Updated Analysis of Exit Poll Controversies Released by SSRC

[dzika]

(sorry if this has already been posted)

The National Research Commission on Elections and Voting brings scholarly research, knowledge, and perspective to bear on efforts to improve the integrity of the American electoral process. Organized by the Social Science Research Council, the Commission website serves as a national, nonpartisan clearinghouse of data, independent research, and other resources to support the efforts of scholars and organizations studying voting and election issues. In providing this public service, the SSRC intends to help deepen both public and scholarly awareness of electoral process concerns that must be addressed in order to ensure that our elections and voting system remains legitimate and fair.

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Updated Analysis of Exit Poll Controversies Released

Three Commission members have completed a working paper (pdf) providing further analysis of controversies surrounding exit polls during the 2004 Presidential Election.

From the PDF report:

A Review of Recent Controversies Concerning the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Polls

10 March 2005

Michael Traugott, University of Michigan
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)

THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COMMISSION ON ELECTIONS AND VOTING
A Project of the Social Science Research Council
810 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10019 USA
http://elections.ssrc.org

I. Introduction

One feature of the end of the 2004 presidential campaign was the leaking of preliminary exit poll data from the National Election Pool (NEP) on several websites during the afternoon of November 2.1 The leaks were not completely unexpected because a similar incident occurred during the 2000 presidential campaign. Several websites announced in advance their intention to locate and release early data, and the activity and visibility of several websites and blogs had increased significantly during this campaign. The difference in 2004 was that the early exit poll data were incorrect in that they suggested that John Kerry was ahead in the national poll and leading in several key states that would have been sufficient to give him an Electoral College majority. Furthermore, even the final data had a Kerry bias in their estimate of the outcome.2

What was also unusual about the leaks was the fact that the campaigns took the information seriously. There was a brief period during the afternoon on Election Day when the Kerry campaign went into seclusion to think about an acceptance speech and an even briefer period when the Bush campaign team contemplated an unexpected loss.3 And the stock market took a brief plunge at the close of trading on November 2, apparently based on this information as well.4 When the Republicans quickly turned to their on-the-ground intelligence in the key states of Florida, Ohio, and Virginia and it gave them a different picture of the likely outcome there, their confidence in victory returned.

By the end of the evening, when the full set of NEP data and the output of their statistical models were available, none of the network partners had made any incorrect calls of individual states, and it was clear at a reasonable hour that President Bush had been re-elected.5 However, many bloggers and websites were concerned that the early exit poll results did in fact accurately represent the voters' preferences, and the differences in actual vote outcomes from the exit poll results may have stemmed from fraud, problems with new voting technology, or administrative malfeasance in specific locations.

As a result, there was sufficient public discussion and consternation that a committee of the U.S. House headed by Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) held open sessions about election administration and the exit polls to which several of the principles were invited for presentations. NEP and its partners remained relatively silent through all of this, and it was not until January 19, 2005 that a report was released by Edison Research/Mitofsky International about what happened with the exit polls on Election Day.6 That report has now become a topic of extended discussion on the Web.

Link to the report in PDF format:
http://elections.ssrc.org/research/ExitPollReport031005.pdf


COMMENT: My initial impression of this report is that they agree with Mitofsky and NEP on the "reluctant responder" theory.

[Be Brave]

1. "The difference in 2004 was that the early exit poll data were incorrect

in that they suggested that John Kerry was ahead in the national poll and leading in several key states that would have been sufficient to give him an Electoral College majority."

That says it all.

[dzika]

2. Conclusion

So, are they saying that more data is needed from NEP before the problems with the exit polls can be better understood? AND that NEP is not going to release the necessary data due to political sensitivities?


