anecdotes filling our mail boxes and raging on talk radio would be borne out. They weren’t. In spot checks on a few popular fraud anecdotes, I found credible alternative explanations such as incompetence, structural problems, politicization of decision-making and other failings— but no evidence of deliberate fraud designed to hand the election to Bush.
I looked especially closely at the theory that fraud is the only way to explain the large gap between the early exit polls, which showed Kerry doing very well, and the final result giving Ohio’s key electoral votes to Bush. According to this theory, there was no way the actual tally could vary so greatly from the exit polls. The proponents of this view essentially accuse the legendary exit pollster Warren Mitofsky, and a media consortium, the National Election Pool (NEP), of some kind of complicity— or at least willful denial. I found no evidence whatever of either.
For casting doubt on the conspiracy theory, TomPaine.com and I received virtual barrels of e-mail, most from angry anti-Bush activists who could not believe that their hard work had been for naught. I also heard from Steven Freeman, a University of Pennsylvania professor and author of a widely cited study that served as the primary basis for the pro-theft-theory folks, The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy . His remarks, and my response to them, appeared on TomPaine.com.
Privately, I heard from many Democratic officials, election reform advocates and analysts from inside Ohio and elsewhere, who believed my reporting to be accurate, and who were more than a little perturbed by the frenzy, which they found a counterproductive distraction from the serious ongoing effort to reform election practices. Since the debate refuses to die, this seems a good time to trumpet the arrival of not just one, but two, new technical analyses that cast further doubt on the theory regarding exit poll fraud. The author of the first is an earnest young fellow in San Diego named Rick Brady.
“Brady's paper is a must-read for those still genuinely weighing the arguments on the exit poll controversy,” writes Mark Blumenthal, a longtime Democratic pollster on whose website blog, MysteryPollster.com (“Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling”) Brady sometimes posts.
Brady’s point-by-point refutation of the Stolen Election thesis, in which he exposes fallacies, misuses of data and other technical sloppiness, can be found here. These range from an inapt comparison with German exit polls to reckless application of out-of-date margin-of-error statistics.
Meanwhile, a growing chorus of voices is raising doubts about the methodology and conclusions of a loose-knit coalition of academics called U.S. Count Votes (USCV) which has been at the forefront of the Ohio Fraud movement. As Warren Mitofsky told me privately back in January (he’s now gone public with this) —and demonstrated to me in some detail why—he finds the fraud theory highly implausible. Recently, WashingtonPost.com columnist Terry M. Neal interviewed Mitofsky about the findings of USCV. Mitofsky said :
"The trouble is they make their case very passionately and not very scholarly. I don't get the impression that any of these people have conducted surveys on a large scale."
Although many of the USCV people have degrees in statistics and math, those are general skills that constitute only a part of the toolkit needed to design and deconstruct complex polls. That’s not to say they don’t have some legitimate points, just that they don’t have the chops for such a powerful conclusion.
Like the USCV folks, Rick Brady—author of the new study— is no polling expert. He has been deeply involved with graduate-level statistics primarily while earning a master's degree in public planning, but appears to have approached the exit poll mystery with the best qualifications—an agile and open mind.
The other study comes from Elizabeth Liddle, a U.K.-based former USCV contributor and Ph.D. candidate in psychology/cognitive neuroscience who published her own independent study, which demonstrates fundamental problems with the fraudniks’ conclusions.
She begins by acknowledging her own concerns with the situation in Ohio. “I believe your election was inexcusably riggable and may well have been rigged,” writes Liddle. “It was also inexcusably unauditable. I am convinced that there was real and massive voter suppression in Ohio, and that it was probably deliberate. I think the recount in Ohio was a sham, and the subversion of the recount is in itself suggestive of coverup of fraud. I think Kenneth Blackwell should be jailed. However (and I'll come clean now in case you want to read no further) I don't believe the exit polls in themselves are evidence for fraud. I don't think they are inconsistent with fraud, but I don't think they support it either.”
Specifically, Liddle asserts that the exit polls were not just wrong in so-called battleground states, as the fraudniks assert, but everywhere. “My analysis shows that the swing states were not in fact more wrong than the safe states,” writes Liddle. “This evidence shows that the greatest bias was [actually] in the safest blue states... Moreover, the pattern of polling bias is the same as in the nearest comparable election, 1988, another two-horse race where there was also a large significant over-estimate of the Democratic vote and another losing Democratic candidate (Dukakis).”
Liddle explained to me that, since 1988 at least, voter sampling has consistently over-polled Democrats. I’ve heard a variety of explanations for this, but in general, it’s not hard to imagine that Democrats might be at least marginally more inclined to explain their political decisions to exit pollsters, who, after all, are representatives of the often-reviled “liberal” media.
In fact, it seems that Republican voters are overall slightly less likely to accurately express their preferences to in-person interviewers, even in precincts where they constitute a sizable majority. For fairly complex reasons, a slight undersampling of Bush voters produces a larger gap between exit polls and final results in (A) evenly split precincts than in highly partisan precincts, and in (B) highly Republican precincts than in highly Democratic precincts. Not knowing this, says Liddle, one could look at certain precincts and immediately, if incorrectly, smell something foul.
