I live in Las Vegas, NV, I voted for Sharron Angle, and I understand your frustration. However the variance between telephone polls of likely voters and the actual Election Day results is not, in and of itself, hard evidence of election fraud.
I'm gonna throw out some facts and an alternative theory, and I genuinely hope you give it some thought.
Telephone surveys of likely voters conducted during the week of early voting showed the Senate Majority Leader, a long time friend of the SEIU, the Culinary, and the teachers’ unions in a statistical tie with a staunchly anti-union Bircher who has never held statewide office.
Friends, that's enough to put the unions in panic mode.
Reid and his allies spent millions of dollars for thousands of paid campaign workers to knock on doors. Meanwhile, Angle spent millions of dollars on high-priced D.C. consultants.
Reid's paid campaign workers ID’d the voters who would vote for their guy weeks before the voting started. Angle's team did not.
Reid's paid campaign workers were canvassing door to door every single day, from before the primary right up to Election Day. The AFL-CIO had a girl on my doorstep in July, as a matter of fact. I never saw a single Angle canvasser. Ever. She relied on mailers instead.
Reid's paid campaign workers were on autodialer phone banks from 8am to 8pm, non-stop, from the beginning of early voting all the way through Election Day. They kept calling until they contacted every voter they had ID’d, and they said anything and everything to get that voter into the booth. Angle had some volunteers on the phone, cold-calling Rs on the registered voter list.
During the 10 days of early voting, the Ds and the unions went all out with every old-school, machine politics trick they could legally use: Free food, free rides to the polls, gift cards, you name it. Some of it was close to vote buying, most of it was not. Either way it doesn't matter because no one produced evidence of anything illegal. Where was Team Angle during all of this? I honestly don't know.
Oh wait. Yeah I do. Her campaign was b1tching about it all being so unfair.
When the Secretary of State reviewed her evidence-free complaint and essentially told her to STFU, Team Angle decided to float the ridiculous allegation that Reid's name was preselected on the Sequoia voting machines. Then some jackhole thought it would be a good idea to lay the blame on the union representing the Clark County employees.
Just between friends, I don't honestly think Reid's name was pre-selected on any voting machine. Worse, the union representing the Clark County employees just happens to represent TENS OF THOUSANDS of hotel workers, health care workers, government workers ... you name it. A third of the freakin’ state.
Simply put, trotting that nonsense out in the middle of early voting was a PR disaster. People don't care much for candidates that toss around unsubstantiated charges of vote fraud, especially against a 40 year veteran politician who's built a brand as Mr. Clean.
Anyhoo, once you go out of your way to make it personal like that, there is no way in hell the SEIU, the Culinary, the Teachers, or those thousands of paid campaign workers are gonna let their boy lose. No way. In hell.
On Election Day, the Reid campaign and their union allies put a ground game into play that can only be described as “shock and awe.”
The unions know where you work. They know where you live. They check the Registrar of Voters and they know who has voted and who hasn't. When the sun came up on Election Day, there was a fleet of buses staged in the parking lot at Larry's Villa, not far from the Strip and the Downtown hotels. That fleet was running from before the polls opened till well after they closed, taking people from work to go vote, then dropping them off back at their cars or at their homes when they were done.
I'd be willing to venture that a lot of those voters they delivered are not “likely voters” in the telephone surveys.
Another minor detail: A fifth of those voters are Latino. Legal immigrants who were registered to vote the day they joined the union.
And that's another factor in play. See, the ground game was only part of the reason Reid won. The 800 lb gorilla in the room, the fact that everyone chooses to ignore, is our Bircher candidate, Sharron Angle, decided to make an enemy out of the entire Latino community.
She ran a stupid commercial portraying Latino immigrants as criminals. She then compounded the error two weeks ago by going to a high school Hispanic Club and inexplicably joking with the kids in defense of her racist anti-immigrant ad, saying “Are you sure you're Hispanic? Some of you look Asian to me.”
I understand the point she was trying to make, however in todays age of cellphone video recorders and YouTube, that was one goddamned stupid comment.
Apologies if the truth offends.
If there was an ounce of sense in the Angle campaign, they might have noticed a Hispanic R running for governor and kept their race-baiting anti-immigrant ads in the can. Instead, they gave Univision, Telemundo, and every Spanish radio station in town reason to label Sharron Angle as a racist 24/7 for the last 2 weeks.
I cannot emphasize this point enough.
If it was massive vote fraud, as the Angle camp has suggested, how is it Republican Brian Sandoval pulled off a big win, beating Harry's son, Rory, in the Governor's race by 12 points?
Twelve points.
Meanwhile, exit polls show that 90% of the Latino vote went for Harry. In other words, quite a few of those Latino voters split the ticket, voting Sandoval (R) for Governor, and Reid (D) for Senate.