From "III. What Happened with the Exit Polls?", last paragraph:

What must necessarily become more subjective, having eliminated the most directly testable explanations for the bias, is an attempt to explain what other sources there might be among many unobserved and unmeasured possible explanations. The NEP report concludes that the most likely source of the errors is differential response patterns by Kerry and Bush voters leaving the polls - that is, Kerry voters were more likely to agree to be interviewed while Bush voters were less likely. The authors include a simulation of the likely magnitude of the differential response rates, and then they speculate about contributing factors. These conclusions must be inferred (of necessity, since no information is available on the refusers) from the finding that the average WPE was greatest where younger and more highly educated people were interviewers, irrespective of gender.34 The analysis also suggests that interviewers hired later and who describe themselves as "somewhat" or "not very well" trained also were associated with data that produced higher average WPE's. From these analyses, the NEP leaders conclude they must pay more careful attention to interviewer recruitment, including trying to hire older interviewers, and to their training. These concerns would undoubtedly fall on any researchers' list of ways to improve their data collection if they had additional resources. Given the current information available to NEP, however, it is not possible to estimate what level of error reduction would occur for a given investment in improving any one or all of these features of their studies.

And they conclude the report:

IV. Conclusion

NEP has moved quickly, in conjunction with its partners, to change its procedures for 2008. The first decision is that no results will be provided to their sponsors until 4 p.m., about three hours later than in 2004 (New York Times, November 18).35 It will remain to be seen how effective these changes will be in eliminating leaking. The leaking of early exit poll results is not being done by the NEP staff; it comes from news executives and people working on analysis desks at news organizations who have access to the early data.

The information on the exit poll methodology is still being consumed by independent analysts, and there are now calls for the release of raw and supplementary data from sample precincts. This would include contextual data about the vote history in those areas as well as information about the interviewers.36 This is unlikely to happen, and for justifiable reasons. Such information would be too politically sensitive in that disclosure of the sample sites could subject the exit poll interviewing to manipulation by political organizations and interest groups on Election Day if the same sites are always chosen.

[GettysbergII]

4. I wonder if it would be possible in '06 & '08 for 'we, the people' to fund

an independent exit poll run by , maybe, Zogby for the express purpose of validating the legitimacy of the vote.

Also regarding: "This is unlikely to happen, and for justifiable reasons. Such information would be too politically sensitive in that disclosure of the sample sites could subject the exit poll interviewing to manipulation by political organizations and interest groups on Election Day if the same sites are always chosen."

Does this mean the 'non-partisan' networks themselves had no access to this information? And exactly how difficult would it be for a determined organization to identify the location of the sample sites on election day simple by monitoring the polls which both parties do anyway?

[GettysbergII]

3. The SSRC is closely associated with the Council on Foreign Relations

which while bipartisan is also a highly elitist and undemocratic. As such I'm concerned about just how much The National Research Commission on Elections and Voting is an 'independent scholarly research group' and how much it is a just another ruling class tool for social control. Quite possibly a goodly part of the ruling class takes umbrage at the methodologies of right wing but that doesn't mean they want the rabble poking their unwashed noses into the business of running this country or find the concept of 'one man, one vote' any less childish that the wingnuts do.

At any rate here's a link to my research on the SSRC I posted on Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/17/211138/455

<snip>
The National Research Commission on Elections and Voting was created by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in October of 2004 allegedly as a non-partisan independent initiative intended to bring scholarly research, knowledge and perspective to bear on improving the integrity of the electoral process, regardless of the outcome of the November 2nd election. http://election04.ssrc.org/pressrelease/October2004.pdf

However in my mind while it might be bipartisan it is very unlikely that the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting is a genuinely independent research group since the SSRC itself appears to be a tool of the corporate elite as of the 16 members of the SSCR Board of Directors, I've been able to identify at least five including the Chair of the Board as being members of the Council of Foreign Relations simply from checking the SSCR's own biographies or the Board members own Curriculum Vitae.They are:

http://www.ssrc.org/inside/about/board_of_directors.page

Lisa Anderson - Chair of the Board

Barry Eichengreen

Stanley N. Katz

Orville Schell

Kathryn Sikkink

documentation follows...
<snip>

[Helga Scow Stern]

5. Unfortunately, the academicians appointed to DNC committee

are members of either SSCR or NRCE. They responded days after the election to refute claims of fraud.

