Reply #130: This original report is a good exampleof gobbledygook and what [View All]

[Stevepol]

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

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

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

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