Quite a trick, when you think of it.
I think anyone who honestly reviews the tabs on those surveys will find that Latino voters were under-represented, and no one took into account the intense personal dislike Sharron Angle cultivated among Hispanics in the final weeks of the campaign.
One final point, and this is where she lost the undecideds: Angle decided to play hide-and-seek with the media. She refused to give press conferences, ever, and was actually videotaped running from the TV reporters the last day of early voting. After that incident, whatever possessed her to announce that she was banning 2 Las Vegas TV stations from election night coverage at her headquarters is truly beyond me.
Yeah, I understand she got ambushed paparazzi-style at McCarran, but that is simply not a legitimate reason to freeze out the TV news. Every time those two stations mentioned the Senate race, which was every single news broadcast 5, 6, and 11, they pointed out that Sharron Angle was avoiding them and wouldn't answer their questions.
Not. Really. Smart.
Bottom line: Clark County delivered Harry a 40,000 vote margin for the win. The guy won fair and square. Reid is old, he's an azzhole, and somehow he's been able to amass a fortune while serving in the Senate, but Harry is a known brand. He had a better ground game and his opponent imploded at the 11th hour.
The fact Sharron Angle came as close as she did is, IMO, a freakin miracle.
Sorry for being long-winded, but I live in Nevada, I voted for Angle, and that's the way I saw it.
Hit me on twitter @brookedunne
I also appreciate your vents about Sharron Angle and how she could have better handled the press. Leaving aside debate about the candidate herself and her conduct... I am not so sure (to put it mildly) that these factors would not appear in polled voters' opinions, esp. with the preponderance of other races' polling-to-results ratios as given. Statistically, this race is clearly an outlier. Reasonable probability of one or two polls being off? Understandable. But all of them? That's like winning the jackpot several times in succession.
From Time, "A TIME/CNN/Opinion Research poll last week found Reid trailing Angle among likely voters, 45% to her 49%, just outside the margin of error, with independent candidate Scott Ashjian pulling in 2%. Strikingly, those poll numbers are reversed among registered voters — 43% for Reid, 39% for Angle and 5% for Ashjian — which means Reid's success depends on turning out his supporters."
That's one motherload of a turnout of registered voters to swing the election that far in Reid's favor, again stretching the bounds of credulity on the legitimacy of this result.
Brooke your take is interesting. I enjoyed reading your analysis. I don’t disagree with you entirely but let me make a few points I think you might want to consider.
First off it’s too early to rule out election fraud. As election fraud expert Bev Harris (blackboxvoting.org) says, you have to wait a week or two before the irregularities make themselves manifest.
Second, you’re building you’re assumptions on top of a very problematic assumption. Namely that you can trust the e-machines. There’s no reason to think so. Look at their record. They’re notoriously unreliable. Subject to (frequent) malfunction, manipulation and eminently hackable, often by remote control. In the case of Nevada the problem’s particularly serious given that the votes are cast on Sequoia machines which have a terrible record, even for voting machines.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the people who serviced Nevada’s e-machines were the corrupt pro-Reid SEIU
Perhaps they did their job honestly and didn’t tamper with them. We don’t know. But their record and allegiance to Reid gives me serious cause for concern regarding the vote integrity and I think it should do the same to you
Consider this as well, Sequoia was until recently owned by a multinational, Smartmatic, a company previously embroiled in serious election fraud controversy in Venezuela 2004
http://vcrisis.com/index.php?content=letters/200409080559
Sequoia is now owned by another foreign company Dominion a company out of Canada. Turns out Dominion is problematic too and not just because they’re foreign. They lied about their acquisition of Sequoia and lied about their connections to Chavez just like Sequoia did. Recall the Venezuela 2004 vote?
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7906
Does the ownership of Sequoia prove election fraud? No. But it should give reason enough to pause before arriving at confident conclusions about the integrity of the Nevada vote.
A) You also haven’t considered the potential problems with the absentee vote count. There has been no shortage of absentee vote scandals and irregularities over the years including a recent relatively minor one here in Nevada
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/10/15/elections-officials-sued-for-mailing-late-overseas-absentee-ball/
B) There’s already a dangerous lapse in the integrity of the Nevada vote. As if the reliance on Sequoia machines weren’t problematic enough there is the troubling issue of crucial data retention. Federal Law requires the machines’ hard drives, flash memory chips and memory cartridges be kept for 22 months after the election so that a record exists of how people voted and how the e-machines functioned during the election. But sadly Nevada election officials are violating this law leaving no way (such as there was) to determine the
integrity of the vote
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8157#more-8157
The larger issue imo is the question of why the Republicans and Democrats are doing nothing about this...
