Sunday, May 21, 2006
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Were the Exit Polls Right in 2004?
Just read this. It may take a while and will take some thought but slog through to the end, it's worth it. Here is the link
A Corrupted Election
Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right
By Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf
Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.
Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.
The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.
Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.
The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the âways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.â Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.
Grasping at explanations
Last November in the United States, as in Ukraine, the discrepancy between the presidential exit polls and the tallied count was far beyond the margin for error. At the time, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies hired to do the polling for the National Election Pool (a consortium of the nationâs five major broadcasters and the Associated Press), didnât provide an explanation for how this happened. They promised, however, that a full explanation would be forthcoming.
On Jan. 19, on the eve of the inauguration, Edison and Mitofsky released their report, "Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004", which generated headlines such as MSNBC's Exit Polls Prove That Bush Won. But, the report does nothing of the sort. It restates a thesis that the pollsters previously intimatedâthat the discrepancy was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."But the body of the report offers no data to substantiate this position. In fact, data presented in the report serve to rebut the thesis, and bolster suspicions that the official vote count was way, way off.
The report states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by chance ("sampling error"), and that a systematic bias is implicated.
With that statement the pollsters confirm the discrepancy we initially documented. The exit polls were based on more than 70,000 confidential questionnaires completed by randomly selected voters as they exited the polling place. The overall margin of error should have been under 1 percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than 5 percent a statistical impossibility.
The pollsters report that the precincts were appropriately chosen for sampling, in that the aggregated official results from the sampled precincts accurately reflected the official statewide ballot counts.
In saying this, Mitofsky and Edison vindicate a key piece of their methodologyâthe representativeness of their samples. If the fault indeed lies with the exit polls, the range of possibilities for error is therefore narrowed.
Finally, they report that the source of error is, in fact, within-precinct error (WPE), the difference between official precinct tallies and the exit poll samples from those same precincts. On average, across the country, the President did 6.5 percent better in the official vote count, relative to Kerry, than the exit polls projected.
This admission further narrows the range of possibilities. If the polling data are accurate, the only remaining possibilities are "non-response" bias (i.e., Bush voters disproportionately did not participate in the exit polls) and/or errors in the official tally.
However, having gotten to this point in their argument, Mitofsky and Edison summarily dismiss the possibility that the official count was wrong. They reject the election fraud hypothesis because, they say, âprecincts with touch screen and optical voting have essentially the same error rates as those using punch-card systems.
Indeed, they do. But this fact merely suggests that all three of these systems may have been corrupted. Indeed, there is little question about problems associated with both punch card systems (recall the Florida debacle in 2000) and mechanical voting machines, which are generally unreliable, vulnerable to tinkering and leave no paper trail. Thatâs why both systems have been slated for termination under the Helping America Vote Act of 2002.
Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.
Further, data that are underplayed in the report provide support for the hypothesis that the election was stolen.
First, the report acknowledges that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. And while that fact is consistent with allegations of fraud (if you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed), Mitofsky and Edison suggest, without providing any data or theory to back up their claim, that this discrepancy is somehow related to media coverage.
Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the presidentâs men would steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is small. Lo and behold, the report provides data that strongly bolster this theory. In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0âthe numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3).
Other report data undermine the argument that Kerry voters were more likely to complete the exit poll interview than Bush voters. If this were the case, then one would expect that in precincts where Kerry voters predominated, the cooperation rate would be higher than in pro-Bush precincts. But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds.
Corollary evidence
The exit polls themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election. Moreover, the exit poll discrepancy must be interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities during Election Day 2004. For many Americans, if not most, mass-scale fraud in a U.S. presidential election is an unthinkable possibility. But taken together, the allegations, the subsequently documented irregularities, systematic vulnerabilities, and implausible numbers suggest a coherent story of fraud and deceit.
What's more, the exit poll disparity doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't count those voters who were disenfranchised before they even got to the polls. The voting machine shortages in Democratic districts, the fraudulent felony purges of voter rolls, the barriers to registration, and the unmailed, lost, or cavalierly rejected absentee ballots all represent distortions to the vote count above and beyond what is measured by the exit poll disparity. The exit polls, by design, sample only those voters who have already overcome these hurdles.
