This is an updated response to the “TruthIsAll FAQ” by Mark Lindeman. Since 2005 Mark has been posting non-stop trying to debunk the work of scores of independent election analysts. The analysts cite pre-election and exit polls as powerful evidence that Kerry easily won the True Vote in 2004 and that the 2006 Democratic landslide was denied by election fraud. Posting as ‘On the Other Hand’ on the Democratic Underground and ‘Hudson Valley Mark’ on Daily Kos (as well as on numerous other forums), Mark quickly responds to posts that analyze pre-election and exit polls. He invariably thrashes them if they are presented as indicators of election fraud. It’s good that Mark wrote the TIA FAQ for it provides a snapshot summary of the polling debates which are still taking place on various election forums.
In June 2006 Farhad Manjoo in Salon
Magazine wrote a rebuttal to the RFK Jr. Rolling Stone article Was the
2004 Election Stolen? Manjoo’s rebuttal was soundly
debunked by a number of well-respected election researchers who cited many factual
and logical errors. In the article Farhad claimed to
have consulted with Mark Lindeman as a primary advisor in writing the piece.
Confirmation of a Kerry Landslide is a complete analysis of the 2004 election.
2008 Election Fraud Analytics shows that although Obama won by 9.5 million recorded votes, his True Vote margin probably exceeded 20 million. Just like in the 2006 Midterms, a Democratic landslide was denied.
Election Fraud
Analytics is another comprehensive statistical analysis of the 2004 and
2006 elections. In 2000, Al Gore won by several million more votes than his
recorded 540,000 margin. In 2004, John Kerry actually won by 8-10 million
votes. In the 2006 midterms, a Democratic Tsunami gave them control of
congress, but the landslide was denied; they did much better than the
official results indicate. And the True Vote does not include the
disenfranchised, the great majority of whom are Democratic minority voters.
The original TruthIsAll (TIA) FAQ was written
in late 2006 by Mark Lindeman, an Assistant Professor of Political Science.
Since 2004, Mark has frequented election reform sites, relentlessly attempting
to rebut the polling analyses of researchers that indicate elections have been
stolen since 2000. “On the Other Hand”,
his Democratic Underground screen name, is apropos to his mission.
In January 2007, I wrote the "Response to the TruthIsAll
FAQ" along with a detailed statistical analysis: "2000-2006 Election
Fraud Analytics". Now that the 2008 election is history and similar
anomalous results indicate that election fraud cut Obama’s
landslide in half, just like the Democratic margin in the 2006 midterms.
Furthermore, the 2008 results confirm that the 2004 election was indeed stolen
and that Gore won the popular vote in 2000 by close to 3 million.
Most serious election researchers agree that
the election was stolen in 2004. But
statistical evidence also indicates that election fraud cut the 12% Democratic
landslide margin to 6% in the 2006 midterms, costing them 10-20 House seats. In
2008, Obama’s mandate was officially 9.5 million, but
a post-election True Vote analysis,
using 2008 National Exit Poll vote
shares, but with a feasible returning
2004 voter mix, indicates that he won by 22 million.
That is what the evidence shows, regardless
of whether or not it is ever discussed in the media. Statistical analysts and
political scientists who have looked at the evidence must be well aware of the systemic
fraud, but the combination of job security and unwillingness of Democratic politicians and the mainstream
media to discuss the issue are strong incentives to perpetuate the ongoing myth
that historical election results votes have been accurate. In the meantime,
only a handful of liberal bloggers will even touch
the subject. A number of books have been written which show that massive fraud
in the form of voter disenfranchisement and vote miscounts occurred in
2000-2008. There is not one book that provides a statistical analysis to prove
that Bush won in 2004.
In order to help the reader quickly become
familiar with the main areas of focus, I have included the questions posed in
the original FAQ, but updated for the 2008 election with an abbreviated summary
of Lindeman’s comments followed by mine. The original
full text response follows the summary.
A TruthIsAll (TIA) FAQ
by Mark
Lindeman
TruthIsAll (TIA) is the pseudonym
of a former Democratic Underground (DU) regular who now posts elsewhere. Many
of his writings are available at http://www.truthisall.net. TIA argues, among other things, that the 2004
Who is TruthIsAll (TIA) and why do you care what he says?
I don't know who he is. Apparently he has worked in quantitative analysis for many years; he has described himself as an "Excel expert." His allegations of election fraud -- in particular, his enumeration of (presumably far-fetched) things one must believe in order to believe that Bush won the 2004 election -- formed the template for the 2005 Project Censored story making the same case.
Many people believe that TIA's arguments irrefutably demonstrate that John Kerry won the popular vote and the election. Many more people believe that TIA's arguments have no merit whatsoever, and therefore don't bother to try to refute them. I do not like to see weak arguments go unchallenged. (But plenty of people have criticized TIA's arguments -- I make no claim to originality.)
I also think that these particular weak arguments lead to poor political judgments. If TruthIsAll is right, it follows that the 2004 election was obviously stolen. So, one might conclude, among other things, that (1) most voters preferred Kerry to Bush, (2) Democratic political leaders are effectively complicit in a cover-up, and (3) Democrats cannot win crucial elections until and unless the current voting systems are thrown out. I disagree with all of these conclusions.
(Now that the Democrats have won House and Senate majorities in the 2006 election, argument #3 must be modulated. Fraud-minded observers now often argue that the Republicans stole some votes and even some seats, but that either for some reason they could not -- or did not dare? -- steal enough votes, or that they had to decide how many votes to steal several weeks in advance, and were caught flat-footed by a late Democratic surge. As I address on the Miscellaneous page, I have seen no convincing evidence of widespread vote miscount.
OK, so what are TIA's arguments?
He has many posts, but many of them make these basic claims:
Pre-election polls (both state and national) gave Kerry better than a 99% chance of winning the election.
Well-established political generalizations, such as the "incumbent rule," buttress the conclusion that Kerry should have won.
The exit polls gave Kerry a lead in the popular vote well beyond the statistical margin of error, and diverged substantially from the official results in many states, generally overstating Kerry's vote total. (This claim is largely true, although not everything TIA says about it is.)
Fraud is the only good explanation of the exit poll discrepancies. In particular, there is no good reason to believe that Kerry voters participated in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters. Since Kerry did better than Bush among people who did not vote in 2000, Bush would have had to do much better among Gore 2000 voters than Kerry did among Bush 2000 voters -- and that can't have happened.
It is pretty easy to look around and determine that not many political scientists are expressing agreement with these views. But why not? It could be that political scientists have a status quo bias and/or are afraid to rock the boat by confronting unpleasant truths; perhaps some are even paid by Karl Rove. It could be that political scientists simply haven't looked at the evidence. It could be that political scientists see gaping holes in TIA's arguments. It could be some combination of those factors, and others besides. For what it's worth, I will explain at some length why I don't agree with TIA's views.
Please note that this is not a one-size-fits-all election integrity FAQ.
Do you think that electronic voting machines are almost ridiculously
insecure and unreliable?
I do, although I certainly don't
agree with every word of every critic. Do you think that John Kerry won or
should have won
TIA
These are just a few well-known researchers whose analyses confirm mine: Steve Freeman, Ron Baiman, Kathy Dopp, Greg Palast, RFK Jr., Mark C. Miller, Bob Fitrakis, Michael Keefer, John Conyers, Richard Hayes Phillips, Paul Lehto, etc. At least four have advanced degrees in applied mathematics or systems analysis. I have three degrees in applied mathematics.
It would be useful if you would mention the names of the political scientists or statisticians who disagree with my analysis and believe that Bush won the election fairly in 2004. How do they account for his 3 million “mandate”? How do they explain where Bush found 16 million new voters net of voter mortality and turnout? What are their confirming demographics? Do any of the analysts you refer to have degrees in mathematics or statistics? Did their 2004 projections match the exit polls? Or did they match the vote miscount? Have any of them ever written about or considered election fraud in their analysis? Have they analyzed the impact of uncounted votes on election results? What is their track record? Were their projections based on economic or political factors or did they use state and national polling? What was the time period between their final projections and Election Day?
FAQ Summary and Response
1. The Pre-Election Polls
1.1. What did the national pre-election polls indicate?
According to most observers, most pre-election polls put George W. Bush slightly ahead of John Kerry.
TIA
That is simply not the
case. Kerry led the pre-election
polls from July to Election Day except for a few weeks in September. Real Clear
Politics is often cited as the data source but it only listed final Likely
Voter (LV polls) – but not one Registered Voter
(RV) poll. The final five pre-election polls from CBS, FOX,
The final five
2008 Update: The Pre-election RV
polls had Obama leading by 52-39%. He led the
1.2. How does TIA come up with those 99+% probabilities of a Kerry
victory?
Basically, those probabilities (for both state and national polls) assume that all his assumptions (for instance, about how "undecided" voters will vote) are right, and that the only source of uncertainty is random sampling error.
TIA
The 2004 Election Model assumed a final 75% undecided voter allocation (UVA) percentage; but provided scenarios ranging from 60-87%. A 5000 trial Monte Carlo EV simulation gave Kerry a 98.0% win probability assuming 60% UVA (99.8% for the base case 75% UVA).
The base case assumption was that
Kerry would win 75% of the undecided
vote. But a sensitivity analysis showed
that he won with 50%. Historically
challengers have won the undecided vote over 80% of the time.
2008: The Final 2008 Election Model (EM) exactly matched Obama’s
365 electoral votes and was just 0.2% higher than his recorded
52.9% vote share. But his True
EV and popular vote were both higher than reported. The final EM projection was
based on the 50-43% Likely Voter poll average which understated Obama’s vote share. He led by 52-39% in the final RV
polls- before undecided voters (7%) were allocated. After allocation, Obama led by 57-41%.
Obama’s (expected)
EV was calculated as the cumulative sum of each states poll-based win
probability multiplied by its electoral vote. The 5000 election trial
1.3. Doesn't the high turnout in the election mean that the
registered-voter poll results are probably more accurate than the likely-voter
results?
No, high turnout is not a reason to dismiss the likely-voter results. Most pollsters already expected high turnout.
TIA
The average
projected turnout in the final five
In 2004, there were approximately
22 million newly registered and others who did not vote in 2000. Kerry won this
group by 57-62%, depending on the National Exit Poll time line. The Final
NEP (13,660 respondents) was forced to match the recorded vote. To match the
recorded vote, the exit pollsters reduced Kerry’s new voter share to 54% and adjusted
the returning Bush/Gore voter mix from an implausible 41/39% at
2008: With 75% of undecided voters allocated to Obama, the final RV polls matched his 57% True Vote share. The True Vote Model was based on a feasible returning voter mix, rather than the impossible National Exit Poll 46/37% Bush/Kerry mix. The NEP Vote shares were not changed. This confirms what we learned from 2004 and 2006: adjusting the NEP to a mathematically impossible returning voter mix was necessary in order to match the fraudulent recorded vote.
1.4. How about the state polls?
There TIA's data hold up somewhat better, although his probabilities don't. While the national polls (prior to TIA's massaging) fit the official results rather closely, the state polls do not fit as well.
TIA
Professional pollsters must be “massagers” as well, since they also allocate undecided voters. The RV polls, with 75% of undecided voters allocated to Kerry, did in fact confirm the unadjusted state aggregate exit poll (he was a 52-47% winner). Tim Lorentz did a 2004 pre-election poll analysis.
Fact - Kerry led by 1% in the final pre-election polls before undecided voters were allocated; he led by 3% after allocation.
Fact - Kerry led Register Voter polls by a higher margin than Likely Voter polls.
Fact - Registered Voter
pre-election polls were more accurate than
Fact - There were 22 million new voters. Kerry won 57-60% of new voters.
2008: Allocating 75% of undecided
votes to Obama, the aggregate final
state pre-election polls gave Obama 53.8%. But
they were
1.5. What about cell phones?
TIA and others have argued that the pre-election polls were biased against Kerry because they do not cover people who only use cell phones -- and these were disproportionately young voters who favored Kerry.
TIA
True. Young people are heavily Democratic and cell phone users.
2008: There were many more
cell-phone users than in 2004. That is just one reason why Obama
did better in the RV polls.
The "Rules": Did They Favor
Kerry?
2.1. Don't undecided voters break sharply for the challenger?
Undecided voters probably sometimes break sharply for the challenger. But I can find no evidence that this rule is useful in "allocating" reported undecided voters in presidential elections.
TIA
Not sometimes; virtually always. If
they approved of the incumbent they would not be undecided. You say that there
is no evidence that allocation is “useful”. What is the basis of that
statement? Professional pollsters find that allocating undecided voters quite useful.
2008: Six pollsters who allocated an average 67% of the undecided vote to Obama.
2.2. What about the rule that incumbents don't do better than their
predicted shares in the final polls?
On average, it is true that incumbents don't do better -- or, rather, much better -- than their predicted shares in the final polls.
TIA
That is a
contradiction. If you agree that incumbents don’t do better than their final
predicted shares, then you must also agree that undecided voters break for the
challenger, for if they broke for the incumbent, he would have a higher vote
share than his final polling. Ergo, how
can you say that Bush led the final polls and ignore undecided voters? True, Bush
led the final
2008: Obama was the de facto challenger since McCain represented
a continuation of Bush policies.
2.3. What about the rule that incumbents don't win when their final
approval rating is below 50%?
TIA has stated that Bush's approval rating on November 1 was 48.5% based on the "average of 11 polls."
TIA
That is true. You can look up his monthly approval ratings in the 2004 Election Model. In every election since 1972, the incumbent won when his approval rating exceeded 50%. Bush was the ONLY incumbent with approval below 50% to win re-election! There was a strong 0.87 correlation between Bush’s monthly pre-election approval ratings and the national polls. The Bush state approval ratings were highly correlated to his state vote and exit poll shares.
From 1968-2008, the average incumbent final 46.5% approval rating exactly matched the average True vote!
2008: On Election Day, the Bush 22&
approval rating
indicated that a major Obama landslide
was in the making.
Describing the Exit Poll Discrepancies
3.1. How do the exit polls work?
Let me say first of all that the main point of the exit polls is not to project who will win the election -- although the exit poll interviews are combined with vote count data in order to make projections.
TIA
Unadjusted exit polls work just fine – until the category weights and/or vote shares are forced to match the recorded vote. That makes no sense at all. For one thing, this standard practice assumes that the election is fraud-free. In order to force the Final National Exit Poll to match the recorded vote in 2004, 2006 and 2008, the NEP required an impossible return voter mix and/or implausible vote shares. Most people know that the 2004 election was not fraud-free but are unaware that fraud was just as massive in the 2006 midterms and 2008. The landslides were denied.
2008: The Final 2008 NEP contains
impossible returning voter weights. Unadjusted state exit polls and preliminary
NEP results have not, and apparently will not be released.
3.2. How accurate are exit polls?
It depends, of course. Most attempts
to argue that exit polls are highly accurate strangely steer around
TIA
Unadjusted exit polls are quite
accurate. Respondents report who they just votes for; there are no undecided
voters. On the other hand, the Final National Exit Poll is grossly inaccurate,
since it is always forced to match the recorded vote, even if it is fraudulent.
2008: We don’t have the preliminary
national exit poll timeline or the unadjusted state exit polls. Why not? Perhaps because they would show that Obama did much better than the recorded vote. The exit
pollsters don’t want a repeat of 2004. The discrepancies will need to be
explained.
3.3. Couldn't spoiled ballots and/or fraud account for these past
discrepancies?
Probably not, although they certainly may contribute. Greg Palast offers an estimate of 3.6 million uncounted ballots in 2004 alone.
TIA:
May contribute? They sure do
contribute. The best evidence indicates that 70-80% of uncounted votes are
Democratic. In 2004, the Census reported 3.4 million uncounted votes. This was
confirmed by government statistics (see Greg Palast).
Had the votes been counted, the Bush
margin would have been reduced from 3.0 to 1.3 million. But in 2004,
uncounted votes were only a fraction of the total fraud. Vote miscounts
(switched, stuffed ballots) accounted for most of the discrepancies. In 2000, uncounted
votes were a major factor. The Census
Bureau reported 5.4 million net
uncounted votes, reducing Gore’s margin from approximately 3.0 million to
540,000.
In every election there are
millions of net uncounted votes (uncounted less stuffed ballots).
Net Uncounted Votes = Total Cast
– Total Recorded
In order to match the recorded
vote, the 1988, 1992, 2004 and 2008 National Exit Polls required that returning
Nixon and Bush voter
turnout had to exceed 100%. This meant there had to be millions of phantom
voters. If we include total votes cast and calculate a feasible
returning voter turnout, the average Democratic True Vote share exceeded the average
recorded share by 4.7%.
2008: The
Vote Census has not yet been released.
3.4. What about exit pollster Warren Mitofsky's
reputation for accuracy?
Here is how Mitofsky International's website puts it: "[Mitofsky's] record for accuracy is well known”.
TIA
The Final National Exit poll is always “perfect” because it is always forced to match the recorded vote. But the NEP needed an impossible returning voter mix to match the 2004 recorded vote – because the recorded vote was fraudulent. The unadjusted state aggregate exit poll had Kerry winning by 52-47% and closely matched the UVA-adjusted pre-election polls. Either way, the exit polls were quite accurate – even though they were polar opposites.
2008: The Final NEP was once
again forced to match the recorded vote with an impossible returning voter mix.
3.5. Didn't the exit polls indicate that Kerry won by more than the
polls' margin of error?
It depends on what one means by "the exit polls" and "won."
TIA
Hmm… the question should be asked:
In how many states did the unadjusted exit poll discrepancy exceed the margin
of error? The MoE
was exceeded in 29 states – all in Bush’s favor. The probability is ZERO. Among
the 29 were
2008:
Still waiting for the E-M 2008 report. It’s over a month late. Why?
3.6. Why are the pollsters' estimates of uncertainty larger than the
ones calculated by TruthIsAll and others?
TruthIsAll sometimes has argued
that the exit polls should be treated as simple random samples (like drawing
marbles from a hat). In this instance, the margin of error for
TIA
The
2008: The Final NEP had over 17,000
respondents; the theoretical MoE was lower than 1.0%
3.7. Doesn't E/M's own table show that the margin of error is
plus-or-minus 1% for 8000 respondents or more?