[GettysbergII]

6. Right, and even the criticisms of the Dems that stood up on Jan. 6.....

......were within the findings of the NRCE preliminary report made public on 12-22-04, which were:

http://election04.ssrc.org/research/InterimReport122204.pdf

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.

[dzika]

7. NEP, SSRC, EAC

all seem to agree with each other on the issue of exit polls.

I noticed that one of the "solutions" to "fixing" the 2008 exit polls is to not release any data until 4PM. This goes along with the idea that the leaks and the bloggers are root problem that NEP is trying to fix. "The people are the problem not the system."

Elected officials, corporate media monopolies and those beholden to them all have the same thing to gain from fair elections: nothing.

[GettysbergII]

9. With friends like this, eh.

I noticed that one of the "solutions" to "fixing" the 2008 exit polls is to not release any data until 4PM.

Of course the other solution would be hand counted paper ballots


Elected officials, corporate media monopolies and those beholden to them all have the same thing to gain from fair elections: nothing.

Well said! And there in lies the rub.

[anaxarchos]

8. Sadly...

...Michael Traugott is yet another researcher funded by grants for projects that "will be guided by interactions with practitioners who administer voting process, and with companies which build and market electronic voting machines."

http://www.digitalgovernment.org/search/projects/project.jsp?ID=149

Really sad...

[Melissa G]

10. Hi Dzika, I was who originally posted this link but I pulled it because

I saw that we, and I mean DU, Daily Kos, Solar Bus, Bradblog and lots of others, are sponsoring this IMHO, rather weak and misleading paper.
Are our folks with credentials going to help them clean up this working paper?

[Helga Scow Stern]

11. How are we sponsoring it?

Am I missing something?

[Melissa G]

13. If you go to the sponsoring site and look under organizations

you will find all kinds of cool groups including us here at DU, Daily Kos, Solar Bus, Bradblog etc...

http://elections.ssrc.org/organizations/directory/

[GettysbergII]

15. Those organizations mentioned are just links not sponsers

Melissa G writes:

I saw that we, and I mean DU, Daily Kos, Solar Bus, Bradblog and lots of others, are sponsoring this IMHO, rather weak and misleading paper.
Are our folks with credentials going to help them clean up this working paper?

Boy unless you read the fine print on the left side of the webpage I could see how people will think the list is sponsering organizations but they are just 'links'

From the 'Organizations & Groups' section of the National Research Commission on Elections and Voting website

Descriptions are extracted from mission statements available at each organization's web site. In providing these links as a public service, the Social Science Research Council is not endorsing, evaluating, or legitimizing the veracity of any data, claims, or opinions contained therein.

Further while there are a lot of cool progressive sites listed there are also vile nasty regressive ones such as:

American Enterprise Institute
Drudge Report
The Heritage Foundation
Ohio Secretary of State Election Services
Republican National Committee
and one possible CIA front Org
IFES

[Melissa G]

17. Thanks Gettysburg, I obviously did not look at this long enough..

So was I right in the first place and we have a possible Rove influence here? What is the scoop on the Social Science Research Center?

[GettysbergII]

18. More like the Council on Foreign Relations than Rove

The CFR is the premier bipartisan organization of the ruling class. While it may be bipartisan it's bipartisan in the oligarthic rather than democratic sense of the word. To understand how it operates in regard to foreign policy and U.S elections I refer you to two recent articles by Laurence Shoup in Z Magazine (The CFR itself recognises Laurence Shoup as providing the best critical analysis of the CFR):

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Oct2004/shoup1004.html

Bush, Kerry, and the CFR
by Laurence Shoup

One of the prime characteristics of the U.S. upper class is its high level of organization. One of the central organizations, accurately called “the citadel of America’s establishment,” is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Founded in 1921, the CFR is the most influential of all private policy planning groups. Its great strength is mainly exercised behind the scenes and stems from its unique position among policy groups: it is simultaneously both a think tank for foreign and economic policy and also has a large membership comprising some of the most important individuals in U.S. economic, intellectual, and political life. The Council has a yearly budget of about $30 million and a staff of over 200.