The thesis of the Mitofsky/Edison exit poll report and the headlines that it generated are curiously detached from the numbers in the report itself. Statisticians who have studied the exit polls find substantial evidence to support the thesis that the vote counts, not the exit polls, were inaccurate.
Apparently, the pollsters at Mitofsky and Edison have found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy. Unfortunately, their patrons in the media find it correspondingly preferable to latch onto a non-confrontational thesis, however implausible, than to even suggest the possibility of foul play.
A comprehensive analysis of the Edison/Mitofsky report has been posted here.
A Corrupted Election
Despite what you may have heard, the exit polls were right
By Steve Freeman and Josh Mitteldorf
Recall the Election Day exit polls that suggested John Kerry had won a convincing victory? The media readily dismissed those polls and little has been heard about them since.
Many Americans, however, were suspicious. Although President Bush prevailed by 3 million votes in the official, tallied vote count, exit polls had projected a margin of victory of 5 million votes for Kerry. This unexplained 8 million vote discrepancy between the election night exit polls and the official count should raise a Chinese May Day of red flags.
The U.S. voting system is more vulnerable to manipulation than most Americans realize. Technologies such as electronic voting machines provide no confirmation that votes are counted as cast, and highly partisan election officials have the power to suppress votes and otherwise distort the count.
Exit polls are highly accurate. They remove most of the sources of potential polling error by identifying actual voters and asking them immediately afterward who they had voted for.
The reliability of exit polls is so generally accepted that the Bush administration helped pay for them during recent elections in Georgia, Belarus and Ukraine. Testifying before the House Committee on International Relations Dec. 7, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, explained that the Bush administration funded exit polls because they were one of the âways that would help to expose large-scale fraud.â Tefft pointed to the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count to argue that the Nov. 22 Ukraine election was stolen.
Grasping at explanations
Last November in the United States, as in Ukraine, the discrepancy between the presidential exit polls and the tallied count was far beyond the margin for error. At the time, Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, the two companies hired to do the polling for the National Election Pool (a consortium of the nationâs five major broadcasters and the Associated Press), didnât provide an explanation for how this happened. They promised, however, that a full explanation would be forthcoming.
On Jan. 19, on the eve of the inauguration, Edison and Mitofsky released their report, "Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004", which generated headlines such as MSNBC's Exit Polls Prove That Bush Won. But, the report does nothing of the sort. It restates a thesis that the pollsters previously intimatedâthat the discrepancy was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters."But the body of the report offers no data to substantiate this position. In fact, data presented in the report serve to rebut the thesis, and bolster suspicions that the official vote count was way, way off.
The report states that the difference between exit polls and official tallies was far too great to be explained by chance ("sampling error"), and that a systematic bias is implicated.
With that statement the pollsters confirm the discrepancy we initially documented. The exit polls were based on more than 70,000 confidential questionnaires completed by randomly selected voters as they exited the polling place. The overall margin of error should have been under 1 percent. But the official result deviated from the poll projections by more than 5 percent a statistical impossibility.
The pollsters report that the precincts were appropriately chosen for sampling, in that the aggregated official results from the sampled precincts accurately reflected the official statewide ballot counts.
In saying this, Mitofsky and Edison vindicate a key piece of their methodologyâthe representativeness of their samples. If the fault indeed lies with the exit polls, the range of possibilities for error is therefore narrowed.
Finally, they report that the source of error is, in fact, within-precinct error (WPE), the difference between official precinct tallies and the exit poll samples from those same precincts. On average, across the country, the President did 6.5 percent better in the official vote count, relative to Kerry, than the exit polls projected.
This admission further narrows the range of possibilities. If the polling data are accurate, the only remaining possibilities are "non-response" bias (i.e., Bush voters disproportionately did not participate in the exit polls) and/or errors in the official tally.
However, having gotten to this point in their argument, Mitofsky and Edison summarily dismiss the possibility that the official count was wrong. They reject the election fraud hypothesis because, they say, âprecincts with touch screen and optical voting have essentially the same error rates as those using punch-card systems.