So, absent the emergence of true polling methodology experts screaming theft, we may reasonably conclude that no evil genius rigged the results. Instead, what we experienced was probably an amalgam of system failings, miscalculations, incompetence, and, in some cases, the variably successful exertions of biased election officials. These are, at worst, symptoms of gaming the system, a deplorable practice hardly limited to this election or, historically, to one party. The anomalies being cited, including by Christopher Hitchens—apparently without any notable independent verification—in a widely cited Vanity Fair piece, may prove to be invalid, or attributable as well to other factors. Perhaps fraud occurred on an isolated basis, but no one has come forward with careful documentation—as opposed to hysterical—unscientific allegation.
Until the public becomes confident in the underlying integrity of the electoral apparatus in this country, none of the urgently needed improvements to that system can take place. That’s why the conspiracy-mongering must cease. Can we instead please turn now to the many substantive proposals already being proffered to make things better—including pending legislation? Let’s keep our eye on the real ball that’s in our court.
Russ Baker is obviously on the BushCo. payroll and part of the VRWC.-DU
"it’s not hard to imagine that Democrats might be at least marginally more inclined to explain their political decisions to exit pollsters,"
I said it before the election and I'll day it again. "I will lie to an exit pollster if they question me."
day = say. d'oh.
I would have been surprised if the polls were anywhere near accurate. For years the Democrats have tilted polls so much to fit their agenda that most have become as reliable as reading chicken entrails to predict the weather. How were exit polls immune to that?
Let's talk about what DID happen in Washington State. The left is dangerous.
I was on a lot of pollster's lists last election season. I consistently lied every time I was called. One day I was gun-luvin' liberal, the next an anti-gay marriage moderate.
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Interesting how the left is obsessed with Ohio while the Washington gubner election is set to be overturned due to leftist fraud.
Meanwhile, if anyone wants to find widespread acknowledge vote fraud, voter suppression, and voter intimidation by Democrats, all they have to do is come to Milwaukee. Wisconsin was stolen from Bush. The head of the Milwaukee election commission has been fired. The son of the current representative to the US House seat and the son of the former Mayor of the city are under indictment for sabotage related to the election. Some city wards had a vote of 120% of eligible voters. I'm sure the moonbats think this is just fine.
I am not sure I could form and speak the words "I voted for Kerry." If I did, I think I would have to a bar and lick an ashtray to get the taste out of my mouth.
Michigan was "iffy" at best.
http://www.nationalreview.com/battleground/2004/battleground200411040640.asp
"I am convinced that there was real and massive voter suppression in Ohio, and that it was probably deliberate. I think the recount in Ohio was a sham, and the subversion of the recount is in itself suggestive of coverup of fraud. I think Kenneth Blackwell should be jailed."
Wow! And this is one of their sane ones! It's funny that while she's refuting one conspiracy theory, she endorses many other theories without any shred of evidence.
Thank you. I've just added this thread to my links page.
"Ohio had been stolen"
I live here. I felt Ohio would go Bush for a long time; it was only 2 months before the election when I started to be a little concerned. Kerry ads were running every other whipstitch, and every dam! day, I would see out of state plates everywhere, any time of the day and night. Registration people were out in force. We received several phone calls out of the blue from obvious Moveon types, looking to poll us, which we hung up on.
When we went to vote at a little setup in a church, we got there before 6 am, and within 15 minutes, the line had had to be redone 2 times, and was almost out the door. The woman directly in front of me tried to vote in the wrong precinct, and acted like she was innocent of the whole thing, not knowing where to go.
High school seniors in the inner city essentially had the day off, 'escorting' people to the polling place. For weeks, people had been going into schools to advocate for 'Rock the Vote' and other such organizations, and offering to pay people to volunteer for the Kerry cause. Note: there was no alternative group of Bushies in schools that I knew about. Rumors abounded among those who accept handouts that Bush had the WTC disaster planned, and Michael Moore's film was shown as gospel.
So, I became concerned that Ohio would be stolen, especially with the frenzy of out of staters so obviously here for the purpose of rigging the vote. Fortunately, people like Hannity and other speakers came here to speak, and to get people out to register. Otherwise, I thought Ohio would be stolen--by the Dems.
But, as it turned out, we Ohioans really do not cotton to outsiders much, even if they do want to act all friendly for the moment. I would say that the nonsense Kerry caused here helped get out massive support that worked against him. Then again, those $500 shoes or whatever they were didn't do much for the good ole' boy look he tried to foster, and that dog just didn't hunt.
Bookmark.
In the 30 odd years I've been involved in politics, I've only been polled twice. I lied both times. I don't want politicians following polls and the MSM turning it into a horse race, so my hope was if polls become inaccurate and useless, politicians will quit using them. I remember reading on one of the election day FR threads a gal who said she was approached by an exit pollster and she lied to them. Good for her!
I was ready for some blue helmet types to come to my polling place. I was going to be tempted to slit some tires there on that one....after voting, of course.
The helmets never materialized.
Michael Moore rented himself a street block or something in Ohio to investigate our voting practices. Fortunately he stayed where he could keep some bodyguards on payroll or something, and didn't venture out into the hinterland. He'd have gotten himself into a snipe hunt out here.
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