Vote Fraud! But I don't mean that in a bad way...
The Votemaster over at Electoral Vote.com has linked to and is hosting a "study" by a University of Pennsylvania professor who insinuates the complete impossibility of the President being re-elected legitimately in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida based solely on non-scrubbed raw data released by the exit pollsters by mistake. He claims that there is no possible way for the vote counts to be legitimate because they diverge so much from the exit polls. I have a few problems with this study though. However, I am not a statistician or a pollster, so this is just a list of things that twitch my BS meter.
One: Its pretty obvious from the tone of this paper (entitled "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy") that Dr. Steven Freeman was quite convinced of his premise before seeking his data. I think he would have been pretty hard to convince of anything other than that Bush "stole the white house"< /end liberal shrieking>.
Two: He doesn't actually have the data he uses as the basis of his thesis. He collected the data from CNN's webpage which supposedly had the unscrubbed data up (again by mistake) until 12:30 a.m. on election night. He has no idea how accurate this pure raw data reflected what CNN actually received from the National Election Pool's pollsters. I just don't like that he is coming to these conclusions based on second- or thrid-hand data.
Three: He takes as inviolable that the exit polls are correct and that the vote count is wrong. His reason for treating the NEP/CNN polls as inconvtrovertible is that a group of students at Brigham Young University have, in the past, been remarkable accurate with their exit poll in Utah, and were again this year. So, obviously since one exit poll is accurate, then ALL exit polls must be accurate, especially when employing different methodologies and different questions and different poll-takers. This seems overly confident to me.
I have posted a comment on a vaguely-related thread at LGF and emailed Shannon Love from Chicagoboyz.net about this for additional fisking because she did such an excellent job debunking the bogus Lancet Study on Iraqi deaths. Hopefully they can do better than my simple BS-meter allows me to.
One: Its pretty obvious from the tone of this paper (entitled "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy") that Dr. Steven Freeman was quite convinced of his premise before seeking his data. I think he would have been pretty hard to convince of anything other than that Bush "stole the white house"< /end liberal shrieking>.
Two: He doesn't actually have the data he uses as the basis of his thesis. He collected the data from CNN's webpage which supposedly had the unscrubbed data up (again by mistake) until 12:30 a.m. on election night. He has no idea how accurate this pure raw data reflected what CNN actually received from the National Election Pool's pollsters. I just don't like that he is coming to these conclusions based on second- or thrid-hand data.
Three: He takes as inviolable that the exit polls are correct and that the vote count is wrong. His reason for treating the NEP/CNN polls as inconvtrovertible is that a group of students at Brigham Young University have, in the past, been remarkable accurate with their exit poll in Utah, and were again this year. So, obviously since one exit poll is accurate, then ALL exit polls must be accurate, especially when employing different methodologies and different questions and different poll-takers. This seems overly confident to me.
I have posted a comment on a vaguely-related thread at LGF and emailed Shannon Love from Chicagoboyz.net about this for additional fisking because she did such an excellent job debunking the bogus Lancet Study on Iraqi deaths. Hopefully they can do better than my simple BS-meter allows me to.
posted by Mister Bixby | 11/13/2004 01:15:00 PM
<< Home