That table (on page 2 of the national methods statement) applies to percentages in the tabulations, not to the vote projections.
TIA:
The 1.0% MoE
applies to the projected vote share for any given category cross tab in which
at least 8000 have been sampled. There were 13,047 respondents at
3.8. Doesn't everyone agree that the exit poll results were outside the
margin of error?
Yes: overall, and in many states, the exit poll results differed from the official results by beyond the margin of error, overstating Kerry's performance.
TIA:
It is more accurate to say that the
official vote understated Kerry’s True Vote. The Edison-Mitofsky
Evaluation of the 2004 Election System reported than the MoE was exceeded in 29 states – all in favor of Bush. From
1988 to 2004, the margin of error was exceeded in 65 of 238 states which were
exit polled, all but one in favor of the Republicans.
2008: The report has not been made available. It appears that it never will be. The MSM does not want a repeat of 2004. Probably because it would confirm that the National Exit Poll adjusted for a feasible returning voter mix indicates that Obama won by at least double the official margin.
3.9. Aren't survey results far outside the margin of error prima
facie evidence of fraud?
Margins of "error" refer to random sampling error. Most survey researchers would say that results outside the calculated margin of error most likely evince non-sampling error in the survey, such as non-response bias, sampling bias, or measurement error.
TIA
They evince non-sampling error? What about a vote counts? Do they evince fraud? Or is that inconceivable?
3.10. Which states had the largest exit poll discrepancies? Wasn't it
the battleground states?
No, the largest exit poll discrepancies were generally not in battleground states.
TIA
The largest exit poll
discrepancies by vote count were in Democratic
strongholds:
Are we to believe that Bush gained
vote share from 2000 to 2004 in Democratic
urban locations while his share of the vote in rural areas declined? The
strong 0.61 correlation
between county size and percentage increase in the recorded Bush vote in
2008: Unadjusted exit poll results are not available.
Explaining the Exit Poll Discrepancies
4.1. How did the exit pollsters explain the discrepancies in 2004?
In the Edison-Mitofsky Evaluation of the 2004 Election System, they stated Within Precinct Error was "most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters".
TIA
How did they know that? What data did they base it on? It’s a myth. Could the 6.5% average WPE have simply been due to the fact that there were more Kerry voters? How does E-M explain the mathematically impossible 43/37% returning Bush/Gore voter mix in the Final National Exit Poll? They can’t have it both ways. The Final NEP was forced to match the miscounted recorded vote.
2008: New election, same anomaly.
This time it’s 46/37%.
4.2. What is the "reluctant Bush responder" (rBr) hypothesis?
What the pollsters concluded in the evaluation report was simply that Kerry voters apparently participated at a higher rate.
TIA
That was a trial balloon immediately floated by the exit pollsters to explain the discrepancies but they had no data to back it up. In fact, the report suggested otherwise; there was a slight Bush bias in the exit polls. But no one in the media called them on it. The rBr canard was contradicted by the Final National Exit Poll. A mathematically impossible Bush/Gore 43/37 returning voter mix was required to match the vote count. Unfortunately few read the report.
The Final National Exit Poll indicated that returning Bush voters comprised 43% of the electorate; just 37% were Gore voters. Bush needed 55% of non-responders to match his recorded vote since he had 47% of responders. Exit Poll response was higher in strong Bush states than in Kerry states.
2008: Expect the same tired canard:
Democratic voters were more anxious to speak to the exit pollsters, blah, blah,
blah…
4.3. Does the participation bias explanation assume that fraud is
unthinkable?
I will present several lines of argument that participation bias accounts for much of the exit poll discrepancy, and that fraud does not.
TIA
Do the “lines of argument” include data from the E-M report that indicates Bush voters participated more readily? The change in the Bush recorded vote share from 2000 to 2004 is an incorrect measure of Swing. Swing should be based on total votes cast (i.e. the True Vote). The correlation between TRUE vote swing and recorded Red-shift was a strong 0.44.
Kathy Dopp of U.S. Count Votes proved that it is not NECESSARY that there be a CORRELATION for fraud to occur; the assertion was logically false.
2008: Expect the “swing vs. red-shift: canard to be used again. But as in 2004, “swing” in 2008 will assume a fraud-free 2004.
In any case, the premise has been
proven logically false, since it is easy to display scenarios that disprove it.
4.4. Don't the high completion rates in "Bush strongholds"
disprove the rBr or bias hypothesis?
No, and I'm amazed how much mental effort has gone into elaborating this very weak argument.
TIA
Amazed that a regression analysis shows completion rates declined moving from Bush to Kerry states? The analysis is a “strong” argument and the Kerry Vote vs. Exit Poll Completion graph clearly shows the pattern.
2008: The E-M report has not yet
been released. Why? It will surely show the same regression trend.
4.5. How can you explain the impossible changes in the national exit
poll results after
As I explained above, the tabulations are periodically updated in line with the projections -- and, therefore, in line with the official returns.
TIA
But what if the tabulations were corrupted by official vote miscounts? Given the overt election 2000 theft, matching to the recorded vote count in 2004 requires a major leap of faith that Bush had neither motive, means or opportunity to steal the election.
2008: The preliminary NEP has not
been released. Why?
4.6. Why were the tabulations forced to match the official returns?
If the official returns are more accurate than the exit polls -- and bear in mind that exit polls have been (presumably) wrong in the past -- then weighting to the official returns should, generally, provide more accurate tabulations.
TIA
Presumably? That’s a big IF. One cannot just assume that the exit polls were wrong in the past. For one thing, we know that at least some of the discrepancies in every election since 1968 can be explained by millions of uncounted votes.
2008: The Final ionce
again assumes impossible returning Bush/Kerry/Other voters (46/37/4%). The Bush
46% (60.2m) share is impossible; there were at most 57m returning Bush voters –
if you assume his 62 million recorded votes in 2004 were legtiimate.
The returning third-party 4% (5.2m) share is impossible; there were only 1.2
million recorded third party votes in 2004.
4.7. Wasn't there an effort to cover up the exit poll discrepancies?
Not that I can see.
TIA
You don’t see them because you
refuse to consider the preponderance of the evidence. Either that or you aren’t
looking hard enough. The National Exit Pool has not provided raw, unadjusted
precinct data for peer review. When pressured to provide unadjusted
2008: There is obviously an
ongoing, recurring effort to cover up the fraud. Just look at the
4.8. Is there any specific reason to think that the exit poll
discrepancies don't point to fraud?
One of my favorites is based on TruthIsAll's observation: "Based on the pre-election polls: 41 out of 51 states (incl DC) deviated to Bush. Based on the exit polls: 43 out of 51 deviated to Bush."
TIA
How can the margin of error be
exceeded in 29 states, all in favor of Bush, not be an indicator of massive
fraud? How can forcing the Final NEP to match the vote count (using impossible
weights and implausible vote shares) not be an indicator of fraud? How
can the state and national polls not indicate fraud? When input to the Interactive
Election Simulation model, the 51-48% Kerry victory was confirmed by the
unadjusted state exit poll aggregate (52-47%) and the 1222am National Exit
Poll (51-48%) After allocating undecided voters, the
pre-election
state and national polls matched the corresponding unadjusted exit polls.
2008: The
unadjusted state exits have not been released. They will surely show a similar,
implausible red-shift to McCain from the exit polls.
4.9. Is there any specific reason to believe that participation bias does
explain the discrepancies?
Yes, beyond the facts that
participation bias is common, that past exit polls have overstated Democratic
performance, and that the exit poll discrepancies don't correlate with
pre-election poll discrepancies, "swing" from 2000, or electronic
voting machine use, there is also some evidence indicating participation bias
in 2004.
TIA
But what if the discrepancies were due to uncounted and miscounted votes? Democrats always do better in exit polls than the recorded vote because 70-80% of uncounted votes are Democratic. The premise of the “swing vs. red-shift” argument (that the 2000 and 2004 recorded votes are appropriate to measure swing) is invalid. At least 5.4 million (net of stuffed) ballots were never counted in 2000 and 3.4 million uncounted in 2004. The false premise immediately rejects the argument that near-zero correlation between swing and red shift “kills the fraud argument”. Besides, there are an infinite number of scenarios that refute the argument. The “swing vs. red-shift” canard is pure double-talk designed to confuse. It was debunked by Kathy Dopp at US Count Votes in a mathematical proof.
2008: The media is sure to use the same, pathetic bias argument that Democratic voters are more likely to be exit-polled – among other things.
4.10. Aren't you offering a lot of unproven speculation?
You could call it that, or you could call it scientific reasoning on the basis of incomplete evidence.
TIA
The evidence provided by True Vote Model for all elections since 1968 isoverwhelming. What is clearly evident is that you have seen more than enough evidence but refuse to accept any of it.
2008: Even with more evidence of fraud in the impossible 2008 Final NEP, Mark still invokes rBr and “false recall”.
4.11. Are you saying that the exit polls disprove fraud?
No. As noted earlier, many forms of fraud may be compatible with the exit poll results. However, it seems hard to reconcile massive, widespread fraud – on the order of many millions of miscounted votes -- with the exit poll results unless one begins by discounting the details of the exit poll results.
TIA
A “massive” 5% vote switch is
very possible with unverifiable touch screens and invisible central tabulators.
Uncounted votes accounted for over half of Bush’s 3 million “mandate”. There
were 125.7 million votes cast in 2004. In 2000, 110.8 million votes were cast.
Approximately 5.5 million died. Of the 105 million still living, approximately
102 million voted in 2004. Therefore there were 23 million new voters and 3
million were returning Nader voters. How did they
vote? Of the 26 million, Kerry had approximately 15.5 million (60%) – a 5
million margin. Gore won the popular vote by 540,000. So how did Bush turn a
5.5 million deficit into a 3 million surplus? That’s an 8.5 million net vote
switch. Are we to believe that 8.5 million more Gore voters defected to Bush
than Bush voters defected to Kerry? That is beyond implausible.
2008: And now we are expected
to believe that were 12 million more returning Bush than Kerry voters?
4.12. Are you saying that you are sure Bush didn't steal the election?
No, depending on what one means by "steal." In particular, I think it is at least
possible that some combination of vote suppression (purges, long lines,
intimidation, etc.) and uncounted votes cost John Kerry a victory in
TIA
There you go, refusing once again
to even consider the probability that votes were miscounted electronically.
After all the anecdotal evidence of vote miscounts, you still only go as far as
to suggest “vote suppression” and uncounted votes, but do not consider the very
real probability that votes were miscounted at the touch screens and central
tabulators. Why would election
officials use visible vote suppression but not resort to invisible,
unverifiable electronic vote switching and other surreptitious methods?
2008: A new election and still the same unverifiable voting machines. It’s a repeat of the 2006 Democratic Tsunami. Landslide denied.
Comparing 2004 to 2000
5.1. Why has TruthIsAll called the "2000 presidential vote"
question the clincher?
TIA emphasizes two aspects of this table. First, he notes, it is impossible that 43% of the 2004 electorate voted for Bush in 2000. That would be over 52 million Bush voters, whereas Bush only got about 50.5 million votes in 2000. (Some of those voters must have died, or not voted for other reasons.)
TIA
It’s a
clinch because off simple arithmetic; the numbers are the Clincher: The 43% statistical weighting implies
52.6 million returning Bush voters – 2.1 million more than his recorded 50.46
million in 2000. But let’s not stop there. Approximately 2.5 million died,
therefore at most 48 million could have voted in 2004. If 46 of 48 million
returned to vote in 2004, then the Final NEP overstated the number of Bush
voters by 6.6 million. This is not rocket science or brain surgery..
2008: It’s even worse this time
around. The returning Bush/Kerry voter mix was 46/37%. Even if Bush won by the recorded 3 million
votes and there was zero fraud in 2004, the mix implies that there were 12
million more returning Bush than Kerry voters. But if Kerry won by the
unadjusted exit poll 52-47% (6 million votes) then there was an 18 million
switch!
5.2. What is wrong with the "impossible 43%" argument?
It assumes that exit poll respondents accurately report whom they voted for in the previous election. In reality, exit poll respondents seem to have overstated their support for the previous winner in every exit poll for which I could obtain data, ten in all, going back to 1976. Lots of other evidence indicates that people often report having voted for the previous winner although they didn't. Perhaps most telling is an (American) National Election Study (NES) "panel" in which people were interviewed soon after the 2000 election, and then re-interviewed in 2004.
TIA
Gore had 540,000 more official votes than Bush (actually 3 million if the 5.4m uncounted votes are included). Why would returning Gore voters, but not returning Bush voters, misstate their past vote? It makes no sense. The past vote question was posed to only 3,168 of 13,660 exit poll respondents. It was not asked of 10,000 respondents. The past vote question was not a factor in the other category crosstabs: sex, race, income, party-id, location, when decided, military background, etc). The respondents were only asked who they voted for. And 51% said Kerry. No fog, no forgetting.
False Recall assumes the recorded vote as a baseline, not the True Vote. Gore won the recorded vote in 2000 by 540,000. He won the True Vote by 3 million. There is no evidence to suggest Gore voters forgot or were motivated to lie. Retrospective surveys matched the True Vote when total VOTES CAST was used as a baseline. The NES respondents told the truth about their past vote: In 1968-2008, the average NES winning margin was 11.43%.
The average True Vote winning margin was 10.63%. The average True Vote winning share deviated by 0.40% from NES. The average Democratic True winning share deviated by 0.70%. The average Republican True winning share deviated by 0.46%.
2008: It’s hard to believe that the “false recall” canard is still being used, especially since Bush’s 48% approval rating in 2004 declined to 30% in 2006 and 22% in 2008. Are we expected to believe that the ridiculous 2008 Final NEP 46/37% Bush/Kerry returning voter mix is due to Kerry voters misstating their past vote to the exit pollsters? Or is it that returning Bush voters were reluctant to be interviewed? It’s a true Hobson’s choice dilemma.
5.3. What is wrong with the second argument, where new (and Nader) voters break the stalemate in favor of Kerry?
The second argument assumes that Kerry did about as well among Bush 2000 voters as Bush did among Gore 2000 voters. Superficially, the exit poll table supports this assumption.
TIA
The
2008: We thought “false recall” was laid to rest in 2006, but Mark is still using it even as he concedes that Final National Exit Poll weights/shares are always adjusted to force a match to the “official” count. Contradictions abound. Mark wants to have it both ways (rBr and “false recall”). But it was a Hobson's Choice. One argument refutes the other. He is spinning like a top.
5.4. But... but... why would 14% of Gore voters vote for Bush??
If one thinks of "Gore
voters" as people who strongly supported Gore and resented the Supreme
Court ruling that halted the
TIA
Right, it makes no sense. It only
makes sense if you consider that the Final NEP was forced to match a corrupt
recorded vote by changing the return voter mix
The Final was forced to match the recorded vote. The 43/37 returning Bush/Gore voter mix was impossible. The mix required over 6 million phantom Bush voters. The Final had to adjust corresponding Bush vote shares to implausible levels. Kerry won all plausible scenarios in a sensitivity analysis of various vote share assumptions.
2008: To believe that 46% were
returning Bush voters, there had to be 12 million more returning Bush than
Kerry voters. But even assuming that the official 3 million Bush “mandate” was
legitimate, one would expect a 3 million difference in turnout. Instead we are
asked to believe that 4.5 million Kerry voters (7.6% of 59 million) told the
exit pollsters they voted for Bush, despite his 22% approval.
TruthIsAll FAQ:
Miscellaneous
M.1. What about the reports of flipped votes
on touch screens in 2004?
Many people reported difficulty voting on electronic voting machines (DREs), in particular, that attempts to vote for one candidate initially registered as votes for another. The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), connected to the "OUR-VOTE" telephone hotline, recorded close to 100 such incidents. TruthIsAll has asserted that 86 out of 88 reports of electronic vote-flipping favored Bush. He cites the odds of this imbalance as 1 in 79,010,724,999,066,700,000,000.
TIA
The probability calculation is
correct. The odds that 86 of 88
randomly selected vote switching incidents would be from Kerry to Bush are
one in 79 sextillion.
The reports came from widely diverse,
independent precincts but were just a drop in the bucket. Many voters
know of someone whose vote was switched right before their eyes. And yet Mark
still does not accept that electronic vote switching was a major cause of the
exit poll discrepancies. The votes were not just switched on touch
screens. Invisible, unverifiable central tabulators “consolidate” reported
precinct votes. But no one could report those vote flips to EIRS.
M.2. Did the 2006 exit polls manifest
"red shift" compared with official returns?
Yes. For instance, the initial national House tabulation -- posted a bit after 7 PM Eastern time on election night -- indicates that Democratic candidates had a net margin of about 11.3 points over Republican candidates. The actual margin was probably about 7 points, depending on how uncontested races are handled.
TIA:
There is no basis for that
statement. It’s a “belief” based on a few outlier polls without allocating
undecided voters. The 120 “generic” moving average regression trend line
projected that the Democrats would win 56.4% of the vote. The unadjusted aggregate state exit polls
produced an identical 56.4% share.
M.3. Do pre-election "generic" House polls in 2006 match the
initial exit poll returns?
Not really. A "generic"
poll is one that asks respondents whether they would vote for (in
TIA
Yes, they matched all right. So what if the names
were not indicated? That is pure nonsense! The trend-line of 120 pre-election Generic
Polls, all won by the Democrats, projected a 56.4% Democratic vote share. Lo
and behold, the unadjusted exit poll aggregate was an identical 56.4%! It is true: Generic polls were
not a good predictor of the recorded vote. But they did predicted
the True Vote! A corrsponding pre-election model
quantified the risk
that 10-20 House elections would be stolen.
M.4. What about the massive undervotes in
Sarasota County,
Without getting into the specifics,
the short answer is: I think that if voters had been able to cast their votes
as they intended, the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings would have won
the House race in
TIA
Are we to believe that FL-13 was an
isolated case of missing and/or switched votes? And there is no evidence of
vote miscounting in the other 434 districts?
A number of post-election studies indicate otherwise.