Here's a table in the article of the prominent CFR members who were supporters of Bush:


Here's a table in the article of the prominent CFR members who were supporters of Kerry:


Some other members that comprise the CFR are:

A review of director lists of major corporations found that the following corporations have at least three of their directors who are also CFR members:

* American Insurance Group and Citigroup: Eight directors
* J.P. Morgan Chase, Boeing: Six directors
* The Blackstone Group, Conoco, Disney/ABC: Five directors
* Kissinger-McLarty Associates, IBM, Exxon Mobil, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, Viacom/CBS, Time Warner: Four directors
* The Carlyle Group, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse First Boston. Washington Post/Newsweek, Chevron Texaco, Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Alliance Capital: Three directors

And this is basically why we see so little difference between the foreign policy objectives of Democrats and Republicans. In an earlier article, Shoup talked about how the war in Iraq was a truly bipartisan effort:

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Mar2003/shoup0303.html

Behind the Bipartisan Drive Toward War
by Laurence H. Shoup

In mid-2002 the CFR, together with the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University, established a 23 member planning group to formulate the U.S. war aims and the political and economic rules for a post-war Iraq. One of the project directors was Rachel Bronson and members included Kenneth Pollack, as well as corporate leaders (Boeing, PFC Energy), university professors (Princeton, Yale, Vermont) a Naval War College professor, a Senate on Foreign Relations staffer, and representatives from the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the Brookings Institution, the James Baker III Institute for Public Policy, and nine staffers from the CFR. A report, Guiding Principles for U.S. Post -Conflict Policy in Iraq, was produced by the Council in late 2002.

I highly recommend both these articles to all who wish to understand why both parties support the war in Iraq and pay so little attention to the wnats and needs of the vast majority of this country. While it's quite possible that Bush and the elite of the extreme right wing are no longer playing 'according to cricket' with the CFR, I really doubt that either the CFR or the extreme right wing sees that this 'family squabble' is any of the business of 'the rabble'.

[Melissa G]

19. Thanks Gettysburg!

Great research and explanation. I saw this info but did not have the background to interpret it. Thanks for the help!

[davidgmills]

12. Is it just me, or do any of you find it odd

That these authors do not list their credentials other than to say which schools they are affiliated with?

How can you judge their work if you don't know something about their credentials?

Has any one looked up these guys to see if they are faculty?

[Igel]

16. Here's a quick Googling:

Michael Traugott, University of Michigan
http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/mtraugott.html
Recent publications:
Presidential Polls and the News Media, with Paul J. Lavrakas and Peter V. Miller (Westview Press: Boulder, CO, 1995).
"The Impact of Media Polls on the Public," In Media Polls in American Politics, ed. Thomas E. Mann and Gary R. Orren (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1992) pp. 125-149.
"Who Votes by Mail: A Dynamic Model of the Individual-Level Consequences of Vote-by-Mail Systems," with Adam Berinsky and Nancy Burns. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 25, 1998.

Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis, PhD, Political Science, UC-Berkeley
http://ps.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/bhighton.html
recent grants/awards:
Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation. 2003-04. “How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Blacks and Latinos” (with Raymond Wolfinger). $55,000. Carnegie Scholar, Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2001-03. “Race and Representation in the U.S. Congress.” $100,000. Best Paper on State Politics given at any political science conference in 2002 (with Raymond Wolfinger and Megan Mullin), presented by the State Politics and Policy Section of the American Political Science Association

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley), Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980
http://www.polisci.berkeley.edu/Faculty/bio/permanent/Brady,H/
His current research interests include political participation in America, Estonia, and Russia, the dynamics of public opinion and political campaigns, the evaluation of social welfare programs, and the impact of computers on social policy making. Brady has co-authored two books. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada in 1992-1993. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995)

[fasttense]

14. Only in the richest and most powerful country in the world,

are accurate, reliable and predictive exit polls unable to be developed. They maybe rich and powerful but they sure are stupid.