I need some help. Can anyone make sense of this?

[Bread and Circus]

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


November 17, 2004

EXIT POLL UPDATE....The exit polls this year indicated a big lead for John Kerry, but when the final vote tallies came in George Bush had earned a decisive victory. Should we be suspicious of this? Is it evidence of possible vote fraud?

I've already expressed my skepticism about this, but last week I posted a paper by Steven Freeman that laid out the exit poll case so that people could judge for themselves. Today, though, Ruy Teixeira throws yet more cold water on the fraud thesis by taking a look at raw exit poll results from past years. Here's the basic data for the popular vote:

Year


Exit Poll Results


Dem Lead


Dem Actual

1988


Dukakis: 50.3%
Bush: 49.7%


+0.6%


-7.7%

1992


Clinton: 46%
Bush: 33.2%


+12.8%


+5.6%

1996


Clinton: 52.2%
Dole: 37.5%


+14.7%


+8.5%

2000


Gore: 48.5%
Bush: 46.2%


+2.3%


+0.5%

As you can see, the raw exit poll results always overstate the Democratic vote, sometimes by as much as eight percentage points. So the fact that the raw results this year overstated Kerry's actual vote tally is hardly cause for alarm.


http://www.tcf.org/publications/pow/nov17_2004.pdf

---

I gotta go right now, I will postulate more on it later.

[lonestarnot]

1. Well of course!

They cheated...subtract from Kerry....add to bushit! Very simple. No need to make sense of cheaters means, ways must be demonstrated!

[papau]

2. stop hiding the GOP CHEATING - Ruy Teixeira DOES NOT dump on fraud idea

stop hiding the GOP CHEATING - Ruy Teixeira DOES NOT dump on fraud idea

http://www.tcf.org/publications/pow/nov17_2004.pdf

He says exit polls are always off - and always corrected - but he concedes that this years corrections may be much larger than the usual corrections (The raw before "corrections" exit polls were in 88 50.3 Dukakis vs 49.7 Bush, in 2000 Gore 48.5, Bush 46.2)

DOES UNWEIGHTED/UNCORRECTED RESULTS - MEANING RAW USING THE 4 PM STAT MODEL - ALWAYS BEING DIFFERENT FROM ACTUAL MEAN EXIT POLLS ARE ARE DEM BIASED - OR DOES IT MEAN THE GOP ALWAYS CHEAT?

So was there a cultural surge at the end of the campaign -as occurred in the past per the "plausible" explanation of Democracy Corps' exit poll statement for 2004-

or was there there the usual GOP fraud.

In other countries there would not be a question - we know the math - we know that exit polling works - and we'd cry foul. But in the US we want to "fix" the problem by finding out where exit pollsters stood relative to the accuracy of the exit poll in their area.


http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/10/voting/ind ...

Was the election stolen?
The system is clearly broken. But there is no evidence that Bush won because of voter fraud. By Farhad Manjoo

Nov. 10, 2004 | Election Day 2004, like all national elections, saw its share of glitches, ineptitude, fraud, and intimidation. ...Salon has examined some of the most popular Kerry-actually-won theories currently making the rounds online, and none of them hold up under rigorous scrutiny.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Exit Polls...

...are used worldwide to verify elections, and specifically to help determine if fraud occurred. They are highly respected non-partisan polls. Their methods have undoubtedly improved over the years, which is why they continue to be used everywhere for this purpose.

Recently, in the Ukraine, it was the discrepancy between the Exit Polls and the tallied results that prompted 500,000 people to take to the streets to protest that fraudulent election.

Here, the TV networks hid Kerry's big numbers in the Exit Polls by starting to mix the Exit Poll data with the tallied results sometime between 4 pm and 6 pm on election day, thus making it appear that the Exit Polls corroborated a Bush victory, when the only evidence of a Bush victory came from vote tabulation machines using SECRET source code (no public review!) owned as proprietary by highly partisan Republican voting machine companies who had insisted on no paper trail for electronic voting.

What reason do we have for confidence in the tallied result? None, in fact. Which should we trust--non-partisan Exit Polls with a worldwide reputation for accuracy, or Republican-controlled vote tabulation?

You wrote: "I've already expressed my skepticism about this..."

So, you're pre-judging it, are you?

"Today, though, Ruy Teixeira throws yet more cold water on the fraud thesis..."