End of FAQ Summary Update
________________________________________________________________________________
Original FAQ
TruthIsAll FAQ: (1)
1.1. What did the national pre-election polls indicate?
According to most observers, most pre-election polls put George W. Bush slightly ahead of John Kerry. The summary of "final trial heats" at pollingreport.com shows Bush ahead in 10, Kerry ahead in 3, and one tied. (The average margin was Bush +1.45%.) Among the "pollster vote projections" (in which the pollsters may make subjective judgments about how undecided voters are likely to vote), five favor Bush, two favor Kerry, and one is a tie. (For what it is worth, both projections favoring Kerry are attributed to Democratic pollsters; one projection favoring Bush is attributed to a Republican pollster. So among nominally neutral pollsters, Bush was ahead in four projections and tied in the fifth; the average margin was Bush +1.3%.)
Please note that every single one of these polls yielded a result within its statistical margin of error, even assuming that the polls were otherwise perfect. So they certainly don't justify high confidence that Bush was "really" ahead, much less that he was destined to win. Some folks might say that the polls revealed a "statistical tie," but that characterization throws away useful information. As I said, most of the polls put Bush slightly ahead.
Yet TruthIsAll argued, in his final Election Model, that the pre-election polls gave Kerry a 99.99% probability of winning the popular vote (as well as a 99.8% probability of winning the electoral vote). Why are his numbers so different? There are two main reasons.
First, TruthIsAll uses poll results for all registered voters, rather than for likely voters, whenever possible. Presumably he believes that the pollsters were biased toward understating Kerry support. In many surveys, people who are least likely to vote tend to favor Democratic candidates. So, for instance, the final pre-election survey by the Pew Research Center gave Bush a 3-point lead among "likely voters," but gave Kerry a 1-point lead among all "registered voters." TruthIsAll uses the figure that puts Kerry ahead, even though Pew itself headlined the report, "Slight Bush Margin in Final Days of Campaign." [More on turnout and likely voters below.]
Second, TruthIsAll assumes that undecided voters will (or did) sharply favor Kerry. (His final model assumed that 75% of undecided voters would vote for Kerry -- although, in fairness, he also considered alternative proportions.) [More on undecided voters on the next page.
TIA:
Kerry and Bush were essentially
tied at 48 in the final national pre-election polls, but the trend of undecided
voters was to Kerry. Of the 18 national polls analyzed in the pre-Election
Model, 9 were registered voter (RV) and 9 were likely voter (
Final Election Day Zogby and Harris LV polls were not included in the Nov.1
election model. Both had Kerry winning by 50-47%. Including these polls,
Kerry led in 13 by 48.0-47.5%. But that was before the allocation of
undecided voters. Harris and Zogby said they were
breaking 2-1 to 4-1 for Kerry. The
You continue to reject the historical fact that late undecided voters would break for the challenger, Kerry. But world-class pollsters Zogby and Harris, who have a combined 60 years of polling experience, indicated that their Election Day polling Kerry won undecided voters by 67-75%. The National Exit Poll also reported that Kerry won a clear majority of undecided voters. This was not unusual; historical evidence indicates that undecided voters break for the challenger over 80% of the time, especially when the incumbent is unpopular - and Bush had a 48.5% average approval rating on Election Day. Final Zogby polls in nine battleground states had Kerry leading by an average of 50-45%. He was projected to win all nine by 53-46%, but only won five by 50-49%. The margin of error was exceeded in six states - a 1 in 52 million probability.
You dismiss the significance of the
Bush 48.5% approval rating on Election Day. But all presidential incumbents
with approval below 50% lost re-election (Ford, Carter, Bush I) while all
incumbents over 50% won (Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Clinton).
The near-perfect 0.87 correlation
between Bush’s monthly approval rating and national poll average share is
further evidence. The correlation was confirmed by the
You overlook the fact that 41
states switched to Bush from the final pre-election polls to the
recorded vote. But none of the 10 states which switched to Kerry was a
battleground state. Forty-three states red-shifted to Bush from the
This is a graph of the 2004 National Pre-election Polls Monthly Trend
1.2. How does TIA come up with those 99+% probabilities of a Kerry
victory?
Basically, those probabilities (for both state and national polls) assume that all his assumptions (for instance, about how "undecided" voters will vote) are right, and that the only source of uncertainty is random sampling error. I argue below that his assumptions are more wrong than right. They certainly aren't 100% reliable. (TruthIsAll himself suggests that the polls might be biased -- against Kerry, of course.)
TIA:
Mark says that my assumptions are not “100% reliable” and “are more wrong than right”. What does 100% reliability mean when it comes to assumptions?
And how are they more wrong than right? Let’s take a close look at some assumptions.
-Does he mean the base case
The sensitivity analysis provides a range of assumptions: 2000 voter turnout, Kerry’s share of returning Gore, Bush, Nader voters and others who did not
vote in 2000. Which assumptions does he believe are more wrong than right?
-Does he mean the undecided voter allocation?
I provide a 60-87% undecided voter allocation range (see the Monte Carlo EV sensitivity analysis). The 75% base case matches that of world-class pollsters Zogby and Harris. I trust their combined 70 years of experience a lot more than the Mystery Pollster. What polls did he run? Is Mark implying that MP knows more than Zogby and Harris?
-Does he mean the Margin of Error?
I use pre-election state poll 600- sample MoE (4%) to compute the MoE. The state exit poll MoE is adjusted for a user-entered cluster effect.
The 1222am National Exit Poll (13047 sample) adjusted for a 30% cluster effect yields a 1.12% MoE. In the notes Edison-Mitofsky claim the MoE is 1.0%.
-Does he mean the annual mortality rate?
I use the published
-Does he mean the assumption that only living Gore, Bush or Nader 2000 voters could have voted in 2004?
It’s a fact. Or does he believe in reincarnation?
-Does he mean the random sampling assumption?
I refer once again to Edison-Mitofsky’s notes (link above).
-Does he mean the assertion that the Final NEP “How Voted in 2000”
weights (43% Bush / 37% Gore) and corresponding vote shares were drastically
changed to match the Bush 51-48% vote?
It’s a fact. The Final NEP has always been matched the recorded vote.
-Does he disagree that the “How Voted in 2000” weights were
mathematically impossible?
It’s a fact. Do the math.
-Does he disagree that matching to the NEP only makes sense if the
election is fraud-free?
Is it his assumption that 2004 was fraud-free? What about 2000, 2002 and 2006?
-Does he disagree with the overwhelming statistical evidence that the
election was stolen?
In light of the above, is that not a fair conclusion?
No, high turnout is not a reason to dismiss the likely-voter results. Most pollsters already expected high turnout. For technical reasons, it is hard to compare pollsters' various turnout assumptions to the official figures, but the survey results don't change very sharply if we change turnout assumptions by a few points. To include every respondent who claims to be registered would include many people who have very little prospect of voting.
In Pew's final pre-election poll (data available for download here), Pew scored over 62% of its respondents as "likely voters," scoring 8 or 9 on its 0-to-9 likely voter scale. (Actually, this percentage is weighted -- for instance, young respondents weighh more heavily than older ones. The unweighted results are even less favorable to Kerry.) The actual presidential turnout in 2004 is estimated by Dr. Michael McDonald at about 60.3% of the eligible voting-age population. In order for Kerry to take a slight lead in the Pew survey, one must either include all voters scoring as low as 5 on the likely voter scale -- which implies about 77% voting-age turnout -- or assume that about three quarters of all undecided voters would vote for Kerry. In order to give Kerry an appreciable lead, one has to jack up the projected turnout and allocate the vast majority of undecided voters to Kerry.
By strange coincidence, TruthIsAll did exactly that: he jacked up the turnout to include all self-reported registered voters (which, in the Pew survey, would be about 80% voting-age turnout, or around 160 million voters nationwide instead of 120 million), and allocated three quarters of undecided voters to Kerry. Presto, Kerry took the lead.
In January 2005, TIA claimed, "Any reputable pollster will tell you that in this election, RV's were a more accurate gauge of the vote." What a strange claim. Pollingreport.com reports (here and on the following "earlier" pages) likely-voter results from well over a dozen separate pollsters. Were they all disreputable? Did they all repudiate their likely-voter models?
TIA:
It’s
nonsense to extrapolate voter turnout based on the type of poll.
Pollingreport.com also provides companion RV polls from these same pollsters.
Nine of the final 18 national polls in my pre-election model were RVs – and
presto! Kerry won 5. Nine were
________________________________________________________________
1.4. How about the state polls?
There TIA's data hold up somewhat better, although his probabilities don't. While the national polls (prior to TIA's massaging) fit the official results rather closely, the state polls do not fit as well. The median state poll in TIA's analysis, prior to TIA's allocation of undecideds, had a Kerry margin about 2.8 points larger than Kerry's actual performance. After allocating undecideds 75% to Kerry, the median discrepancy is about 4.5 points.Looking at the crucial battleground states, the discrepancies don't seem very suspicious.
TruthIsAll had Kerry ahead by three
points in Ohio, but only one Ohio poll out of the last ten actually put Kerry
ahead. (This discrepancy could owe to flukes of timing, TIA's
preference for registered-voter results, and/or TIA's
reported propensity to ignore certain survey results he regards as biased.)
Thus, although TIA's final model (again, the link
-- find "OH") gave Kerry an 866.49% probability of winning
Similarly, because of TIA's allocation of most undecideds
to Kerry, his Interactive
Election Simulation spreadsheet gave Kerry a 73% chance of winning
Kerry won
In summary, first of all, TruthIsAll's simulation results asserting a 99.8%
probability that Kerry would win the electoral vote depended heavily on very
favorable assumptions about
TIA:
You fail to distinguish between weighted and unweighted averages, claiming Bush led the pre-election state polls. But you used an unweighted average to derive the national share. Kerry led the national weighted average (based on state voting population) from July to Election Day, except for a brief period in September. Kerry also led in the national pre-election polls all year.
You use the median of the data set when you should be using the weighted mean. Despite your protestations to the contrary, the pre-election polls did NOT match the official recorded vote, but DID match the exit polls. Kerry led the 18 nationals by a slight 0.5% - before my so-called undecided allocation “massaging”. Allocating undecided voters is necessary for projecting the final vote. Even professional pollsters do it. It’s foolish to ignore undecided voters, especially when a very unpopular president with a 48% approval rating is running. I believe Zogby and Harris.
Go here to see how the individual pre-election state and exit polls compared to each other - and to the recorded vote.
On the other hand, matching the Final NEP to a miscounted recorded vote is not massaging; at best, it’s inadvertent poll-rigging and intellectually dishonest. It implies ZERO fraud. There is no justification for matching the Final Exit Poll to the recorded vote. It’s just catapulting the propaganda for an illegitimate regime. The use of bogus, mathematically impossible weights and implausible vote shares in order to match the Final National Exit Poll to a fraudulent vote count is, well…fraudulent.
The Interactive
Election Simulation graph displays the results of a 200- election trial
run. In PA, Kerry’s RECORDED exit poll margin understated his TRUE margin by
5%. As for
TIA and others have argued that the
pre-election polls were biased against Kerry because they do not cover people
who only use cell phones -- and these were disproportionately young voters who
favored Kerry. Scott Keeter, drawing on a close
analysis of
(Keeter's findings also appeared in Public Opinion Quarterly.) Certainly Pew's age weightings seem fairly close to the mark. For instance, in their final pre-election poll (weighted), respondents aged 18-24 comprise 8.5% of the likely voters, and respondents 18-34 total 22.9%.
In the Current Population Survey, self-reported voters 18-24 are 9.3% of all voters, and voters 18-34 are approximately 23.8% (derived from Table B). If one assumes, generously, that voters 18-24 favored Kerry about 60% to 40%, then any underrepresentation of young voters may have cost Kerry a small fraction of a percentage point in Pew's likely voter estimate.
TIA:
In 2004, 122.3 million votes were recorded. According to voting records cited by Greg Palast, over 3 million additional votes were uncounted (spoiled, provisional, absentees, etc), confirming the 2004 Census Vote Survey (0.30% MoE) which indicated that 125.7mm voted. Approximately 27 million (22% of 125.7mm) were voters who did not vote (DNV) in 2000.
According to the
________________________________________________________________
The
"Rules": Did They Favor Kerry?
2.1. Don't undecided voters break sharply for the challenger?
Undecided voters probably sometimes break sharply for the challenger. But I can find no evidence that this rule is useful in "allocating" reported undecided voters in presidential elections. In fact, overall, reported undecideds seem to break about evenly.
In support of the claim that undecideds break for the challenger, TruthIsAll has cited an essay by Chris Bowers at MyDD. Bowers canvassed 28 presidential polls going back to 1976, and concluded that "undecideds break overwhelmingly -- better than 6 to 1 -- in favor of the challenger in a Presidential race." But a close reading reveals that Bowers did not examine declared "undecided" voters at all!
Bowers basically found that on average, incumbents did about 0.3 points better than the final polls indicated, while challengers did about two points better – indeed a ratio of more than 6 to 1. This result mostly had nothing to do with undecided voters. Nine of the 28 surveys were from 1996, a year in which the pre-election polls overstated incumbent Bill Clinton's winning margin by over 4 points on average. Five of those surveys reported no undecided voters whatsoever -- and their errors were not systematically different from the other four surveys'. (The second most accurate survey that year reported 11% undecided, equalling the other eight surveys combined.) Clearly Bowers's analysis cannot be used as a guide to allocate reported undecided voters. At most it might imply that challengers tend to do well when some polls report a lot of undecideds, but I see little support for even this inference.
I examined a total of 31 presidential polls going back to 1972, using the same National Council on Public Polls dataset used by Bowers. (1972 was the earliest year with multiple polls, at least one of which reported undecided voters.) In some elections, the polls with higher reported undecided rates indicated less net support for the incumbent than the other polls; in others, they indicated greater incumbent support. Overall, the results indicate no statistically significant relationship between percentage undecided and incumbent support. Thus, there is no statistical support for altering the margin to account for reported undecideds. Another way to say that is that reported undecideds seem to break about evenly (since allocating them doesn't appreciably alter the margin), perhaps slightly toward the challenger on average. But every election and every poll is different, so it is probably best just to say that we don't know.
TIA:
You neglect to mention that in our previous discussions (on DU and elsewhere), I cited a 155- election survey in which challengers won the undecided vote in 127 and incumbents won the undecided vote in just 19.
http://www.pollingreport.com/incumbent.htm
This is what the
“In the final USA TODAY/CNN/GALLUP poll before
the election, President Bush held a 49-47 edge over Sen. John Kerry when the
undecided voters were not allocated to a particular candidate. When
You also fail to mention that I
have referred to world-class pollsters Zogby and
Harris. They have stated that challengers typically win over 2/3 of the
undecided vote. The reason is straightforward. Voters are undecided when they
are not enthusiastic about the incumbent. Bush had a 48.5% average rating
in Election Day. A clear majority were NOT satisfied with his performance -
especially undecided voters.
Assuming
that Kerry got 2/3 of the late undecided votes, he was poised to be 51.5-47.5%
winner. My pre-election model forecast a 51.3 - 47.7% Kerry win based on final
state pre-election polls and 51.1 - 47.9% based on the final 18 national
pre-election polls. The exit polls indicate that Kerry won a solid
majority of the late undecided voters (last three days), as well as those who
decided in the last month (60-38%).
This is what Zogby
had to say about undecided voters and Bush approval ratings a few days before
the election:
So, first of all, the numbers. We have been looking for months at what we call a virtual
tie between Kerry and Bush. I can report to you this morning that it's an
actual tie. It's 47 percent for Kerry and 47 percent for Bush. You will note
that my hair is a little grayer these days than it has been, where we stand
today, we have approximately 5 percent undecided. We go as low as 4 percent
undecided on some days.
Who are
these undecided voters? They do tend to be Independents, that is, in terms of
party affiliation. They do tend to be moderates, meaning not liberal and not
conservative. Unlike previous years, they tend to be middle-aged voters,
meaning not young and not old. We have polled them – the undecideds, that is. We have also done focus groups among undecideds. Contrary to popular belief, contrary to what I,
personally, believed; these undecideds generally have
told us that they had their minds made up in the past. This is a new phenomenon
for them. They also told us that they were paying attention. They could
identify for us basically where each candidate stood on the issues. Since we
did the focus groups in the so called "battleground states" of
Here are
some of the things that we have found out among undecided voters: They like the
President as a person. They give the President good marks for leadership and
decisiveness. They appear to be very much opposed to the war and to the way
that we got into the war. They give the President good marks on personal
morality and family values. At the same time, they tell us that they like John
Kerry, that he is smart enough, they believe that he is competent enough to be
President. They also feel that John Kerry is one that they identify with on
their issues, which are domestic issues that we heard about, the economy and
health care, education and so on. They have questions about whether or not they
trust Kerry, about whether or not they believe where he stands on issues. They
do tend to say, and I guess after hearing so many commercials and seeing so
many commercials, that they feel that Kerry is a person who changes his
position to win popular support.
The undecideds told us that they're passionate, that they will
vote. Some of them indicated that they were actually agonizing over their choice.
And they also told us that they're genuinely undecided. Significantly,
from the polling, and not from the focus groups, we find that only 1 in 5 of
the undecided voters tell us that the President of the
Now, on
the basis of history, if history is any guide whatsoever, I still believe:
number one, that the race is about the incumbent, a referendum on the
incumbent, and the fact that the incumbent has not broken 48 percent suggests
to me that the President is not polling good numbers for reelection. In
addition to that, in terms of the other barometric readings that I look at, you
still have a net negative of voters who say that the President is not doing a
good job. He gets a negative job performance rating.
He gets a negative reelect, meaning slightly more people think it's time for
someone new than that he deserves to be reelected. And slightly more people
feel that the country is headed on the wrong direction. Now, the President has
improved all of those numbers, but they're still not reelection numbers. In
addition to that, on the top five issues that the voters tell us are tops on
their minds, the President leads in one of those issues, fighting the war on
terrorism: He leads substantially against Senator Kerry.
Among the other four issues, Senator Kerry leads by double digits over the
President.