Indeed, they do. But this fact merely suggests that all three of these systems may have been corrupted. Indeed, there is little question about problems associated with both punch card systems (recall the Florida debacle in 2000) and mechanical voting machines, which are generally unreliable, vulnerable to tinkering and leave no paper trail. Thatâs why both systems have been slated for termination under the Helping America Vote Act of 2002.
Notably, Mitofsky and Edison unsucessfully try to explain away the fact that, according to their data, only in precincts that used old-fashioned, hand-counted paper ballots did the official count and the exit polls fall within the normal sampling margin of error.
Further, data that are underplayed in the report provide support for the hypothesis that the election was stolen.
First, the report acknowledges that the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official count was considerably greater in the critical swing states. And while that fact is consistent with allegations of fraud (if you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed), Mitofsky and Edison suggest, without providing any data or theory to back up their claim, that this discrepancy is somehow related to media coverage.
Second, in light of the charges that the 2000 election was not legitimate, the Bush/Cheney campaign would have wanted to prevail in the popular vote. If fraud was afoot, it would make sense that the presidentâs men would steal votes in their strongholds, where the likelihood of detection is small. Lo and behold, the report provides data that strongly bolster this theory. In those precincts that went at least 80 percent for Bush, the average within-precinct-error (WPE) was a whopping 10.0âthe numerical difference between the exit poll predictions and the official count. That means that in Bush strongholds, Kerry, on average, received only about two-thirds of the votes that exit polls predicted. In contrast, in Kerry strongholds, exit polls matched the official count almost exactly (an average WPE of 0.3).
Other report data undermine the argument that Kerry voters were more likely to complete the exit poll interview than Bush voters. If this were the case, then one would expect that in precincts where Kerry voters predominated, the cooperation rate would be higher than in pro-Bush precincts. But in fact, the data suggest that Bush voters were slightly more likely to complete the survey: 56 percent of voters completed the survey in the Bush strongholds, while 53 percent cooperated in Kerry strongholds.
Corollary evidence
The exit polls themselves are a strong indicator of a corrupted election. Moreover, the exit poll discrepancy must be interpreted in the context of more than 100,000 officially logged reports of irregularities during Election Day 2004. For many Americans, if not most, mass-scale fraud in a U.S. presidential election is an unthinkable possibility. But taken together, the allegations, the subsequently documented irregularities, systematic vulnerabilities, and implausible numbers suggest a coherent story of fraud and deceit.
What's more, the exit poll disparity doesn't tell the whole story. It doesn't count those voters who were disenfranchised before they even got to the polls. The voting machine shortages in Democratic districts, the fraudulent felony purges of voter rolls, the barriers to registration, and the unmailed, lost, or cavalierly rejected absentee ballots all represent distortions to the vote count above and beyond what is measured by the exit poll disparity. The exit polls, by design, sample only those voters who have already overcome these hurdles.
The thesis of the Mitofsky/Edison exit poll report and the headlines that it generated are curiously detached from the numbers in the report itself. Statisticians who have studied the exit polls find substantial evidence to support the thesis that the vote counts, not the exit polls, were inaccurate.
Apparently, the pollsters at Mitofsky and Edison have found it more expedient to provide an explanation unsupported by theory, data or precedent than to impugn the machinery of American democracy. Unfortunately, their patrons in the media find it correspondingly preferable to latch onto a non-confrontational thesis, however implausible, than to even suggest the possibility of foul play.
A comprehensive analysis of the Edison/Mitofsky report has been posted here.
It's OK when Bush sings in Spanish
I guess it's OK when he sings the national anthem in Spanish to get elected.
Here's the link http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/02/bush-sing-spanish/
President Bush, 4/28/06
I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.
But in his book American Dynasty, Kevin Phillips notes that during Bush's first presidential campaign, he would often sing the national anthem in Spanish. From pg. 142:
When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, he would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parties, sometimes joining in singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, sometimes partying with a "Viva Bush" mariachi band flown in from Texas.
Here's the link http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/02/bush-sing-spanish/
President Bush, 4/28/06
I think the national anthem ought to be sung in English, and I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English and they ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English.
