Robert Kennedy jr. writes a lengthy cover-story detailing and sourcing many of the most obnoxious examples of fraud in Ohio and other places...
Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?: "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"
Some choice selections from his discussion of the 2004 Exit polls that were jointly commisioned by the major six networks:
"The results are [always] exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18)
[snip]
"On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28)"
[snip]
Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31)
In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)
"According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."
[snip]
"What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country."(39)
[snip]
The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion."(40)
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3 comments:
I always wonder what exactly these sort of statistical odds actually mean. This same info was out right after the election; I specifically remember Kerryites citing the Dick Morris quote to claim that there was fraud in Ohio. While I'm not saying that there wasn't fraud in Ohio, in fact, I think there probably was via Diebold electronic voting machines and other republican machine shananigans, I just don't see why exit polls count as evidence for this. Is there anything in here that wasn't in the Conyers report?
Best I can guess, statistical odds probably means something like the the chance a poll is wrong given the times the exit polls were wrong in the past given various inputs such as sample size, etc. But this tells one nothing about the mechanism of fraud and thus is never compelling. In addition, the easy answer is simply that Repubs, who are an angry bunch to begin with, just systematically lied to exit pollsters. I mean way to be relevant RFK jr. and Rolling Stone.
Well - I don't think there's much in the Kennedy piece that wasn't in the C Report . In fact he uses it and an interview with Conyers throughout to move the narrative along. Still, Conyer's committee was never really a legal body at all, so I suppose both he (and the congressional minority committee) and RFK Jr. are doing the same thing: Trying to parlay the paltry media attention they attract to keep a spotlight on the election results. At the end of the piece RFK suggests that his real motive in writing it now is the upcoming November deadline in which all ballots in Ohio can be legally destroyed. If the Times and Post et. al. would pay for an independent recount before its too late, the "mechanisms of fraud" might very well become increasingly apparent. I can applaud that.
Your point about shy or duplicitous republicans is right on, but I'm not sure its so "simple". The national exit poller who must have fucked things up so badly did an internal investigation and came to the same conclusion -- although we have no evidence for it per se, it must have from bad sampling in the republican column.
I'm sure the polling firm had to think long and hard about what it was going to say, so I'd bet this is the best they can do. If there were any other potential argument that wasn't prima facie silly mathematics they would certainly have said so. But this seems to implicitly defend the polling methodologies themselves -- just got some garbage in the inputs that's all. If it can be shown that there was not a bad sampling from republicans, however, then we're left with no choice -- this stuff does not ever happen even in one district, let alone multiple districts.
I mention all this only because one thing that did strike me as original in the RFK piece is the great length he goes to (he, and it sounds like the entire editorial board at Rolling Stone were in on the investigation as well) to show how the argument from shy republicans cannot be made to jive with other exit polling information across the state.
For example, he borrows from a Cornell statistician and others who compared exit polling reliability in Ohio and found that the polling that was so wildly off base about the outcome of the Pres election was as accurate as statistically predicted when it came to the anti-gay marriage proposal.
He offers a reductio that to accept that Bush actually made up all those grounds via quiet voters you must also accept that those very same quiet republican voters (largely from strong Bush districts in southern Ohio)
voted for Bush but against the anti-gay marriage amendment that was also on the ballot.
But, ultimately: exit polling with margins of error between 8-10%?!? It does not can not happen. But I'm not ready to say that everyone knew this so obviously numbers by themselves cannot compell...I think this is ridiculous enough on its face to be compelling to the 2/3 of the country who basically blame Bush already for all sorts of things.
The problem is these numbers themselves have never really become the subject of real public scrutiny. How many folks do you think really know what the margin of error was in Ohio exit polls really? Let them first all hear over and over again these odds and these numbers. Then we can talk about what we observe.
Oh, finally: Even if you're right that talk about the patent ridiculousness of the statistics may not persuade or excite politically at all...But the fact that these errors ALWAYS benefited Bush? It doesn't take a rocket scientist or an advanced degree in hyperbolic typology to catch this ratfuck. All it takes is the predisposition to analyze the rationality of politics in strategic terms...Sounds like one or two folks that I know.
Well,you're right, I should at least read the article. Clearly, some if not most of my concerns are addressed within it. In particular, the gay marriage proposal exit polling, which presumably would/should be just as off (or at least I am willing to assume that too given the statistical analysis on the statistical analysis apparently cited in the article), provides compelling ev that something happened and I agree that some investigation by the post or the times would at least provide some record, though, the Florida recounts became a cluster-fuck of different analyses and newspapers that just seemed to make people go 'meh.' So stratergerically, I'm pretty sure it makes about this || much difference.
Let me just speak further to the strategery remark. Hopefully, and I think this is right, you mean not merely the "one or two folks you know," but also, ummm, well, nearly the whole rest of the Amurrricins including your own self. Strategerically, then, why write this for Rolling Stone? I don't have any stats on the readership of RS but I bet you 1 kajillion dollars that most of them didn't vote and that a huge majority of those that did voted for Kerry. I mean, is RFK jr hot like JFK jr was or the paler skinnier version that his dad was? Was he on the cover?
At any rate, now I'll actually read the article. More ammo for the crap-ass war of position we're stuck in. Unless....
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