The key
reason why I still think that Kerry will win, perhaps, possibly (laughter) --
have I made myself clear here? Okay. That traditionally, the undecideds break for the challenger against the incumbent
on the basis of the fact, simply, that the voters already know the incumbent,
and it's a referendum on the incumbent. And if the incumbent is polling,
generally, under 50 percent and leading by less than 10, historically,
incumbents have lost 7 out of 10 times. In this instance you have a tie, a
President who is not going over 48, undecideds who
tell us by small percentages
that the President deserves to be reelected. And in essence, it gives all the
appearances that the undecideds -- the most important
people in the world today -- have made up their minds about President Bush. The
only question left is: Can they vote for John Kerry? If it's a good turnout,
look for a Kerry victory. If it's a lower turnout, it means that the President has
succeeded in raising questions about John Kerry's fitness”.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is what Harris Interactive said about
undecided voters:
Final Pre-election Harris Polls: Still Too Close to Call but Kerry
Makes Modest Gains
“The final Harris Polls show
Senator John Kerry making modest gains at the very end of the campaign in an
election that is still too close to call using telephone methods of polling. At
the same time, the final Harris Internet-based poll suggests that Kerry will
win the White House today in a narrow victory. Harris Interactive’s
final online survey of 5,508 likely voters shows a three-point lead for Senator
Kerry. The final Harris Interactive telephone survey of 1,509 likely voters
shows a one-point lead for President Bush. Both surveys are based on interviews
conducted between
If this trend is real, then Kerry
may actually do better than these numbers suggest. In the past, presidential
challengers tend to do better against an incumbent President among the
undecided voters during the last three days of the election, and that appears
to be the case here. The reason: undecided voters are more often voters who
dislike the President but do not know the challenger well enough to make a
decision. When they decide, they frequently split 2:1 to 4:1 for the
challenger.
About one percentage point of the
current difference probably reflects the inclusion in the online sample of
people with cell phones but no landline (and therefore not included in the
telephone survey) who favor Kerry by a wide margin”.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is what Frank Newport, Editor in Chief of the Gallup Poll, said about undecided
voters and Bush approval:
Is the presidential race still too
close to call?
Yes. No matter how you look at the
data, the two major-party candidates are neck and neck.
Among likely voters, including our
estimate of what the remaining undecided voters will do on Election Day, the
race is dead even at 49% for each candidate.
Analyzing the data in other ways,
such as modifying likely voter assumptions and changing turnout estimates,
doesn't make a substantial difference in the election predictions. The support for both candidates is basically
in the upper-40% range, and the final popular vote may well depend on which
side is best able to mobilize its voters to go to the polls.
How does
The allocation procedure is a
This has been dubbed the "challenger rule."
There are various explanations for why this may occur, including the
theory that any voter who maintains that he or she is undecided about voting
for a well-known incumbent this late in the game is probably leaning toward
voting for the challenger.This persistent historical
pattern is the basis for Gallup's decision to allocate the 3% undecided vote to
Kerry and Nader/other, making the final estimate 49%
Bush, 49% Kerry and 2% Nader/other.
How might the president's job
approval rating influence the outcome of the election?
A president's job approval rating is an important indicator of
re-election probabilities. But like so much else in this election, this measure
isn't giving us a great deal of direction right now. Bush's job approval has
slipped to 48% among national adults and is thus below the symbolically
important 50% point. If we take that 50% line seriously, then Bush is in a
less-than-auspicious position. No president since Harry Truman has won re-election
with a job approval rating below 50%.
But the last two presidents who
lost (George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter) had job approval ratings much worse
than George W. Bush's 48%. He is clearly not as bad off as they were. On the other hand, the winners all had job
approval ratings well above 50%. Bush is in a gray zone when it comes to
his job approval rating.
What is the impact of turnout among
younger voters?
We've heard a lot about the impact
of younger voters this year. The data indeed show that Kerry does better among
younger voters -- that is, those under age 30. Among all national adults in that age group, Kerry wins by a 59% to 34%
margin.
_______________________________________________________________
On average, it is true that
incumbents don't do better -- or, rather, much better -- than their predicted
shares in the final polls. As noted above, in the polls examined by Bowers (and
by me), on average, incumbents did about 0.3 points better than the final polls
indicated.
Averages can be misleading, and
this one is. Remember the old joke about the hapless target shooter who grazes
a tree with one shot, kills a bystander with the next, but brags that on
average he nailed the bullseye? Well, in two of the
five elections in the Bowers analysis (the five being 1996, 1992, 1984, 1980,
and 1976),
the incumbent improved his vote
share by about 2 points over the polls. In 1984, Ronald Reagan averaged 57%
over six polls and got 58.8% in the official returns. In 1976, Gerald Ford
averaged 45.7% over three polls (although that average is influenced by one
poll that is much lower than the others) and got 48.0% in the official returns.
These elections are partly offset
by 1996, not only because
TIA:
I refer you to the preceding Zogby and Harris statements. Apparently, you disregard
their combined 70 years of polling experience. You resort to citing a 2%
deviation from the vote in 2 of the five elections. Reagan won a landslide. To
say that he did 2% better in the poll average than the vote is
reaching. As for Ford, you cite a limited 3-poll average. Since one of the
three polls was much lower than the average, Ford’s vote share had to be lower
than his other poll numbers indicated. Why not provide the actual poll results?
Once again, you assume that Bush’s
true vote was 50.7%, and that there was no fraud. That is not a good assumption
to make. This is analogous to the Final Exit Poll matching to an assumed
fraud-free recorded vote count. My exit poll analysis indicates that the
true Bush vote was 47%. The pre-election projection model had Kerry leading the
final 18 national poll average by 48-47%.
2.3. What about the rule that incumbents don't win when their final
approval rating is below 50%?
TIA has stated that Bush's approval
rating on November 1 was 48.5% based on the "average of 11 polls."
I'm not sure which polls are included in that figure; different surveys
typically yield slightly higher or lower approval figures. During October 2004,
the Gallup Poll reported six approval figures for Bush: two above 50%, three
below 50%, and one exactly 50%. The last pre-election survey put him at 48%
approval, 47% disapproval, and 5% "not sure."
|
Year |
Incumbent |
Approval |
Vote |
|
1992 |
Bush (I) |
30 |
46.5% |
|
1980 |
Carter |
31 |
45.4% |
|
1976 |
Ford |
46 |
48.9% |
|
1996 |
|
55 |
54.7% |
|
1972 |
Nixon |
59 |
61.8% |
(By the way, TIA's
1992 figure appears to be from late September. A Gallup/Newsweek poll in late
October gave Bush a 37% approval rating, which does not much alter the
analysis. I do not know why TIA excluded 1984; a
Notice that prior to 2004, there is
no incumbent with an approval rating between 46 and 55. So, one might say it is
a rule that "incumbents with approval ratings under 50 never win."
But one might just as accurately say that "incumbents with approval
ratings over 46 always win." Does one of these statements make more sense
than the other? For what it is worth, let's examine a plot of final approval
ratings vis-a-vis incumbent two-party vote shares
from 1956 on.
TruthIsAllFAQResponse_image001
In the plot above, the dashed blue
line is the best-fit line for all these elections. The solid purple line is the
best-fit line excluding the 1956 and 1964 elections, which appear to be out of
trend. (The 1956 and 1964 approval ratings are from summer
polls -- as are the 1972 and 1976 ratings.) Either way, it appears that
incumbents with approval ratings over 45 are likely to win! The thinner,
vertical purple line depicts this break-even point. (Notice
that Carter in 1980 and Bush in 1992 each won over 45% of the two-party vote
despite approval ratings in the low 30s.) Note also that 2004 lies below the best-fit lines: if
anything, Bush might have been expected to do slightly better in the election based on his approval rating. With so few
data points, it would be fairest to say that the election could have gone
either way.
TIA:
Carter
and Bush both LOST and had approval ratings below 50%. You can have your
own theories, but not your own facts. And the FACT is that ALL incumbents with
final approval ratings under 50% LOST the election – and that includes Bush.
Your attempt to twist this FACT is patently obvious. Your scatter plot is
just a diversion. Why don’t you just accept this FACT and move on?
The 0.87
correlation between the Bush 11-poll average 2004 monthly approval rating and
his monthly pre-election 18-poll average was close to a perfect 1.0, indicating
a very strong relationship. His Election Day approval rating was 48.5%. Kerry
won the 12:22am National Exit Poll by 51-48%.
_______________________________________________________________
TruthIsAll FAQ: (3)
Describing
the Exit Poll Discrepancies
3.1. How do the exit polls work?
That's a long story. Let me say
first of all that the main point of the exit polls is not to project who will
win the election -- although the exit poll interviews are combined with vote
count data in order to make projections. Mostly, the exit polls are used to
provide information about who voted for whom and why. This purpose explains why
the exit poll questionnaires are so long -- containing up to 30 questions.
In 2004, the exit pollsters chose
anywhere from 15 to 55 precincts in each state for their exit poll sample: a
total of 1480 precincts nationwide. Interviewers are sent to the corresponding
polling places, some of which host more than one precinct. At some polling
places, interviewers were instructed to approach every voter; at most,
interviewers were instructed to approach every "Xth"
voter, where X could be anywhere from 2 to 10. This instruction is intended to
provide a random sample within the precinct; the value of X is chosen to obtain
about 100 completed questionnaires per polling place.
The interviewers ask each
approached voter to complete the exit poll questionnaire (attached to a
clipboard). Slightly over half of the approached voters agreed to complete the
questionnaire. Three times during the day, the interviewers call in tallied
results for reported votes (presidential and often statewide races), plus all the answers on a subsample of questionnaires. In some states with many
early/absentee voters, the exit pollsters also conduct telephone surveys of
these early voters. (In vote-by-mail
Back at 'exit poll central,' the
exit pollsters use these data in two ways: to make projections and tabulations.
Projections are estimates of the vote shares in each state (and DC), together
with measures of the uncertainty in those estimates. These projections
initially are based on the interview tallies, which are compared with past
results from the same precincts. Sometimes the interview tallies alone suffice
to "call" the winner of a state with great confidence, especially if
the race was not expected to be very close to begin
with. Often the interview tallies are inconclusive. In these more competitive
states, the exit pollsters continually update their projections to incorporate
actual vote counts. The analysts examine both "quick counts" from the
exit poll precincts and selected other precincts, and cumulative county-level
totals. As quick counts become available, they replace the interview data in
the projections.
Tabulations "break down"
the vote share by various categories: for instance, gender, family income, or
religious affiliation. These tabulations are computed for each state and for a
special national sample. Preliminary tabulations were released for each state
as the polls closed, and later updated to match the updated projections -- in
effect, to match the official returns. (Actually, the initial tabulations were
weighted to match the composite
projections, which incorporate not only interview data but pre-election
expectations.) National tabulations were updated several times, incorporating
interview data and official returns from various states as they became
available. Such tabulations, as posted on CNN.com, became the basis for much of
the exit poll controversy.
3.2. How accurate are exit polls?
It depends, of course. Most
attempts to argue that exit polls are highly accurate strangely steer around
One useful accuracy measure is the
"Within Precinct Error" (WPE), which basically equals the percentage
difference between the exit poll margin and the official margin for each precinct.
By convention, WPE is positive if the Republican candidate does better in the
exit poll than in the official count, and negative if the Democratic candidate
does better in the exit poll. (For instance, if Kerry led in a precinct exit
poll by 5 points, but trailed in the official count by 3 points, the WPE would
be -8 points.)
We know that in the last five
large-scale presidential exit polls*, the average WPE has always been
substantially negative, overstating the Democratic performance: -2.2 points in
1988, -5.0 points in 1992, -2.2 points in 1996, -1.8 points in 2000, and -6.5
points in 2004. (See page 34 of the evaluation
report.) So, as far as we can tell from WPE, no recent exit poll has been accurate within the margin of
error. And the 1992 survey was almost as far off as the 2004 survey. As Mark Blumenthal has pointed
out, the documentary The War Room
confirms that the actual 1992 exit poll projections -- at least at
* Fine print: (1) I said
"large-scale" because the Los
Angeles Times has conducted national presidential exit polls, but those
are much smaller. (2) In 1988, each network conducted its own exit polls; the WPE
figure here is for CBS, the exit poll on which Warren Mitofsky worked. Later
exit polls have been conducted by a series of network-sponsored consortiums.
Another useful accuracy measure is
the Call 3 (end-of-day) "Best Geo Error" for each state. The Best Geo
error is the discrepancy between the vote share estimate, based on interview
data, and the official returns. (Like WPE, the Best Geo error is reported as a
percentage difference in margins.) The vote share estimates can vary
substantially from the raw percentages used to calculate WPE; they incorporate
information on turnout, estimates of early and absentee voting (often based on
telephone polls), and comparisons with past races. The average state Best Geo
Error in 2004 was -5.0 points, somewhat smaller than the mean WPE.
TIA:
The exit polls always do not
overstate the Democratic share; the vote count does. Remember, approximately 3%
of total votes cast are never counted. Since about 80% (2.4%) are democratic,
the exit poll margin differential due to this factor alone is 1.8%.
3.3. Couldn't spoiled ballots and/or fraud account for these past
discrepancies?
Probably not,
although they certainly may contribute. Greg Palast offers an estimate of 3.6 million (or
"3,600,380 to be exact") uncounted ballots in 2004 alone. In Palast's account, these include about 1.4 million spoiled
ballots (ballots for which no presidential vote was counted, such as the
infamous "hanging chad" ballots in
Whatever advantage uncounted
ballots have conferred to Republican candidates in the past,
they are unlikely to account for much of the exit poll discrepancies. There is
no obvious relationship between uncounted ballots and exit poll results. For
instance, New Hampshire has had double-digit exit poll discrepancies (Within
Precinct Error) in three of the last four presidential elections (evaluation
report, page 33), but its residual vote rate
was 1.7% in 2000 and 1.2% in 2004. (Incidentally, 2000 was the election without a double-digit WPE in
One might suppose that uncounted
ballots could at least account for a mean WPE of about -2, arguing like this:
if 3% of votes are never counted, and if these uncounted votes skew 80:20 to
Democrats (2.4% of total vote to 0.6%), then they cost Democrats about 1.8% on
the margin. However, the arithmetic is less favorable to this analysis than one
might suppose, because Democratic votes lost in heavily Democratic (or heavily
Republican) precincts have minimal impact on expected WPE in those precincts.
For instance, if a precinct's voters actually cast 90% of their votes for the
Democratic candidate, but fully 5% of those Democratic votes go uncounted, the
Democrat will end up with about 89.5% of the vote, for an expected WPE of -1 in
that precinct.
One certainly can't rule out a priori that fraud might account for
at least part of the 1992 exit poll discrepancies. But as far as I know, no one
has made a serious attempt to argue that George H. W. Bush committed
double-digit fraud in New Jersey that year (as the exit polls might be taken to
suggest) – or, more generally, to explain how Bush stole perhaps 5 million net
votes that year, and why he bothered. In the end, the argument seems circular
at best. People who began by asserting that exit polls are accurate end up asserting that
the 1992 exit polls possibly may have
been accurate.
TIA:
You gloss over uncounted votes as
having minimal impact on WPE in heavily Democratic precincts. This assertion
makes no sense. Votes are accumulated
at the state level. The WPE in a particular precinct is irrelevant
to the final accumulated state total. Compare the 2004 recorded vote
(122.3m) to total votes cast (125.7m). That’s a 3.4 million vote difference. If
we assume that 80% of the 3.4 million or 2.7 million were Kerry votes and the
other 20% (0.70 million) were Bush votes, that’s a net loss of 2 million votes
to Kerry. Since Bush “won” the recorded vote by 62-59mm, a full 2/3 of the 3
million vote margin was due to uncounted votes. Let’s do the numbers: Add
Kerry‘s 2.7m UNCOUNTED votes to his RECORDED 59m to get his total of 61.7
million. Do the same for Bush: 62+0.7= 62.7m. There goes the Bush “mandate” –
from 3 to 1 million. And we haven’t even yet considered the votes which were
SWITCHED electronically from Kerry to Bush.
________________________________________________________________
3.4. What about exit pollster Warren Mitofsky's reputation
for accuracy?
Here is how Mitofsky
International's website puts it: "[Mitofsky's]
record for accuracy is well known. 'This caution in projecting
winners is a Mitofsky trademark, one which has served him well...,' said David
W. Moore, the managing editor of the Gallup Poll in his book, The Super
Pollsters." http://mitofskyinternational.com/company.htm).
In other words, Mitofsky very rarely "called" or predicted the winner
incorrectly. (Mitofsky died on
If Mitofsky's
calls were rarely wrong, doesn't this mean that the exit poll data must be
highly accurate? No, it doesn't. One reason for Mitofsky's
success was that he avoided making calls in close races based on interview data
alone. Edison/Mitofsky (the firms that jointly conducted the 2004 exit poll)
did not make any incorrect projections in 2004. Perhaps people who believe that
the exit polls evince fraud should take Mitofsky's
"caution in projecting winners" more seriously.
TIA:
“Mitofsky’s record
for accuracy was well-known”. Does this quote refer to the preliminary or the
Final exit polls? The Final is always matched to the vote
count. We
know that 3% of total votes cast in every election are uncounted and heavily
Democratic. So from the get-go, matching to the Final vote is incorrect. And
what about votes which are switched? So to argue that Mitofsky is accurate is a
double-edged sword. Final
exit polls are matched to a fraudulent recorded vote count while preliminary polls are closer to the
True vote. But few are aware of the preliminary exit poll timeline, whereas the
finals are shown on media sites and in the newspapers.
3.5. Didn't the exit polls indicate that Kerry won by more than the
polls' margin of error?
It depends on what one means by
"the exit polls" and "won." As I explained above, there are
really 51 different exit polls (if one counts the telephone-only poll in
The final interview-only projection
for
"margin of
error," the margin of error would be 7.8 points. Using
the 99.5% standard that the exit pollsters used as the first (not only) criterion for a "call status," the
margin of error was over 10 points. So, Kerry's apparent lead in
However, the national sample had
about 12,000 respondents, and it gave John Kerry about a three-point margin. If
the national exit poll were a random
sample, its 95% margin of error on the margin would be about 1.8% -- so Kerry's
lead appears to be outside the margin of error. The pollsters did not calculate
an uncertainty estimate for the national sample, because they do not figure
projections for the popular vote. If they did, probably even Kerry's lead in the national sample
would be within the margin of error, at least using the 99.5% standard. (Note
that the concept of "margin of error" is widely misunderstood: see
point 3.9 below.)