But in his book American Dynasty, Kevin Phillips notes that during Bush's first presidential campaign, he would often sing the national anthem in Spanish. From pg. 142:
When visiting cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, or Philadelphia, in pivotal states, he would drop in at Hispanic festivals and parties, sometimes joining in singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Spanish, sometimes partying with a "Viva Bush" mariachi band flown in from Texas.
This will go down on your permanent record!!!!
Monday, May 01, 2006
I'm sitting here in my computer class. Thank god it is the last class for this semester. As a part of our teacher preparation program we have to purchase a subscription to Taskstream.com so we can post our lesson plans and our professors can review our work. The subscription is for one year and it is for around $40. Not too onerous considering the price of actual textbooks we are forced to buy and read.
We need to take a technology class in order to get our certification. They teach things like how to cut and paste in Word, how to set up a formula in Excel, and how to compress and email a PowerPoint presentation. All useful stuff, but all stuff that I already know. I was able to test out of all of the general computer stuff and the Microsoft program sessions because of my stellar computer skills.
I did have to show up to the classes learn how to use Taskstream.com. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out. For me it is a clear, easy to use program and I like it a lot. That did not get me out of showing up to 5 of these classes to learn how to use it.
My instructor is talking about assembling our online portfolio that employers can look at once we get our credential. She is really selling this feature of the website. I think it is neat that we can put all of our reflections, lessons, and units in one place for someone to look at if they like. The problem is that NOBODY is going to look at this once I graduate from Sac State.
It reminds me of the time when I was a sophomore in college and a professor swore to me that future employers would care if I got a B or a C in my second semester of Spanish. Other professors during my undergrad experience stressed the importance of GPA to prospective employers.
Well, turns out it was all bullshit. Nobody cares if I had a 3.0 in college. All the jobs I have acquired were either by nepotism, a good reference, a clear resume and a good series of interviews. More often than not, getting a job usually boils down to being in the right place at the right time.
If you are out of high school and someone tells you hat something is going to go down on your permanent record, tell them to go pound sand. Usually people who have spent their life in academia have no idea what it takes to get a job in the real world.
I'm sitting here in my computer class. Thank god it is the last class for this semester. As a part of our teacher preparation program we have to purchase a subscription to Taskstream.com so we can post our lesson plans and our professors can review our work. The subscription is for one year and it is for around $40. Not too onerous considering the price of actual textbooks we are forced to buy and read.
We need to take a technology class in order to get our certification. They teach things like how to cut and paste in Word, how to set up a formula in Excel, and how to compress and email a PowerPoint presentation. All useful stuff, but all stuff that I already know. I was able to test out of all of the general computer stuff and the Microsoft program sessions because of my stellar computer skills.
I did have to show up to the classes learn how to use Taskstream.com. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out. For me it is a clear, easy to use program and I like it a lot. That did not get me out of showing up to 5 of these classes to learn how to use it.
My instructor is talking about assembling our online portfolio that employers can look at once we get our credential. She is really selling this feature of the website. I think it is neat that we can put all of our reflections, lessons, and units in one place for someone to look at if they like. The problem is that NOBODY is going to look at this once I graduate from Sac State.
It reminds me of the time when I was a sophomore in college and a professor swore to me that future employers would care if I got a B or a C in my second semester of Spanish. Other professors during my undergrad experience stressed the importance of GPA to prospective employers.
Well, turns out it was all bullshit. Nobody cares if I had a 3.0 in college. All the jobs I have acquired were either by nepotism, a good reference, a clear resume and a good series of interviews. More often than not, getting a job usually boils down to being in the right place at the right time.
If you are out of high school and someone tells you hat something is going to go down on your permanent record, tell them to go pound sand. Usually people who have spent their life in academia have no idea what it takes to get a job in the real world.
Phil Collins Still Sucks
Let me preface this by saying that I am not a big music guy. All the tunes that I listen to are on my radio when I am driving around town. I have not bought a new CD in two years and the only current "music" that I pay attention to is on American Idol.
I have old man's disease. Most of the new stuff I hear all sounds the same to me. I do not have the time or the energy to figure out what is cool and listen to it. I used to watch MTV to stay current, but they stopped playing videos a while ago. I guess that is when I stopped paying attention.