"...yet more cold water..."?? What OTHER "cold water" has been "thrown" on the fraud thesis? Your personal opinion that you have "already expressed"?

In fact, there is voluminous evidence of election fraud from several different kinds of statistical analysis (not just of the Exit Polls, but also of paper vs. electronic voting, demographics, prior voting patterns, presidential vs. lower ticket, etc.), and 57,000 complaints to Congress including evidence of several different kinds of electronic vote machinery fraud, fraud involving Democratic voter registrations, and massive vote suppression by Republican election officials in Democratic, minority and poor areas.

You conveniently ignore all other evidence.

And, frankly, I would never base any thesis on the thin "evidence" you present above. Where did you get these numbers? Whose numbers are they? You say they are "raw exit poll results"? What does that MEAN? (--perhaps that this "raw data" HAS NOT BEEN weighted for demographics, and is NOT the actual Exit Poll PREDICTIONS?) How can we know what this data means with so little information?

You just toss it out here, and run off.

"I gotta go right now, I will postulate more on it later."

Really, I can't wait for your further "postulations."

But let me just make a few "postulations" on the Ruy Teixeira (Century Foundation) piece that you reference.

It proves nothing.

He calls the Republican-controlled electronic vote tabulation machine results "the real world."

He implies that the Exit Polls data on TV network screens on Nov.2 had probably not been weighted for demographics, and he says this on the basis of no information whatsoever. A few paragraphs later he says he doesn't know. (It is extremely unlikely that Exit Poll companies would feed unweighted data to the networks as their professional prediction of who was winning!) (If they did so, they should all be fired!)

He then references and extensively quotes a Greenberg Quinlan Rossner study which has the subtitle "Why Americans wanted change but voted for continuity?" The study was published Nov. 5, 2004--a month BEFORE the election! (How can they be making "postulations" about an event that has not yet occurred?)

Neither 'Bread and Circus', nor Teixeira, nor Greenberg Quinlan Rossner say one word about the Republican-controlled source code for vote tabulation, the unverifiability of the election (no paper trail in a third of the country), or massive vote suppression against Democratic voters by Republican election officials.

Have I wasted my time by analyzing 'Bread and Circus''s sloppy, unfactual, self-opinionated, useless, unverifiable "postulations"? Maybe. But we do need to be aware of the crap that will be thrown at us, and this is a good example of it.

[Bread and Circus]

4. Whoa there partner....I'm on your side!

I think. Meaning, I believe fraud was perpetrated on a grand scale.

Rather, this article was brought up to me and I had not seen it
before nor had I seen it critiqued. It showed up in my "Mitofsky
is an assbrain" thread. I haven't had time to look at it and my
wife was literally telling me to get off DU because we had to go
to the store. I just had hoped some DU'ers would get a hold of
it and pick it apart. We are basing a lot of our belief of fraud in
the discrepancy between the exit polls and the election returns.
This article suggests that Raw data exit polls has tended to favor
dems in many elections which would undercut our point. I just
want an honest debate.

Now, I am going to read the article again.

Also, does anyone know if the 2004 exit poll data we have is
weighted or unweighted?

[Igel]

5. It has to be weighted, in some form.

They have to take previous results + expected trends to make sense of the early numbers. No link; just what they have to do.

BTW, I've been wondering: the Ukrainian exit polls ... early numbers or final numbers?

[Bread and Circus]

6. Well, I'll respond myself....it seems that the article may be misleading..

In some ways it is very convincing against the case
of fraud. However, it never clarifies if the 2004 exit
poll data we are all arguing about is weighted or unweighted.
In reading the feedback comments, it seems amongst many that
the data we are talking about is weighted, thereby discrediting
the article. We do know that in all the previous polls they
site the Democratic candidate's support was overstated in unweighted
data.

So, as we know either the exit polls this time were junk or
there was fraud. It has to be one or the other.

I favor fraud but it could be just the exit polls.

I think the jury is still out and we don't really have the information
we need to come to any conclusion. Mitofsky is holding his cards
back and that's what pisses me off. HE has the answer in that
if his raw data were released we could figure out what the hell really
happened.

Frankly, I buy that there has been a degree of vote spoilage that
disadvantages Dems going back decades. However, I don't buy the
argument that wholescale fraud that we suspect now has been
going on all this time.

Let's be sensible.