TIA:
You say: “However, the national
sample had about 12,000 respondents, and it gave John Kerry about a three-point
margin. If the national exit poll were a random
sample, its 95% margin of error on the margin would be about 1.8% -- so Kerry's
lead appears to be outside the margin of error.” Not true. The NEP had 13047 respondents. The MoE
is 0.86% assuming a zero cluster effect. For a 30% cluster effect, it’s 1.12%.
Pollsters always use a 95%
confidence level to calculate the MoE (1.96 standard
deviations from the mean).
If p
= the Bush state poll vote share; 1-p = Kerry’s poll share; n= sample size.
MoE =
1.96 * sqrt (p* (1-p) / n) is the standard deviation.
The probability that the Bush state
vote (v) would exceed his exit poll share (p) is given by the Excel function:
Probability = NORMDIST (p, v,
MoE/1.96, true).
The probability that the Bush vote
discrepancy would exceed the MoE in any given state
is .025 (1 in 40)
The Bush vote/poll discrepancy
exceeded the MoE in 16 states.
The probability that the MoE would be exceeded in 16 or more states by Bush is given
by the Excel function:
Probability = 1- BINOMDIST (15, 50,
.025, true).
The probability is 1 in 19 trillion!
3.6. Why are the pollsters' estimates of uncertainty larger than the
ones calculated by TruthIsAll and others?
TruthIsAll sometimes has argued
that the exit polls should be treated as simple random samples (like drawing
marbles from a hat). In this instance, the margin of error for
So, the pollsters' estimates of
uncertainty (margins of error) were relatively large because the precinct-level
results varied widely, compared with past returns.
This wide variation could be an
indicator of problems with the exit poll interviews. (One source of variation
is that, as I mentioned, some of the polling places contain multiple precincts.
Because the interviewers have no way to tell which voters come from which
precincts, they interview voters from all the precincts -- but the interview
results are compared with past returns from the "intended" precinct
only.)
TIA:
E-M provides cumulative vote totals
from 1250 precincts. An individual precinct MoE is not relevant. The Law of Large Numbers still
applies. E-M clearly indicate the margin of error for
various sample sizes in the NEP Methods statement table.
That table (on page 2 of the national
methods statement) applies to percentages in the tabulations, not to the
vote projections.
TIA:
The final exit poll “projections”
are forced to match the recorded vote count. And what if the vote count is
corrupted? So much for the “projections”. Read
the
3.8. Doesn't everyone agree that the exit poll results were outside the
margin of error?
Yes: overall, and in many states,
the exit poll results differed from the official results by beyond the margin
of error, overstating Kerry's performance. (This overstatement is often called red shift, meaning that the "red
candidate" Bush did better in the official returns than in the exit polls.)
For instance, I noted above that in
As I mentioned earlier, it turns
out that at least the last five
presidential exit polls have had overall discrepancies (measured as Within
Precinct Error) outside the margin of error, but the 2004 discrepancies were
the largest. We don't know how many states were outside the margin of error.
TIA:
Based on the
Once again, your facts are wrong.
The
But the exit poll matched the results of two independent models. The
first was based on
3.9. Aren't survey results far outside the margin of error prima facie evidence of fraud?
Margins of "error" refer
to random sampling error. Most
survey researchers would say that results outside the calculated margin of
error most likely evince non-sampling
error in the survey, such as non-response bias, sampling bias, or
measurement error. The statistical "margin of error" assumes an unbiased sample, but
competent survey researchers are rarely in a position to assume that they
actually have unbiased samples.
Many people are under the mistaken
impression that larger surveys are inherently more accurate. Larger surveys do
have smaller margins of (sampling) error,
but they
are not inherently less vulnerable to non-sampling error. For instance, the
1936 Literary Digest
presidential poll had a huge sample size of over 2.2 million respondents (out of 10 million post cards mailed),
giving it a nominal margin of error of less than 0.1%. In the poll, Alf Landon
held a dominating lead over Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with 57% of the
projected vote. In the actual election, Landon got under 37%. The statistical
odds against this outcome appear to be larger than anything ever reported by
TruthIsAll. But the sample was not random: the mailing lists used to address
the post cards tended to favor more prosperous voters, and in 1936 this class
bias turned out to be catastrophic.
(People sometimes misinterpret
these points as arguing that we should assume that fraud did not occur in 2004
-- whereupon they protest that other eviidence
points to
fraud in 2004. But my point here has nothing to do with whether fraud occurred
in 2004. It is about whether large survey errors should be interpreted
as
evidence of fraud.)
TIA:
Did you really mean to say “vote
count” errors and not “survey” errors? The 1936 presidential poll only
illustrates that polling was in its infancy. Scientific polling was unheard of.
Since then, pollsters have constantly IMPROVED their methodology through
sophisticated sampling techniques. Bush election fraud
has given
polling a bad name. It’s the institutionalized uncounted and switched
electronic votes which are the major cause of the polling discrepancies. But
the fraud is not limited to these factors. Voter disenfranchisement works
heavily against the Democrats even before the votes are miscounted. If all the
votes were counted and everyone eligible was allowed to vote, the Democrats
would win every election.
3.10. Which states had the largest exit poll discrepancies? Wasn't it
the battleground states?
No, the largest exit poll
discrepancies were generally not in battleground states. Using the "IM
WPE" statistic (which averages the WPEs for all
precincts in each state, as opposed to other methods that trim extreme values),
the largest discrepancies were in
TIA:
First of all, let’s get the
magnitude of the discrepancies right. Your discrepancy is margin-based. That is
misleading. For instance, the NY exit poll said that Kerry won by 64-35%. The
recorded vote was 58.5- 40.1%, a 4.5% Kerry discrepancy, far below your 13.9%
figure. In 2000, Gore won by 60-35% with 5% for Nader/other. According to the National Exit Poll,
approximately 71% of Nader 2000 voters voted for
Kerry and 21% for Bush. So let’s allocate the Nader
vote: 75% to Kerry and 25% to Bush. Assuming Kerry matched Gore’s 61% vote and
picked up an additional 3% from returning Nader
voters, his true NY vote share was 61+3% = 64%. matching
the “pristine WPE-adjusted Exit Poll. It implies
that fraud (uncounted and switched votes) cost Kerry 5.5% (64-58.5%).
TruthIsAll FAQ: (4)
Explaining
the Exit Poll Discrepancies
4.1. How did the exit pollsters explain the discrepancies in 2004?
In their evaluation
report, they stated that the Within Precinct Error was "most likely
due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush
voters" (page 3). They further state, "It is difficult to pinpoint
precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to
participate in the exit polls than Bush voters. There were certainly
motivational factors that are impossible to quantify, but which led to Kerry
voters being less likely than Bush voters to refuse to take the survey. In
addition there are interactions between respondents and interviewers that can
contribute to differential non-response rates" (page 4). The evaluation
report lists several factors that were associated with differences in WPE,
including interviewer distance from the polls; interviewer age and education;
number of precincts at the polling place; and sampling rate at the polling
place. It does not offer a master theory of the discrepancy.
TIA:
What about the fact that
discrepancies are caused by uncounted and miscounted votes? Why don’t the exit
pollsters even mention that? Why did they ignore the fact that their own data
indicated a slight Bush bias? Why didn’t they provide a rationale for the
fact that paper ballot precincts had a low average WPE compared to the touch
screens, levers and optical scanners?
4.2. What is the "reluctant Bush responder" (rBr) hypothesis?
First of all, it is a name coined
by critics. What the pollsters concluded in the evaluation report was simply
that Kerry voters apparently participated at a higher rate. That statement
doesn't entail that Bush voters recoiled from the interviewers. It is possible
that some Bush voters did steer around interviewers, and/or that some Kerry
voters steered toward interviewers, and/or that some interviewers subtly
favored Kerry voters over Bush voters. The statements I quoted above do
emphasize non-response bias --
i.e., that Kerry voters were less likely to refuse than Bush voters were. Sampling bias by interviewers
(approaching more Kerry voters than Bush voters) could also contribute to a
difference in participation rates.
The evaluation report never refers
to "reluctant Bush responders." In fact, it doesn't venture any
specific motivations -- reluctance, eagerness, fear, enthusiasm, defiance,
shyness, or anything else. This reserve is appropriate because, after all, the
exit pollsters did not interview the non-respondents, and therefore they cannot
know specifically why the
non-respondents did not respond. (Indeed, even being able to interview the
non-respondents might not help very much.)
TIA:
The exit pollsters “concluded” that
Kerry voters participated at a higher rate? Where is the evidence to that
effect; the exit poll data implies a Bush bias (see Freeman). Could the
discrepancy simply be due to Kerry voters outnumbering Bush voters? Once again,
the exit pollsters had to conjure up an explanation of why the polls were
“wrong” without considering the very real probability of fraud. But since the
polls didn’t match the recorded vote, they assumed that the vote count was
accurate, so…they adjusted exit poll weights and vote shares to match the vote
count.
4.3. Does the participation bias explanation assume that fraud is
unthinkable?
I will present several lines of
argument that participation bias accounts for much of the exit poll
discrepancy, and that fraud does not. (By the way, concluding that fraud
doesn't account for the exit poll results isn't the same as ruling out fraud
generally.) The pollsters had several good reasons to suspect from the outset
that participation bias was important. First of all, non-response bias -- and other forms of non-sampling error -- are
ubiquitous concerns in survey research. Survey researchers do not assume that
their data are accurate within the computed "margin of error,"
because they are well aware of everything that can go wrong. Second, the
national exit polls' history of overstating the Democratic vote share in
precincts, as described in point 3.2,
gives additional reason to consider participation bias likely.
Also, we know that the exit
pollsters tested a specific hypothesis about massive fraud: that millions of
votes were stolen on electronic voting equipment (Direct Recording Electronic
machines and/or optical scanners). In the evaluation report, the pollsters state, "Exit polls do not support the
allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment. Our analysis of the
difference between the vote count and the exit poll at each polling location in
our sample has found no systematic differences for precincts using touch screen
and optical scan voting equipment. We say this because these differences are
similar to the differences for punch card voting equipment, and less than the
difference for mechanical voting equipment." (pages
3-4) That is, the largest exit poll discrepancies on average were in precincts
with lever machines. Granted, it might be possible to steal many, many votes on lever machines, but as far
as I know, no one predicted or suspected it. Again, below I present other lines
of argument that tend to point toward participation bias, and away from fraud,
as explaining the exit poll discrepancies.
TIA:
There was no difference in WPE
between touch-screens and optical scanners? They are really reaching with
that one. That only means that both machines were rigged. Optical scanners
results are fed into central tabulators, just like the touch screens. Were the central
tabulators rigged? And what was the WPE in paper ballot precincts? How does it
compare to the machines?
4.4. Don't the high completion rates in "Bush strongholds"
disprove the rBr or bias
hypothesis?
No, and I'm amazed how much mental
effort has gone into elaborating this very weak argument. Here is the argument:
The reported completion rate in precincts that voted 80%+ for Bush ("Bush
strongholds") was 56%. The reported completion rate in precincts that
voted 80%+ for Kerry was only 53%.
So how can anyone claim that Kerry
voters had a higher completion rate than Bush voters? Doesn't it appear that
Bush voters had a higher completion rate?
One can work a lot of math into the
argument, but basically the math is irrelevant. It seems that either one finds
this argument compelling or one doesn't, regardless of the numbers attached. As
a matter of logic, the argument has no force.
It is perfectly possible -- even
likely -- that both Kerry voters and
Bush voters completed the exit polls at a somewhat higher rate in
"Bush strongholds" than their counterparts in "Kerry
strongholds." The evaluation report suggests (on page 31) that
"hypothetical completion rates of 56% among Kerry voters and 50% among
Bush voters overall would account for the entire Within Precinct Error that we
observed in 2004," but no one believes that those rates could apply everywhere. Indeed, the reported
state-level completion rates ranged from 42.7% in
TIA:
Once again, you confound the
basics. A Linear
regression analysis of state exit poll response vs. poll and
recorded/vote share indicates this relationship: exit poll response rates
decreased going from Bush states to Kerry states, while Kerry’s poll and vote
shares increased. To you, the regression analysis is irrelevant, but it disproves
your case. The regression tells us that non-responders were more likely to be
Kerry voters.
4.5. How can you explain the impossible changes in the national exit
poll results after
First to explain the
"problem": The tabulation of the national exit poll at
At times TruthIsAll and others have
suggested that these results are "impossible" in the sense that an
additional 613 respondents cannot account for the shift from Kerry to Bush.
Indeed they cannot. As I explained above, the tabulations are periodically
updated in line with the projections -- and, therefore, in line with the
official returns. The tabulation would have been updated even if there had been
no additional respondents. So the whole idea of "impossible changes"
is a red herring.
TIA:
You are creating the red herring by
failing to mention that the final exit poll was forced to match the vote count
– come hell or high water. the fact that the
“how voted in 2000” weights were mathematically impossible, and corresponding
vote shares not plausible, was never a consideration.
Interested readers should refer to
the DU
Game thread in which you were finally forced to provide a plausible
rationale for the Bush “mandate”. Unfortunately, you only succeeded in proving
that there was none. Because you had to finally agreed that the 43/37
weightings were impossible, you had to force Bush vote shares much higher than
they were in Final Exit Poll where they were already inflated to match the
votes. So you compounded the fakery by hypothesizing that 14.6% of Gore voters
defected to Bush in 2004. The
4.6. Why were the tabulations forced to
match the official returns?
If the official returns are more
accurate than the exit polls -- and bear in mind that exit polls have been
(presumably) wrong in the past -- then weighting to the official returns
should, generally, provide more accurate tabulations. Weighting results to
match known characteristics of the population (in this case, the voters) is
called "post-stratification," and it is standard statistical
practice. Of course, if the exit polls were more accurate than the official
returns, then weighting to the official returns would provide less accurate
tabulations. But even if one believes that they were, I see no reason to
conclude that the exit pollsters thought so.
TIA:
Exit polls were presumably wrong in
the past? Or was it the vote count? Could the “errors” have been a result of
uncounted and miscounted votes? If demographic weightings are designed to match
the population, then why were MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE 43%
Bush / 37% Gore weights used in the Final Exit Poll? Post-stratification
or post-misinformation? You see no reason to believe that the exit
pollsters were aware of the significance of the demographic impossibility? They
HAD to match the vote count, so they were well aware. And so they went along
with the Big Scam.
4.7. Wasn't there an effort to cover up the exit poll discrepancies?
Not that I can see. The original
tabulations were online for many hours, at the hardly obscure CNN.com. Exit
pollsters commented on the results for reporters, and Warren Mitofsky appeared
on PBS's NewsHour three days after the election.
The exit poll discrepancies were not secret.
TIA:
The preliminary exit polls notes
say that they were “not for public viewing”. Without the
4.8. Is there any specific reason to think that the exit poll
discrepancies don't point to
fraud?
There are several. One of my
favorites is based on TruthIsAll's observation:
"Based on the pre-election polls: 41 out of 51 states (incl
DC) deviated to Bush. Based on the exit polls: 43 out of 51
deviated to Bush." As I discussed in Point 1, TruthIsAll's analysis of the pre-election polls is
idiosyncratic: for instance, he estimated an 85% probability that Kerry would
win
the exit
polls -- then one might judge that both sets of results tended to point to
fraud. (Note: this argument assumes that the extent of fraud varied from state
to state,
and that the differences in exit poll discrepancies partly reflect differences
in fraud.)
Interestingly, as I show here, the
relationship between these two deviations (official vs. pre-election polls, and
official vs. exit polls) is flat to negative. That is, if anything, exit poll
"red shift" overstating Kerry's support was largest in states where
he did better than predicted in
pre-election polls, or at least no worse. These results are calculated using TruthIsAll's own pre-election poll measures! While many
people (including TruthIsAll) have asserted that pre-election polls may be
biased, no one has explained why some state polls would be more biased than others,
in a pattern that would cancel out the evidence of fraud. The lack of a
positive correlation between these two deviations isn't strong evidence against
fraud in any particular state, but it appreciably weakens the case that the
exit polls point to fraud around the country. (A more detailed exploration of
the data is here.)
Another strong reason to think that
the exit poll discrepancies do not point to fraud involves the
"swing" statistic. "Swing" is the percentage change in
Bush's performance from 2000 to 2004, in each exit poll precinct. Swing tends
to be fairly small, generally within a range of plus-or-minus 10 points.
Generally, if an exit poll "red shift" of (say) 30 points tended to
indicate 30-point fraud favoring Bush, then one would expect swing favoring
Bush to be larger in such precincts than in precincts where the exit polls
closely matched the official returns or even overstated Bush's support. But in
fact, as I show here,
there is essentially no
correlation whatsoever between "swing" and "red shift."
This result is hard to reconcile with fraud in the exit poll precincts, unless
the fraud was precisely targeted in precincts where Bush would otherwise have
done worse than in 2000.
TIA:
The naysayer
swing vs. red-shift scatter
chart flat regression line is the rationale for claiming that the
exit poll discrepancies had little effect and therefore fraud was unlikely. But it is not supported by the mathematics;
there are an infinite number of scenarios which would invalidate the premise.
And you are comparing apples to
oranges; you did not adjust the 2000 recorded vote. According to the 2004
National Exit Poll, Kerry won 71% of returning Nader
voters compared to 21% for Bush. A similar split would have
increased Gore’s margin by 1.4m. Assuming that 75% of approximately 3
million uncounted votes were for Gore, his margin increases by another 1.5mm. When added to his recorded 540,000 vote
majority, Gore’s adjusted margin becomes 3.4m.
And we have not yet considered the
effects of vote-switching. Thanks to
You never normalized the 2-party
state vote shares in calculating “swing”. Assuming 3% vote- switching from Gore to Bush, swing exceeded red-shift
in 43 states. Average adjusted state swing was 4.0%; average red-shift,
1.5%. Weighted average adjusted swing was 3.74%; weighted average red-shift,
1.41%. Assuming zero vote-switching in 2000, adjusted swing exceeded red-shift
in 32 states. Average adjusted swing was 2.58%; weighted average swing was
2.39%.
An adjusted
swing vs. redshift bar graph displays the deviations.
Another scatter
chart shows that adjusted swing exceeded 4% in 18 states while
red-shift exceeded 4% in only 2 states. The naysayer
swing vs. red-shift argument is just another ruse meant to divert, confuse and
mislead.