Second I don’t know what you mean by ‘filtered likely voters’ but if you meant excluded or edited likely voters in their polls I’d like you to elaborate because every poll I saw before the election included likely voters
Third, there’s no reason to think the effect of Reid’s ground game or Angle’s relatively weak campaign was not reflected in the polls going into the election
Fourth regarding the Time/CNN poll you say shows Reid carried the under 35 demographic, http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/10/27/topstate8.pdf
I don’t know what you think makes it instructive. Unless I’m looking at it incorrectly I see only N/A with Reid carrying the under 50 demographic on one question and Angle carrying the crucial over 50 demographic decisively on another
Fifth, you’re being a little naive dismissing Angle’s complaints on the basis of the Secretary of State’s rejecting her complaints. You can’t really use this as evidence. He’s conflicted. Miller’s a life-long democrat. Now I grant you that doesn’t make Angle’s complaints legitimate but it does make his rejection of them suspect, wouldn’t you agree.
Sixth, regarding the cell phone issue I agree with you that it’s important and the pollsters are making a mistake not factoring it into their surveys.
To your point specifically, and its important, about the number of you under 35 that use cell phones exclusively, well, respectfully Brooke, you’re incorrect that “most” of you use cells only.
According to the CDC and Nielsen (2009) just over a fifth of all US households use cell phones exclusively.
http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/one-fifth-of-us-households-use-wireless-only-phones-11552/
Regarding your age group the numbers are significant but nowhere near the “most” figure you claim:
“Nearly half of adults ages 25-29 (45.8%) live in households with only wireless telephones. More than one-third of adults ages 18-24 (37.6%) and approximately one-third of adults ages 30-34 (33.5%) live in households with only wireless telephones.”
For an average of 38% roughly
Now the CDC claims that the overall percentage rises by 5% per year. I think it’s safe to say that percentage applies to your demographic specifically. So as of now almost 2011 the overall cell phone only use by household must be around 33% for safety and your demographic average is approx 41%.
41% is a large group of people to not survey I grant you, particularly in a demographic that typically swings one way – Democrat, sometimes as much as 60/40. But I’m not sure how much this omission on the part of the pollsters affected their accuracy. For one thing there’s no guarantee this demographic would have swung for Reid. Given the level of disillusionment with Obama and the Dems it’s a safe bet that this demographic was up in the air, perhaps might have tilted toward Angle. If it did swing for Reid it would be interesting to know by how much. We could then factor that percentage into the overall Reid vote. As you know any margin for Reid would only be a small percentage of the overall Reid number. And that brings up another difficulty with your analysis - the issue of turnout. In order to properly weigh the impact this demographic had we need to know how many of them actually voted.
The pollsters also missed the other cell only demographics which are not typically democratic or vote republican. According to the Nielsen CD surveys the percentage of cell phone only households in the 35+ demographic is smaller than yours but significant still and increasing:
“21.5% for adults ages 35-44; 12.8% for adults ages 45-64; and 5.4% for adults ages 65+. However, the percentage of wireless-only adults within each age group has increased over time.” The average comes to 15%. Now if we apply the same percentage the CDC uses to estimate increase per year 5% we get an average of about 18% How much of that 18% would have swung for Reid is hard to say but again given Obama’s and the Dems low popularity it may well have swung for Angle.
Seventh the 200,000 registered voters the union GOTV reached are a question mark imo and I have a couple questions about them. How do you know that A) many of them would not be considered likely. That sounds like a very large missed or ‘unlikley’ demographic for a state with just over a million registered voters
B) the union calculations were accurate and they would mostly vote for Reid. Following on from A, I find it hard to believe that this 20% of the Nevada voter population would be mostly untapped Reid voters
C) How effective were the union efforts at i) getting these people to vote and ii) getting them to vote for Reid?
That’s my first take on your (worthy) comments. Any more and we’d have to get into deeper research and statistics and quite frankly I don’t feel like it right now. I don’t pretend to be 100% correct on all of this or logically airtight but I hope you’ll think about what I’ve said.
As you say everyone is entitled to their opinions but I think we need to inform them as best we can using the information available and thoughtful analysis as best we can :)
Just to follow up Brooke.
I’d like to make an additional point.
I don’t think you should be so cavalier about the glaring disparity between the pre-election, exit polls and the election results. Before the vote machines the polls had a MUCH better record for accuracy. This record began to deteriorate only AFTER the introduction of these vote machines and continued to get worse as more and more machines were imposed. Do you think that a mere coincidence?
Is it mere coincidence that these polls became so inaccurate only after the imposition of the vote machines?
I know you have suggested that the omission of the cell only households was an important factor in the polls (ostensible) inacurracy. However as I said in my previous post it is difficult to determine whether the impact this demographic might have had on the election.
In addition I did some digging into this cell phone issue and fwiw there is no scientific data (yet) to support he contention that the omission of cell only people compromises poll integrity