The music that I do listen to is old and familiar. The radio stations that I listen to play music from 1964 to 1995 in a variety of formats. There is the 80's station, the top hits station, the ROCK station, and Jack (or Howard or Phil or whatever). Even if you do not live in Sacramento I'm sure you have these stations where you live. Radio is the same all over the country.
These stations like to play music that is nostalgic, I can dig it. After all, that is why I listen. Hearing songs from my past can connect me to college, high school or different times of my life. Sometimes I hear songs that I have not heard in years and I appreciate them for what they are. Good solid tunes that I enjoyed when it was out. Hearing songs like, "Joey" by Concrete Blonde or "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Voodoo
I have a message for all of you younglings that did not grow up with the music of the 70's and 80's. Much of it really sucked. It was bad when it was first released and it is still terrible today. Now, I understand that there is a certain campiness to some songs from that era. They are so bad that they are good. Songs like "YMCA" or "Ice, Ice Baby" that were reviled when they came out are kinda fun to hear again when you least expect it.
The price we pay for hearing the music that we like or that we can make fun of is dear. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to hear Phil Collins or Genesis again. Or Mike and the Mechanics. Or Styx. Why oh why do radio programmers feel the need to play anything from Peter Gabriel's "So" album. Why on earth did I hear "We Built This City (on rock and roll)" by Starship when I was driving downtown yesterday?
This music was shoved down my throat when I was young. I survived hearing "Teacher, Teacher" by .38 Special three times a day for six months when I was delivering newspapers in High School. Yes I survived this music, but as you can see it has permanently scarred me.
Why am I forced to relive the trauma? Are people really clamoring to hear Ace of Base or Pat Benatar
I know what you are saying, "If you don't like it why don't you just turn the channel?" To you I say, "What the hell else am I going to listen to while my favorite AM talk shows are playing commercials?"
I have old man's disease. Most of the new stuff I hear all sounds the same to me. I do not have the time or the energy to figure out what is cool and listen to it. I used to watch MTV to stay current, but they stopped playing videos a while ago. I guess that is when I stopped paying attention.
The music that I do listen to is old and familiar. The radio stations that I listen to play music from 1964 to 1995 in a variety of formats. There is the 80's station, the top hits station, the ROCK station, and Jack (or Howard or Phil or whatever). Even if you do not live in Sacramento I'm sure you have these stations where you live. Radio is the same all over the country.
These stations like to play music that is nostalgic, I can dig it. After all, that is why I listen. Hearing songs from my past can connect me to college, high school or different times of my life. Sometimes I hear songs that I have not heard in years and I appreciate them for what they are. Good solid tunes that I enjoyed when it was out. Hearing songs like, "Joey" by Concrete Blonde or "Mexican Radio" by Wall of Voodoo
I have a message for all of you younglings that did not grow up with the music of the 70's and 80's. Much of it really sucked. It was bad when it was first released and it is still terrible today. Now, I understand that there is a certain campiness to some songs from that era. They are so bad that they are good. Songs like "YMCA" or "Ice, Ice Baby" that were reviled when they came out are kinda fun to hear again when you least expect it.
The price we pay for hearing the music that we like or that we can make fun of is dear. For the life of me, I cannot fathom why anyone would want to hear Phil Collins or Genesis again. Or Mike and the Mechanics. Or Styx. Why oh why do radio programmers feel the need to play anything from Peter Gabriel's "So" album. Why on earth did I hear "We Built This City (on rock and roll)" by Starship when I was driving downtown yesterday?
This music was shoved down my throat when I was young. I survived hearing "Teacher, Teacher" by .38 Special three times a day for six months when I was delivering newspapers in High School. Yes I survived this music, but as you can see it has permanently scarred me.
Why am I forced to relive the trauma? Are people really clamoring to hear Ace of Base or Pat Benatar
I know what you are saying, "If you don't like it why don't you just turn the channel?" To you I say, "What the hell else am I going to listen to while my favorite AM talk shows are playing commercials?"
Friday, May 19, 2006
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