The recorded 2000 vote needs to be
adjusted by these factors:
1) Third-party (Nader)
share of 2000 voters:
According to the National Exit Poll,
Kerry won returning Nader 2000 voters by 71-21% over
Bush. We need to revise the 2000 vote totals accordingly by allocating the Nader vote to Gore and Bush in the same proportion.
2) Uncounted votes:
According to the 2004 Election
Census, there were 125.7mm total votes cast but only 122.3mm were recorded;
3.4mm (2.74%) were uncounted. In 2000, there were 104.7mm votes recorded.
Assuming that the 2000 uncounted vote rate was equal to the 2004 rate, then
107.7mm total votes were cast and 3.0mm were uncounted. Since the majority of
uncounted ballots are found in Democratic minority districts, a fair assumption
is that 75% of these uncounted votes were for Gore. There were 180,000 spoiled
ballots (under and over votes) in
3) Switched votes:
The True Vote Model base case
scenario indicates that 6.8% of total votes cast for Kerry were switched to
Bush. An exhaustive review of the ballots in
4.9. Is there any specific reason to believe that participation bias does explain the discrepancies?
Yes, beyond the facts that
participation bias is common, that past exit polls have overstated Democratic
performance, and that the exit poll discrepancies
don't
correlate with pre-election poll discrepancies, "swing" from 2000, or
electronic voting machine use, there is also some evidence indicating
participation
bias in
2004. Specifically, some patterns in the exit poll discrepancies fit well with
participation bias.
For instance, "red shift"
is much greater in precincts where interviewers stood further from the polling
place. The average WPE increases from -5.3 where interviewers stood inside the
polling place to -12.3 where interviewers stood more than 100 feet away
(evaluation report, p. 37). This result is consistent with the conjecture that
Kerry voters were more eager to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters
were -- and this disparity was more manifest in polling places where it was
easier to avoid the interviewers entirely. The recorded completion rate falls
from 59% where interviewers stood inside the polling place to 43% where they
were more than 100 feet away; both refusal and "miss" rates go up. At
that distance, the "random sample"
becomes
largely voluntary.
(Some people have objected that
interviewer distance cannot account for the error in the poll because the WPE
is so large even when interviewers stood inside the polling place. This misses
the point. Edison/Mitofsky never asserted that interviewer distance accounts for non-response bias. If
Bush voters and Kerry voters are equally willing to participate in the survey,
then distance should not matter. But if they differ overall in their
willingness to be interviewed, then it makes sense that greater distance would
accentuate the difference.)
"Red shift" is also much
larger at polling places with high interviewing rates -- that is, where
interviewers were supposed to skip more voters between interviews (evaluation
report, p. 36). Interestingly, however, the reported completion rates were not
lower at these polling places. So it appears hat interviewers at these polling
places sometimes (probably unawares) ended up interviewing Kerry voters when
they "should have" interviewed Bush voters. Indeed, there is anecdotal
evidence
that some interviewers did not rigorously enforce these interviewing rates, but
rather sometimes interviewed voters who seemed more cooperative.
Red shift also varies with certain
interviewer characteristics, such as age and education (evaluation report, pp.
43-45); it appears that interviewers who were college students were especially
prone to biased results. Voters may have tended to assume that college students
would be Kerry voters, and gravitate toward
or away
from them accordingly.
TIA:
Red-shift
or red-herring? Check this graph of
________________________________________________________________
4.10. Aren't you offering a lot of unproven speculation?
You could call it that, or you
could call it scientific reasoning on the basis of incomplete evidence. William
Jennings Bryan once said that "Darwinism... is only a guess and was never
anything more" -- but
Given all the respects in which
participation bias fits the data, and in which massive fraud does not, it is
hard to understand how anyone can argue straight-faced that participation bias
is the more speculative theory.
TIA:
The exit polls point to
double-digit fraud in NY? That’s misleading. According to the exit
poll, Kerry won NY by 63-36%. The recorded vote was 58.5- 40.1%, a 4.5%
discrepancy. In 2000, Gore won NY by 61-35% with 4% of the vote going to Nader. According to the NEP, 71% of Nader
2000 voters switched to Kerry in 2004; just
21% voted for Bush, a better than 3-1 ratio. Let’s assume that Kerry matched
Gore’s 61% and won 75% of Nader 2000 voters. Then
Kerry won by 63-36%, matching the Exit Poll. And yes, there is evidence that
Lever machines are vulnerable to miscounts at the voting machine and central
tabulator.
4.11. Are you saying that the exit polls disprove fraud?
No. As noted earlier, many forms of
fraud may be compatible with the exit poll results. However, it seems hard to
reconcile massive, widespread
fraud – on the order of many millions of miscounted votes -- with the exit poll
results unless one begins by discounting the details of the exit poll results.
By and large, the exit polls point to fraud in bizarre places (Delaware?) and
sizes (how likely is it that Kerry would have won New Hampshire by double
digits – or New York by over 30 points?). One can explain away some of these
results individually, but the entire pattern simply isn't very consistent with
massive, widespread fraud.
TIA:
How likely is it
that Kerry won NY by over 30 points? As we have shown, Gore won NY by 60-35%
over Bush, with the remaining 5% to Nader/other.
It’s very conceivable that Kerry at least matched Gore and won 75% of the Nader vote to end up with a 64-35% margin.
4.12. Are you saying that you are sure Bush didn't steal the election?
No, depending on
what one means by "steal." In particular, I think it is at
least possible that some combination of vote suppression (purges, long lines,
intimidation, etc.) and uncounted votes cost John Kerry a victory in
Please note: I think that efforts
to prevent people from voting, or to prevent their votes from being counted,
are despicable regardless of whether they affect the outcome.
TIA:
Please note: switching votes
electronically from Kerry to Bush is also despicable.
Go here for an analysis of Uncounted and Switched Votes
TruthIsAll FAQ: (5)
5.1. Why has TruthIsAll called the "2000 presidential
vote" question the clincher?
About 3200 exit poll respondents
around the country were asked who they voted for in 2000. The weighted results look like this
(screen shot excerpted from cnn.com):
TruthIsAllFAQimage002.jpg
TIA emphasizes two aspects of this
table. First, he notes, it is impossible that 43% of the 2004 electorate voted
for Bush in 2000.
That would be over 52 million Bush
voters, whereas Bush only got about 50.5 million votes in 2000. (Some of those
voters must have died, or not voted for other reasons.) Ergo, it is necessary
to apply "mathematically impossible weights" to the exit poll data in
order to match the official returns, and so Kerry must actually have won. I
will call this the "impossible 43%" argument.
Second, he argues: if the previous
election's Gore voters and Bush voters turned out in roughly equal numbers in
2004, and if they 'defected' in 2004 to the other party at roughly equal rates,
as in the table (10% of Gore voters to Bush, 9% of Bush 2000 voters to Kerry),
and if Kerry won among the "Other" voters (mostly Nader
voters) and those who did not vote in 2000, then Kerry must have won.
The second argument is especially
appealing to many people who regarded the 2004 election as in some sense a
replay of the 2000 election. It seems very reasonable to say that if Kerry
could just battle to a stalemate among the previous election's Gore and Bush
voters, the Nader voters and new voters were bound to
put Kerry over the top.
5.2. What is wrong with the "impossible 43%" argument?
It assumes that exit poll
respondents accurately report whom they voted for in the previous election. In
reality, exit poll respondents seem to have overstated their support for the
previous winner in every exit poll
for which I could obtain data, ten in all, going back to 1976. (Yes, even Richard Nixon, despite resigning in disgrace, garnered a
higher "recalled vote" percentage in 1976 than his official vote share
in 1972!) In fact, TIA's first argument could
just as well be applied to 2000: in that year, proportionately more exit poll
respondents recalled having voted for
Lots of other evidence indicates
that people often report having voted for the previous winner although they
didn't. Perhaps most telling is an (American) National Election Study (NES)
"panel" in which people were interviewed soon after the 2000
election, and then reinterviewed in 2004. Of the people
who said in 2000 that they had voted for Gore, about 7% said in 2004 that
actually they had voted for Bush
in 2000. (A smaller proportion, under 2%, similarly
"switched" from Bush to Gore.) Also, among those who said in 2000
that they hadn't voted for president, about 36% said in 2004 that they had voted and those respondents
reported voting for Bush by about 2 to 1. For several reasons, these
percentages cannot be directly applied to the exit polls.Nevertheless, the
panel does provide direct evidence of people misreporting their past votes, in
Bush's favor.
So, while it is impossible that 43%
of voters in 2004 actually
voted for Bush in 2000, it is not at all impossible that 43% of voters would report having voted for Bush in 2000.
In fact, this overstatement of past support is consistent with past exit poll
results; it would be surprising if the percentage were not "too high."
TIA:
Ah, the “false recall” argument
that people often report voting for the previous winner. But in 2000 GORE won
by 540,000 votes in the official count. You cite the 2000 exit poll in
which 45.5% respondents (48.1 of 104.74m) said they voted for
Once again, you assume that
In any case, it doesn’t matter what
2004 exit poll respondents said as to how they voted in 2000. The maximum
number of returning 2000 voters in 2004 is limited to those who were still
living in 2004. You have agreed to this simple fact, so false recall is a
non-issue. It comes down to this: where did Bush find 16 million new
votes? Assuming that 95% (46.5 of 48.7) million Bush 2000 voters also
voted in 2004, he needed 62-46.2= 15.8 million new voters to match his 2004
recorded vote!
5.3. What is wrong with the second argument, where new (and Nader) voters break the stalemate in favor of
Kerry?
The second argument assumes that
Kerry did about as well among Bush 2000 voters as Bush did among Gore 2000
voters. Superficially, the exit poll table supports this assumption. And many
Democrats cannot believe that any appreciable number of Gore 2000 voters --
presumably outraged by the Supreme Court's intervention, not to mention
countless Bush actions -- would actually vote for Bush in 2004.
But the problem with the first
argument is crucial to understanding the problem with the second: one cannot
assume that people have reported their past votes correctly. Among the people
who reported having voted for
Gore, only about 10% "defected" to Bush. But what about the people
who actually voted for Gore in
2000 but reported
having voted for Bush? One would expect that in 2004, such people would
be more likely to vote for Bush than for Kerry. Indeed, in the 2000-2004 NES panel, this group favored Bush over Kerry by greater than a
5-to-2 ratio. Thus, the 10% Gore-to-Bush "defection rate" is
understated, because it excludes people who actually voted for Gore in 2000 (but misreported this fact) and
who voted for Bush in 2004.
By similar logic (also supported by
evidence from the NES panel), the 9% "defection rate" of Bush 2000
voters to Kerry is somewhat overstated.
It includes some people who actually voted for Gore, but reported having voting for Bush (in 2000) -- and then
voted for Kerry! This finding may seem strange: one might imagine that people
who misreported having voted for Bush in 2000 would invariably support Bush in
2004. But, as I just noted, this is observably not the case in the NES panel.
Some people seem simply to forget having voted for Al Gore in 2000, but
nonetheless end up (apparently) voting for Kerry.
(Kerry's margin among "new
voters," i.e., people who did not vote in 2000,
is probably also overstated, because some actual new voters who voted for Bush will have reported voting
for Bush in 2000 as well. Of course I am leaving out several permutations of
actual and reported votes!)
While there is no way of knowing
the true defection rates, I estimate that the data are consistent with a
Bush-to-Kerry defection rate of about 7-8% and a ore-to-Bush defection rate of
about 14%. For a more extensive discussion, see my paper, "Too Many Bush
Voters?"
This argument is consistent with
the fact that the pre-election national polls generally gave Bush a slight
lead. Kerry was widely expected to do better than Bush among new voters -- so
if these new voters were going to break a stalemate in Kerry's favor, they
should have done so in the polls before the election. (Many people tend to
discount this point because they assume that the pre-election polls somehow
missed these new voters -- perhaps because the pollsters underestimated
turnout and/or because many of the new voters were cell-phone-only
users. I address both these arguments above.)
TIA:
Wow! That can only be described as
a convoluted, faith-based set of hyper-hypotheticals. And this is where we part company. For one
to believe that over 7 million Democratic Gore voters would defect and vote for
the most incompetent, dishonest pRresident in history
(with a 48.5% approval rating) who STOLE the 2000 election from them, is really
a stretch – a perfect example of faith-based naysayer
fundamentalism.
5.4. But... but... why would 14% of Gore voters vote for Bush??
If one thinks of "Gore
voters" as people who strongly supported Gore and resented the Supreme
Court ruling that halted the
One has to consider that many
Americans who vote in presidential elections do not follow politics very
closely. Some will unenthusiastically opt for one candidate or the other late
in the process; if they voted for the candidate who ultimately lost, they may
literally forget him. (Mike Dukakis, the 1988
Democratic nominee, seems to have been singularly subject to this fate. Dukakis lost the election by under 8 points, but in the
1993 General Social
Survey, he
retrospectively lost by 41
points.) Considerable research indicates that incumbent presidents tend to have
an inherent advantage, which might be characterized as a "devil-you-know
factor." Ray Fair estimates that
from 1916 through 2000, an incumbent running for reelection had about a 3-point
boost in expected vote share, although this advantage seems to have declined
since 1960.
Some observers argue that George W.
Bush had a particular advantage in 2004 given his standing as a wartime
president. Americans are said to be reluctant to vote against incumbents in
wartime. I am ambivalent about this argument, but we do not need to arrive at a
sound-bite explanation of why
an appreciable minority of Gore voters defected to Bush in order to conclude
that they did.
TIA:
You sure as hell do need a
sound-bite explanation of why so many Gore voters defected to Bush; all
evidence indicates the opposite. NES, NES, NES. (N)ot (E)xactly
(S)cientific. That’s the essence of your case.
Take a look at the True Vote Model
TruthIsAll FAQ:
M.1. What about the
reports of flipped votes on touch screens in 2004?
Many people reported difficulty
voting on electronic voting machines (DREs), in
particular, that attempts to vote for one candidate initially registered as
votes for another. The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), connected to
the "OUR-VOTE" telephone hotline, recorded close to 100 such
incidents. TruthIsAll has asserted that 86 out of 88 reports of electronic
vote-flipping favored Bush. He cites
the odds of this imbalance as 1 in 79,010,724,999,066,700,000,000. Another
observer reports that actually, 87 out of 94 EIRS reports favored
Bush. The odds of this imbalance are, of course, still prohibitive -- on the
order of 500 trillion to 1 against.
Is this compelling evidence of a
stolen election? No, it really isn't at all -- because the actual election
returns from DREs on crucial states don't support
election theft concentrated upon DREs. In
One also wonders about the inherent
plausibility of visible vote-switching as a means of widespread election fraud.
If someone had the insider access to force visible vote-switching, wouldn't
s/he also have the ability to engineer invisible
vote-switching? This question may have a compelling answer, but I haven't seen
one yet. (On the other hand, the mere fact that a fraud mechanism seems suboptimal doesn't prove that it wasn't used.)
While TIA's
reported odds are breathtaking, they do not interpret themselves, for two
reasons. First of all, the odds calculation depends on the underlying
assumption that Bush-to-Kerry and Kerry-to-Bush switches were equally likely to
be reported to EIRS. Actually, the EIRS hotline was widely publicized in
liberal-leaning media sources, and the election protection
volunteers who promoted the hotline were concentrated in heavily Democratic
precincts. Given these facts, asell as pre-election
concerns about Diebold and DREs,
one would expect Kerry-to-Bush switches to be reported at a higher rate. But how much higher? There is simply no way of knowing.
Certainly the imbalance of reports is suspicious.
The second problem is that these 88
or 94 reports are not a sample, but rather the universe of all EIRS vote-switching reports. (Presumably some
additional vote-switching reports are not logged in the EIRS.) Moreover, most
of these reports assert that the voter was ultimately able successfully to vote
for the correct candidate. So, what is the likely frequency of vote-switching
implied by the data? People who leap from fewer than 100 problem reports to
multi-million-vote conclusions obviously are not following the data alone. Are
these reports the tip of the proverbial iceberg, representing huge numbers of
vote switches not detected or not reported? Again, there is simply no way of
knowing. However, again, statistical analysis of the election returns generally
indicates, probably not. Surely there were more problems than reported in the
EIRS, and some of the problems may reflect tampering, but they seem to have had
little impact on the outcome.
There is solid evidence of excessive "undervotes"
on pushbutton DREs in
M.2. Did the 2006
exit polls manifest "red shift" compared with official returns?
Yes. For instance, the initial
national House tabulation -- posted a bit after 7 PM Eastern time
on election night -- indicates that Democratic candidates had a net margin of
about 11.3 points over Republican candidates. The actual margin was probably
about 7 points, depending on how uncontested races are handled.
TIA:
What is your justification for stating that “the actual margin was
probably about 7 points, depending on how uncontested races are handled”?
M.3. Do pre-election "generic" House polls in 2006 match the
initial exit poll returns?
Not really. A "generic"
poll is one that asks respondents whether they would vote for (in
We know that they [the generic
polls] perform poorly as point estimates. For instance, an 18-point Democrat
lead from early in an election year most likely will translate into a far
smaller vote lead on Election Day. However, regression equations accounting for
the vote in terms of the generic vote do predict well, as they properly
discount the exaggerated sizes of the generic poll leads.
What it means to "predict
well" is a matter of perspective: Bafumi et al. report
(PDF p. 2) that midterm House vote share predictions based on generic polls
over the last 30 days have an estimated margin of error of plus-or-minus 3.7
points. Vote margin predictions
therefore have a margin of error of more than 7 points.
The 2006 generic poll results
varied widely. Seven polls conducted in the last week before the election agreed that the Democrats were
ahead, but the estimated Democratic margin ranged from 4 to 20 points. The
average margin in these polls was about 11.6 points. Using these polls in Bafumi et al.'s regression equation, we can estimate that
the Democrats would win by about 8 points, with (as I mentioned) roughly a
7-point margin of error. (Bafumi et al., using
generic polls through "early October 24," estimated that the
Democrats would win by about 10 points based on an average margin of over 15
points in the polls to that date.)
David Moore and Lydia Saad noted
in 1997 that the final generic
Given statistical margins of error,
these generic poll results could be consistent with a Democratic vote margin of
7 points or of 11-plus points -- although a 7-point margin is somewhat likelier
than an 11-point margin. But we do not have to settle for the generic poll
results. We can examine pre-election polls in particular House races. As Mark
Blumenthal has demonstrated, overall these
pre-election polls come very close to the actual returns. Thus, neither generic
nor race-specific pre-election polls support the conjecture of widespread
miscount in House races. (In Senate and gubernatorial races, Blumenthal showed earlier, Democratic candidates on
average did as well as or better than in pre-election polls.)
TIA: Not Really? Let’s look at the evidence.
This analysis shows how the Final
Exit poll weights were manipulated to cut the Democratic margin in half.
This analysis shows that the 120
Generic Poll Trend matched the7:
This is an analysis of uncounted and switched
votes.
This analysis shows that the 120
Generic Poll Trend matched the 10 Final Generic Polls.
This is the final of three
pre-election articles I wrote with Michael Collins (autorank) and Alistair
Thompson of SCOOP. The purpose was to quantify the risk of fraud in the 2006
Mid-terms. The analysis forecast that the Democrats would gain control of the
House and Senate. It also indicated the House seats and Senate races where fraud
was most likely to occur.
M.4. What about the massive undervotes in Sarasota
County,
Without getting into the specifics,
the short answer is: I think that if voters had been able to cast their votes
as they intended, the Democratic candidate Christine Jennings would have won
the House race in Florida's 13th Congressional District (FL-13) by thousands of
votes, instead of losing by under 400. I have seen no evidence that the events
in FL-13 shed light on outcomes in any other Congressional race.
TIA:
Are you implying that FL-13 was an
isolated case of missing and/or switched votes? And that
there is no evidence of miscounting in the other 434 districts? Mark,
you’re in a constant state of denial. What about Ohio? There are quite a few
articles which document the fraud.
This Pew 2006 Election Analysis of
voting “glitches”, “snafus” and “hiccups” describes the chaos state by state.
This Survey of
Pollworker and Voter Experience Reveals Pervasive and
Recurrent Failures among Computerized Voting Systems.
An extensive analysis of ballots
cast in the Ohio 2006 Senate Race by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D. proved that the
recorded vote count was imposssible.
ABSTRACT: In the November 7, 2006
election in Ohio there were 350,669 more ballots cast than the number of votes
counted for United States Senator. In 16 counties there were 268,987 uncounted
votes, or 19.46% of ballots cast, compared to 82,957, or 2.99%, in 71 other
counties. Cuyahoga County alone accounted for 148,928 uncounted votes, or
26.48% of ballots cast in the county, and 42.47% of the statewide total of
uncounted ballots. In
If the rate of uncounted ballots in
the 17 suspect counties had been about 3%, as was the case elsewhere in the
state, there would have been about 42,000 uncounted ballots instead of 269,000.
This indicates that 227,000 votes may have been lost by the touch screen voting
machines, which were utilized in all 17 of the suspect counties.
________________________________________________________________
Bush had a 48.5% average approval rating on Election Day.
The Nov.1, 2004 Election
Model, based on the final state and 18 national pre-election polls,
projected Kerry as the 51.8-48.2% winner of the two-party vote. His projected
337 electoral vote total was calculated as the average of a 5000 election-trial
Monte Carlo simulation. The projection model was confirmed by the state and
national exit polls.
Edison-Mitofsky provided four state exit poll measures.
Kerry won the first three; Bush won the Final:
1) WPE
51.8-47.2% (unadjusted)
2) GEO
51.0-48.5% (adjusted to
incoming recorded votes)
3) Composite 50.3-49.1% (12:22am-adjusted to pre-election
polls)
4) Final
48.5-51.1% (matched to
recorded vote)
WPE is the only unadjusted
(‘pristine’) measure. It was based on the average discrepancy between
the exit poll result and recorded vote for all state precincts which were
polled. Measures (2) and (3) are adjusted
estimates which incorporate pre-election polls and recorded votes. The final state exit polls were forced to
match the recorded votes, therefore implying ZERO election fraud. Why should we
believe them? And why bother doing exit polls at all if they will just assume
that the recorded vote count was the True Vote?
Some say that exit polls are not designed to predict the
True Vote but to provide a demographic snapshot of the electorate. But if that’s the case, and the recorded
vote count is corrupted, then so are the demographics.
Kerry also had a steady 51-48% lead throughout the National
Exit Poll timeline: at 4pm (8349 respondents); 7:30pm (11027); 12:22am (13047)
- after the polls closed. Of coursse, Bush won the Final NEP by 51-48%
(13660 respondents) which was posted at 2pm the day after the election. The
Final NEP was forced to match the Recorded Vote count with impossible weights
and implausible vote shares, so why should we believe it?
Excel–based models were developed to calculate the True
Vote. Links to the models are provided in this document. They confirm the
massive documented evidence of elections that were compromised by a combination
of uncounted and miscounted votes. The essential input for the models include
state and national recorded votes, pre-election and exit polls, Census total
votes cast and mortality rates. Users can enter their own assumptions and then
view a ‘sensitivity analysis’ of resulting state and national vote shares and
margins. The scenarios are displayed in numeric tables and charts. Many
examples are provided in this document.
The Election
Calculator and Interactive Election Simulation models determined that Kerry
probably did 1-2% better than the exit polls indicate.
The Election
Calculator is an Excel model for analyzing 1988-2004 elections. Users can
override the pre-set default assumptions for voter mortality, uncounted vote
rates, prior election voter turnout and vote shares of prior and new voters. The base case scenario indicates that Kerry
won by nearly 10 million votes with a 53.2-45.4% vote share.
Interested readers can download the model, review the base case scenario
and then enter their own assumptions. Sensitivity analysis tables provide an
instant view of vote shares over a range of input assumption scenarios.
The Interactive
2004 Election Simulation Model (also Excel) enables users to run simulations
based on state and national
pre-election and exit polls. State exit poll vote shares are based on
the following user options: 1) WPE, 2) Best GEO and 3) Composite
(12:22am). The National Exit poll data includes the 12:22am update and
the 2pm Final. The only
pre-election model assumption is Kerry’s projected share of Undecided Voters.
The only state exit poll inputs are the method (1, 2, or 3) and assumed cluster
effect. A Monte Carlo simulation consisting of 200 election trials
generates both the projected popular and expected electoral vote. The
probability of Kerry winning the election is the percentage of trials in which
Kerry received at least 270 EV. Additional model analysis includes National
Exit Poll timeline, Gender vote, exit poll response optimizer, Census data and
the Ohio exit poll.
In the 2006 midterms, a Democratic Tsunami gained 31
congressional seats. But they actually did much better than that. A regression
trend analysis of 120 pre-election Generic polls (all won by the Democrats)
projected they would win by 56-42% and gain over 40 seats. The 7pm National
Exit Poll update (55 Dem-43% Rep) confirmed the pre-election trend. But the next day, the Final NEP was once
again forced to match a corrupted vote count with implausible weights and vote
shares. The Democratic margin
was cut in half to 52-46%. The fraud resulted in the loss of 10-20 seats.
Dec.12, 2000 is a day that will live in infamy. Bush needed
the help of five right-wing Republicans on the Supreme Court to stop the
recount in Florida and enable him to steal the election. There has been an
ongoing controversy regarding the 2004 election. State and national
pre-election and exit polls pointed to a Kerry victory. Those who claim that
Bush won fair and square are relentless in their attempts to thrash polling
analyses which suggest that fraud occurred. Since the media will not release
tell-tale precinct-level data, analysts must rely on publicly available polling
data. And they have determined that the polls provide powerful statistical
evidence of fraud. ’Voter fraud’ has been shown to be a
non-existent distraction from the evidence of massive ‘election fraud’.
Voters don’t fix elections, corrupt officials do. The corporate media was
quick to dismiss the statistical polling analyses and claims of election fraud
by ‘spreadsheet-wielding Internet bloggers’ as
another left-wing conspiracy theory.
This is what Richard
Morin , a Washington Post
staff writer, wrote on Thursday, November 4, 2004:
An Election Day
filled with unexpected twists ended with a familiar question: What went wrong
with the network exit polls? In two previous national elections, the exit polls
had behaved badly. Premature calls by the networks in Florida led to a congressional
investigation in 2000. Two years later, a computer meltdown resulted in no
release of data on Election Day…. Results based on the first few rounds
of interviewing are usually only approximations of the final vote. Printouts
warn that estimates of each candidate’s support are unreliable and not for
on-air use.….That is why the early leaks anger Joe Lenski
of Edison Media Research, which conducted Tuesday’s exit poll with Mitofsky
International for the National Election Pool, a consortium of the major
television networks and the Associated Press…. After the survey is completed
and the votes are counted, the exit poll results are adjusted to reflect the
actual vote, which in theory improves the accuracy of all the exit poll
results, including the breakdown of the vote by age, gender and other
characteristics’.
The media never considered the possibility that the votes
may have been miscounted and that the exit polls were essentially correct. They
just took it for granted that the vote count was accurate (i.e. the election
was fraud-free). After all, isn’t that why the exit poll results are always
adjusted to match the vote count? Of course, they never did an analysis which
would have shown that the adjusted Final NEP weights were impossible and that the
adjusted vote shares were implausible. And they would have come to the
same conclusion as the spreadsheet-wielding bloggers:
the election was stolen.
A dwindling number of naysayers
continue to argue that the exhaustive statistical analysis of 2004 pre-election
and exit polls by a number of independent researchers does not provide
convincing evidence that the election was stolen. Their ‘case’ consists of faith-based theories, factual avoidance,
misstatements and misrepresentations. And they cannot reconcile the many
statistical anomalies which all point to massive fraud. Some of
their ‘explanations’ include the following: Kerry voters were more likely to
respond to exit pollsters; exit poll interviewers sought out Kerry voters; over
7% of returning Gore voters told the exit pollsters that they voted for Bush in
2000; pre-election and exit polls are not pure random samples; exit polls are
not designed to detect fraud in the United States; early exit poll results
overstated Kerry’s vote; women voted early and Republicans voted late; Gore
voters defected to Bush at twice the rate that Bush voters defected to Kerry. None are supported by factual data and all
have been refuted.
Uncounted Votes
In every election, millions of mostly Democratic votes are
never counted – and are a significant contribution to the exit poll
discrepancies. According to the 2000 Census, approximately 5 million votes were
never counted. Since they were from heavily democratic minority districts, if Gore won 75% his true margin was close to 3
million votes - not the 540,000 recorded. And that does not include the
very real possibility that a certain percentage of recorded Gore votes were
switched to Bush. The 2000
election was not even close, although the media would like us to believe it
was. Only the 5-4 Supreme Court decision was close. Consider the Florida
2000 fiasco. Bush ‘won’ by 537 ‘official’ votes - before the recount was
aborted. But 185,000 spoiled (under
and over-punched) ballots were never counted. Since approximately 65% of
them were intended for Gore, he actually won the state by at least 60,000
votes.
According to the U.S.
Census, 125.7 million votes were cast in 2004. The recorded vote was 122.3m
and 3.4m were uncounted. The Census survey margin of
error is 0.30%. Therefore there is a 97.5% probability that at least 125
million cast votes. According to detailed information provided by investigative
reporter Greg
Palast, 3.006m votes cast were never counted.
They were comprised of 1.389m spoiled ballots, 1.091m provisional and .0.526m
absentee. The 0.40 million (0.31%)
discrepancy between the Census and Palast matches the
Census MoE.
First-time Voters
They claimed that the vaunted 2004 Republican GOTV campaign
brought Bush millions of new Christian fundamentalist votes. But they failed to note that since 1992,
according to the National Exit Poll, the Democrats won first-time voters by a
14% average margin. Ruy Teixeira
wrote about it in The Emerging Democratic Majority. Furthermore,
the Democrats had a remarkable voter
registration and GOTV effort. In the strongest Democratic areas, the pace
of new registration was 60 percent higher than in 2000; it was just 12 percent
higher in Republican areas.
Undecided Voters
They rejected the evidence that late undecided voters
virtually always break for the challenger. But world-class pollsters Zogby and Harris,
who have a combined 60 years of experience, indicated that late polling
showed that Kerry won 67-75% of undecided voters. The National
Exit Poll also reported that Kerry won a clear majority of undecided voters.
This was not unusual; historical evidence indicates that undecided voters break
for the challenger over 80% of the time - especially when the incumbent is
unpopular. Bush had a 48.5% average approval rating on Election Day. The final Zogby polls in nine battleground
states had Kerry leading by a 50-45% average. He was projected to win all nine by 53-46% - but won only five by 50-49%. The margin
of error was exceeded in six of the nine states, a 1 in 52 million
probability.
This is what the Gallup poll said about undecided voters:
‘In the final USA
TODAY/CNN/GALLUP poll before the election, President Bush held a 49-47 edge
over Sen. John Kerry when the undecided voters were not allocated to a
particular candidate. When Gallup, using a statistical model that assumes that
9 of 10 of those voters would support Kerry, allocated the voters, the poll
ended as a dead heat with each candidate garnering 49%. The Gallup allocation
formula is based on analyses of previous presidential races involving an incumbent’.
Bush Approval Rating
They dismissed the significance of the Bush 48.5% approval
rating on Election Day. But
historically, incumbents with approval below 50% lost re-election (Ford,
Carter, Bush I) while incumbents above 50% won (Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon,
Reagan, Clinton). The near-perfect 0.87 correlation
between Bush’s monthly approval rating and average national poll is further
evidence. The correlation was confirmed when Kerry won the 12:22am National
Exit Poll by 51-48%. The Final Exit Poll forced a bogus 53% Bush approval
weighting to in order to match the vote count.
Final 5 Million Recorded Votes
They can’t explain these anomalies in the recorded state
vote shares: 1) the strong correlation
between the state exit polls and late vote shares (Kerry led in both), 2) the
small discrepancies between the exit polls and the late vote shares, and 3) the
consistent pattern
of a higher Kerry share of late votes compared to his initial share. But it’s further evidence that the
‘pristine’ exit polls were close to the true vote. Bush won 51.0% of the
initial 117.28m votes; Kerry won 53.0% of the final 5.0m. Kerry exceeded his
initial vote share in 38 states, including 15 of 19 in the battleground. A false impression was created early that
Bush was winning as the first reported votes came in from the East. But even as
the recorded votes were being reported on TV, state and national exit polls
showed that Kerry was winning the popular and electoral vote. The
vote-rigging apparently ended before the final 5m were recorded; Bush had
already ‘won’ the electoral vote and held a 3.5m lead in the popular vote.
After the final 5m votes were recorded, his ‘mandate’ declined by 0.5m to the
official total of 62.04-59.03m.
Weighted Average State Vote shares
They claimed that Bush led in the
pre-election state
and national polls. But they forgot to calculate the national vote as a weighted average
(based on the voting population) of the state poll shares. State polling
data shows that Kerry led the weighted average from
July to Election Day except for a brief period in September. Bush led the unweighted
average. Kerry also led the national
pre-election polls. In both poll sets, before
undecided voter allocation, Kerry led by less than 1% nationally. But he led by 3% in the battleground states.
Vote Share Projection and Electoral Vote Simulation
They disputed the fact that the Nov.1, 2004 Election Model
projections were accurate and that the final pre-election polls matched the
exit polls. But assuming that Kerry
captured 67-75% of the undecided vote, the pre-election state (Kerry 47.9 -
Bush 46.9%) and national polls (Kerry 47.2 - Bush 46.9%) closely matched the
12:22am National Exit Poll (50.8 -48.2%). The state and national models
projected Kerry as the winner by 51-48%, matching the
Random-selection and Margin of Error
They declared that exit polls were not true random samples. But Edison-Mitofsky state
in the notes to the 2004 National Exit
Poll that respondents were randomly-selected with a 1% overall margin
of error. And the pre-election polls all provide a
margin of error based on the number of respondents.
National Exit Poll Timeline
They forgot about the Law of Large Numbers. Kerry led
the National Exit Poll by 51-48% at 4pm (8349 respondents), 7:30pm (11027) and
12:22am (13047). But Bush won the 2pm
Final NEP (13660) by 51-48% through the use of impossible weights and
implausible vote shares that were required in order to match the recorded vote.
Matching Exit Polls to the Recorded Vote
They dismissed the accuracy of the early exit polls. But it’s standard
operating procedure that the final exit polls are always fixed to match the
recorded vote even if it means using impossible weights and implausible vote
shares. This implies that the recorded vote was fraud-free – not exactly a
reality-based assumption. Preliminary state and national exit polls are
‘contaminated’ when they are forced to match a corrupt vote count.
Gender
They need to explain how Bush sharply increased his share of
Democratic women voters while his share of Republican males declined. One would
normally expect to see a positive correlation in the Demographic Trend
between the two groups. But to believe
that Bush won by the 62-59m recorded vote, one must believe that his ‘mandate’
was provided by women who in 2000 either a) did not
vote, b) voted for Gore, or c) voted for Nader.
According to the NEP, Kerry won new voters by 57-41%, Gore voters by 91-8% and Nader voters by 64-17%. So why should you believe it?
Exit Poll Bias
They noted a built-in Democratic bias in the exit
polls. But they did not account
for uncounted and switched votes. Exit polls overstate the recorded Democratic vote in every election. Part
of the discrepancy is due to uncounted votes in heavily Democratic minority
districts. In addition, solid documented evidence exists of direct vote-switching
directly at DREs and on central tabulators where
touch-screen, optical scanner, lever and punched card votes are counted.
Republicans manufacture the voting machines that can easily be hacked.
Margin of Error and the Cluster Effect
They said that the margin of error used in calculating the probabilities
of the exit poll discrepancies was too low. But even assuming a 60% ‘cluster effect’, the probabilities were still
near zero. The WPE-adjusted
state exit polls discrepancies, even assuming a 30% cluster effect, exceeded
the margin of error in 24 states for Bush. The Composite (12:22am)
discrepancies exceeded the margin of error in 16 states - all in favor of Bush.
Not a single state deviated
beyond the MoE for Kerry. Assuming a zero
cluster effect, the probability that the MoE would be
exceeded in 16 states by Bush is 1 in 19 trillion. A probability
sensitivity analysis gave Kerry a 98% probability of winning a
popular vote majority - even assuming a 50% cluster effect.
Urban Legend
They can’t explain The
Urban Legend myth: How did Bush gain
vote share in heavily Democratic urban locations, yet lose share in highly Republican small towns and rural areas?
An analysis
of the 2000 and 2004 NEP location-size demographic shows a 9% increase in the Bush share of the heavily Democratic urban vote
and a 3% decline in share of the heavily Republican small town and rural voter.
And how did he manage a 3% increase in the suburbs which has been
trending Democratic in recent elections?
Regions and Time Zones
They cite Bush voter non-response and Gore voter false
recall as reasons why the margin of error was exceeded (using the average state
WPE) in 29 states for Bush and in just one for Kerry. All 21 Eastern Time
Zone states red-shifted to Bush and 14 exceeded the MoE.
But the probability that the
exit poll margin of error would be exceeded in 29 states is ZERO.
Red-shift vs. Blue-shift
They overlooked the fact that 41 states switched to Bush
from the final pre-election polls
to the recorded vote. But none of the
10 states that switched to Kerry was a battleground state. Forty-three
states red-shifted to Bush from
the
They neglected to ask why six of the eight states which
deviated to Kerry from the exit polls were strong Bush states: TN (1.63), TX
(1.65), SD (1.67), ND (2.51), KS (2.37) and MT (0.22). The exit poll
discrepancies (shown in parenthesis) were all within the exit poll margin of
error. But only two competitive states
deviated to Kerry: OR (0.75) and HI (1.25). Is it just a coincidence that
They agreed that the vote-rich battleground states would
decide the election. But was it just a
coincidence that six deep-red states deviated to Kerry and not a single blue
state? Or was it because Bushco did not want to
explain a 50-state red-shift? Did they disregard the six states knowing that
Kerry would not come close to winning them? Instead they focused on thwarting a nationwide blue-shift in
competitive states. The beast was in the East, the rest were in the West.
Voter Mortality
They suggested that up to one million more Gore 2000 voters
died than Bush voters had a major impact on the Bush ‘mandate’. They cited
Gore’s 51-47% advantage in the Final NEP for the 60+ age group and calculated a
1.15% annual voter mortality rate (4.60% over the four years between
elections). Therefore, approximately 5m of the 110.8m who cast votes in 2000
died prior to Nov 2004. But Gore’s 51% share of 5m is 2.55m; the Bush 47% share is 2.35m; the
0.20m difference is inconsequential. The Election Calculator
showed Kerry winning by 10m votes with 53.5% of the popular vote.
Party ID
They need to explain why the Party ID mix changed from a
3-5% Democratic edge over the last 4 elections to an even 37/37 split in the
Final National Exit poll. The
Reluctant Bush Responders
They hypothesized that Bush voters were reluctant to respond
to exit pollsters. But the rBr theory was contradicted by the 2004 Final Exit Poll. In
the Final, Bush 2000 voters comprised 43% of the respondents, compared to 37%
for Gore voters. And rBr was also contradicted by a linear
regression analysis: exit poll non-response rates increased going
from the strongest Bush states to the strongest Kerry states, which suggests
that non-responders were Kerry voters. So they had to come up with
another explanation. It was a perfect Hobson’s choice. If they believed the
final Exit Poll (which Bush won by 51-48%), they would have to accept the
weights that indicated Bush voters were over-represented. But then they could
not claim the rBr theory.
Mathematically Impossible Voted 2000 Weights
They claimed that it was standard operating procedure to
re-weight the exit polls based on the recorded vote. But the Final NEP ‘Voted in 2000’ weights (Bush 43/Gore 37%) were
mathematically impossible. Bush 2000 voters could not have comprised 43% of the
122.3mm votes recorded in 2004, since 43% of 122.3 is
52.6mm and Bush only had 50.5mm votes in 2000. The 43/37 weights were
irrelevant and misleading since they were mathematically impossible. Furthermore,
since approximately 1.8mm Bush 2000 voters died prior to the 2004 election, the
maximum number who could have voted in 2004 was 48.7 million, even assuming an
impossible 100% turnout. This physical, incontrovertible mathematical fact
totally confounded the naysayers. And the longer they
tried to refute the facts, the sillier they looked.
The Democratic Underground ‘Game’
They finally agreed in the Democratic
Underground Game thread that the Final NEP Bush/Gore weights were
impossible and came up with a new set of feasible weights. But they had to compensate for the change to
feasible weights in order to match the recorded vote by inflating the Bush vote
shares to implausible levels. This was necessary even though the shares
were previously inflated in the Final with impossible weights in order to match
the recorded vote. It was a feeble, last-ditch Hail Mary pass to justify
the Bush ‘mandate’. They had to deal with an inconvenient truth: the Final
National Exit Poll inflated the Bush tally by more than 4 million votes. But even though the weights were
mathematically impossible, the exit-pollsters had no choice but to use them
hoping that no one would notice. And so they lost the ‘Game’. Their use
of implausible vote shares meant that they could not come up with one
believable Bush win scenario.
To match the recorded vote, they were forced to make the
following implausible assumptions:
1) 14.6% of Gore
2000 voters defected to Bush.
The
The probability
of a 6.6% discrepancy is ZERO.
2) Kerry won 52.9% of those who
did not vote (DNV) in 2000.
The NEP reported a 57-41% spread; it was changed to 54-45% in the
Final.
3) 7.2% of Bush 2000 voters defected to Kerry.
The NEP reported that 10% defected; it was changed to 9% in the Final.
False Recall
They knew that every theory they had proposed to explain the
exit poll discrepancies was refuted. So they were forced to suggest ‘false
recall’ as a last-ditch explanation and cited a post-election NES 600-sample
survey to account for the impossible Final 43/37% Bush/Gore weights. This was
the basis for their claim that 14.6% of Gore 2000 voters defected to Bush in
2004. They implied that approximately 6.6% of Gore 2000 voters (8.6% higher
than the
But ‘false recall’
is not a plausible explanation since a) Gore won by 540,000 votes, b) according
to the pristine 12:22am NEP, Kerry captured 91% of Gore voters and 10% of Bush
voters, c) Bush had a 48.5% approval rating on Election Day 2004, d) false
recall is not applicable to pre-election polls and e) the pre-election polls
matched the exit polls. Why
would Gore voters want to be associated with Bush? Even if returning Gore voters lied about their vote in 2000, it’s
irrelevant. What is relevant is a) their factual 2000 recorded Gore vote and b) that 91% said they just
voted for Kerry. We use this factual data to compute feasible and plausible
weights by adjusting the 2000 recorded vote for mortality and estimated 2004
turnout.
They also need to explain how the ‘false recall’ hypothesis
applies to other demographics. In the 12:22am NEP, 13047respondents were asked who they just voted for: Kerry won the Gender demographic by
50.78-48.22%. But only 3200 of
the 13047 respondents were asked how they voted in 2000. But Kerry won
the other 10,000 respondents (who were not asked who they voted for) by 51-48%.
This totally contradicts the ‘false recall’ argument. Why would 10,000
respondents tell the exit pollsters that they just voted for Kerry if they
wanted to be associated with Bush?
Feasible Weights and Plausible Vote shares
They maintain that the base case assumptions in the True
Vote Model are not feasible and plausible. But the assumptions were based on feasible weights applied to plausible
Switched Votes
The True Vote model also determined that 4.5m (6.8%) of
Kerry’s true vote must have been switched to Bush. The simple formula is True
Vote = Recorded + Uncounted + Switched. Kerry’s True Vote was 66.1m, his
recorded vote 59.0m and 2.6m were uncounted. The model also concluded that
Kerry won 336 electoral votes. This result matched the Nov.1 Election Model
which used Monte
Carlo Simulation to calculate Kerry’s expected electoral vote.
The Election
Incident Reporting System (EIRS)
According to the 2004 EIRS,
86 of 88 touch screen vote switching incidents were from Kerry to Bush, a 1 in 79 sextillion probability.
Sixteen Million New Bush Voters
They failed to explain how Bush found 16m new voters (DNV2k)
to reach 62m in 2004. He had 50.5m votes in 2000. But only 46m returned to vote in 2004. Approximately 2m
Bush voters died and an estimated 2.5m did not vote, assuming a 95% turnout.
According to the
They need to explain how Kerry lost the popular vote in 2004, even though he won a solid 57-41% share of new (DNV2k) voters. Of the DNV2k
voters, Kerry won first-time voters
by 55-43% and other new voters
by 61-37%. Gore won the popular
vote in 2000 even though Bush captured new (DNV96) voters by 52-44%. But this
is quite strange, especially since Gore won first-timers (52-43%) and Bush won
others (71-26%). How could there have been such a wide discrepancy in vote
share between first-timers and others? Did Bush really win 71% of other new
voters?
2000 Voter Turnout
They belittled a comprehensive sensitivity analysis which indicated that Kerry won all
plausible scenarios of voter turnout and new voter share. But assuming
Implausible Vote Shares
They need to explain these implausible changes in Bush NEP
vote shares from 2000 to 2004:
-The Bush share of females increased by 4.2% while his share of males decreased by 0.2%
-His share of white females increased by 5.0% while his share of white males decreased by 0.9%
-His share of non-white females increased by 4.0% while his share of non-white males increased
by only 0.76%
-His share of female independents increased by 1.8% while his share of male independents
decreased by 5.6%
Didn’t females vote 54-45% for Kerry? Didn’t over 90% of
blacks vote for him? Weren’t independents for Kerry by 52-44%? Why would
independent males defect to Kerry at triple the rate that independent females
defected to Bush? Didn’t Nader voters break 3-1 for
Kerry?
Swing vs. Red-shift
They claimed that the raw exit poll data which have not been
made public indicates that there was no tendency for Bush to do better in 2004
relative to 2000 (‘swing’) than he did in the 2004 exit poll (‘red-shift’).
They presented
their analysis in a swing vs. red-shift scatter chart
and concluded from the flat regression line that the exit poll discrepancies
did not indicate fraud. But they did
not consider the following factors: According to the 2004 National Exit Poll,
Kerry won 71% of returning Nader voters compared to
21% for Bush. A similar split would have increased Gore’s margin
by 1.4mm. Assuming that 75% of approximately 5 million uncounted votes
were for Gore, his margin increases by another 2.5 million. When added to his recorded 540,000 vote
margin, Gore’s adjusted margin becomes 4.5 million. And that does
not consider the effects of vote-switching. We know a lot more about
vote-switching than we did in 2000. It’s very likely that Gore votes were
switched to Bush. But assuming zero vote-switching, Gore’s adjusted, true
margin was close to 4.5 million: 2.5m uncounted + 1.4m Nader + 0.54m recorded. They never normalized the
2-party state vote shares in calculating ‘swing’. Actual adjusted swing was 3.9%, recorded swing 2.0%; red-shift
4.1%. An adjusted
swing vs. red-shift bar graph displays the deviations. Another scatter
chart shows that adjusted swing exceeded 4% in 18 states while red-shift
exceeded 4% in only 4 states. The naysayer swing vs. red-shift argument is just
another ruse meant to divert, confuse and mislead.
They argued that the Final Ohio
exit poll does not indicate fraud. But
they ignored the massive documented evidence of uncounted and switched votes,
apart from voter disenfranchisement. And two election workers were convicted of
rigging the recount. Kerry won the
Using the original
First-time voters
Of the 14% who were first-time voters, 55% were for Kerry.
Are we to believe that he won just 47% of the other 86%?
When Decided
Of the 21% who decided in the month prior to the election,
62% voted for Kerry. Are we to believe that he won just 45% of the 79% who
decided earlier? Did Bush lead by 10% in any of the early polls?
Party ID
The weights changed from 38D/35R to 35D/40R, a 7.9% shift.
With the original weights, Bush needed 17% of Democrats to match the recorded
vote. He had 8%.
Ideology:
Liberal/Conservative weights changed from
21/32 to 19/34, a 9.5% shift. With the original weights, Bush needed 23%
of Liberals to match the recorded vote. He had 13%.
Voted for Senate
Democratic/Republican weights changed from 43/57 to 36/64, a
16.3% shift. With the original weights, Bush needed 14% of those who voted for
the Democratic candidate. He had 7%.
They ignored
Dan Rather’s
voting machine expose showed that
poor-quality paper used
in punch card machines was a major cause of election fraud in heavily
Democratic precincts, thus illustrating a previously unknown method used to
hack mechanical voting machines, whether punch card or lever.
The Democrats had a
41- 37% registration advantage in Touch Screen (TS) counties and a 42-39% edge
in Optical Scan (OS) counties. Kerry won the TS counties (3.86mm votes) by 51-47%, but Bush won the OS
counties (3.43mm votes) by a whopping 57-42%. Kerry’s low vote shares in the
three most heavily populated (and Democratic) TS counties (
Several models indicate that Kerry won
They cherry-picked the final NY pre-election poll in a
feeble attempt to prove that the pre-election polls didn’t match the exits.
Kerry won the final NY pre-election poll by 59-40%. The recorded vote was
58.5-40.2%. But they cannot explain
how Kerry won 66% of the final 497,000 votes recorded. They claimed that
the NY pre-election poll was correct and that the WPE-adjusted exit poll (Kerry
64.1- Bush 34.4- Other 1.5) was wrong. The Exit Poll MoE is 2.6% for 1452
respondents (3.2% if a 30% cluster effect is assumed).
They claimed that the NY pre-election poll matched an
accurate recorded vote. Their proof: Lever voting machines have a low 1%
spoilage rate. But they cannot provide evidence that ALL the votes were counted
accurately in ALL the precincts and they failed to consider absentee and
provisional ballots. Historical evidence indicates that Lever machines are
vulnerable to rigging. Dan Rather’s
voting machine expose was a clear
example. In Florida 2000, poor-quality
paper used in punch card machines was a major cause of election fraud in
heavily Democratic precincts, thus illustrating a previously unknown method used
to hack mechanical voting machines, whether punch card or lever.
There are four
fundamental flaws in their argument.
They
failed to consider the NY 2000 vote: Gore 60.2
- Bush 35.2 - Nader 3.6. Their argument implies that the 2004 recorded vote was
fraud-free and that 100% of returning Nader 2000
voters defected to Bush - clearly an impossible scenario. In fact, according to the
They ignored the
theoretical margin of error. It’s well-known that exit polls are more
accurate than pre-election polls. There was a 5.1% discrepancy between Kerry’s
NY pre-election (59%) and exit poll (64.1%). Since the MoE is 4% for a typical 600-sample pre-election state poll,
there was a 95% probability that Kerry’s True vote was in the 55-63% range. The
NY exit poll 3.2% MoE (30% cluster effect) implies
there was a 95% chance that Kerry’s True vote was in the 60.8-67.2% range which would fall within the MoE
of both the NY pre-election and exit poll. On
the other hand, the weighted average of 51 state pre-election polls
(adjusted for undecided voters) matched
the National Exit Poll to within 1%. Once again, it’s the Law of Large Numbers
taking effect.
They
failed to consider that Kerry’s vote share was 10% higher in NY than
nationally. The Election Calculator, which accounts for voter mortality,
turnout and uncounted votes, determined that Kerry won by 64.0-34.5%. The assumptions were as follows: Gore and Kerry won
75% of the uncounted votes (5% of total cast); Kerry won 94% of Gore voters,
12% of Bush voters, 61% of new (DNV2k) voters and 68% of returning Nader/other voters. A sensitivity analysis shows that if
Kerry won 90-98% of returning Gore voters and 57-65% of DNV2k, his NY vote
share ranged from 61.3 to 66.7%.
They
implied there was zero fraud in claiming that the recorded vote was the true
vote. An analysis of the effects of uncounted
and switched votes indicates that Kerry won by 63-36%. If 2% of total
votes cast were uncounted (75% to Kerry), then 7% of Kerry votes were switched
to Bush. The uncounted vote assumption is lower than the 2.74% national average
(NY uses lever voting machines).
Exit Poll Response Optimization
Four independent
mathematical methods applied to three distinct sets of precinct, national and
location-size exit poll data each produced the identical result. The
USCV simulation; 1250 precincts by partisanship; location-size; NEP Voted in
2000 were in near-perfect confirmation.
The Exit Poll Optimizer employed the Excel Solver algorithm
to obtain a feasible solution for the 2-party vote (Kerry 52.15-Bush 47.85%).
The data constraints included the recorded vote (Bush 51.24-Kerry 48.76%),
response rates and within precinct error (WPE) categorized into five
partisanship groupings: Strong Bush, Bush, Even, Kerry, Strong Kerry.
The Optimizer
confirmed the USCV simulation. Both models analyzed summary exit poll data for
1250 precincts supplied by Edison-Mitofsky and in so doing, debunked the
reluctant Bush responder (rBr) hypothesis. The Optimizer also exactly matched the
The 2006 Midterms: Tsunami Denied
Except for the notorious 2006 FL-13 congressional race in
which 18,000 mostly Democratic votes were mysteriously missing, the evidence of
massive fraud in the midterm elections is hardly mentioned in the corporate
media..
The fraud probably cost the Democrats 10-20 congressional seats.
The 2006 National Exit Poll ‘How Voted in 2004’ weights were
changed from 47 Bush / 45 Kerry at 7pm on Election Day to 49/43 in the Final
NEP at 1pm on the following day. Once
again, just like in 2004, the exit pollsters had to match the vote count by
expanding the weight spread from 2% to 6%! This had a major effect in cutting the Democratic margin in half
- from 55-43% to 52-46%. As noted earlieer, the 2004 12:22am NEP ‘How Voted in
2000’ Bush/Gore 41/39 weights were changed to 43/37 in the 2pm Final, turning a
51-48% Kerry victory into a 51-48% loss.
If plausible 49
Kerry/ 46 Bush weights (based on the 2004 NEP) are used, the TRUE Democratic
margin becomes 56.7-42.1%, exactly
matching the 120 pre-election Generic
Poll trend line. Was this just a coincidence
or another confirmation that the pre-election polls matched the
This is an
extensive report of e-voting failures from votersunite.org.
This Pew 2006
Election Analysis of voting ‘glitches’, ‘snafus’ and ‘hiccups’ describes
the chaos state by state.
This Survey of Pollworker and Voter
Experience Reveals Pervasive and Recurrent Failures among Computerized Voting
Systems.
An extensive
analysis of ballots cast in the Ohio
2006 Senate Race by Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D.
proved that the recorded vote count was impossible
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
