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October 11, 2006
November 30, 2006
"Was the 2004 Presidential
Election Stolen?" This is a review
I wrote with
"Exit Polls, Election Fraud, slashdot.org They continue
and the Official Count" in mind, to help to sit on it --
keep this issue as of this
by Joel Bleifuss, alive in people's writing it is
Steve Freeman minds as the "pending",
Seven Stories Press 2006 election and has been
approached. for a month
and a half.
I think they call them "exit polls"
because people bolt for the exits Actually, they
when you mention them, but I'm still did run it,
fascinated by the subject myself, some time
and this book is one of the reasons (They like dorky *after* the
why. humor at slashdot. election.
Myself, I do not
In "Was the 2004 Presidential normally indulge, Can't really
Election Stolen?", the central of course.) complain
focus is, of course, on the though: HBO
infamous exit-poll discrepancies did a better
of the 2004 US Presidential job than I
election; but the authors also put with their
it into context: they discuss the "Hacking
2000 election, the irregularities Democracy".
in Ohio in 2004, the electronic
voting machines issues, and the
media's strange reluctance to
report on any of these problems.
Further, in the chapter "How did
America really vote?", they compare the
indications of the raw exit-poll data
to other available polling data.
Throughout, Freeman and Bleifuss do an
excellent job of presenting arguments
based on statistical analysis in a
clear, concise way.
The heart of the book in my opinion,
is Chapter 5, "The inauguration eve
exit-poll report":
The Edison and Mitofsky firms that
conducted the NEP exit polls later
released a report trying to explain
how they could have gotten it so far
wrong. Freeman and Bleifuss, of
course, take issue with the
presumption that the discrepancies
*must* be "errors", and argue in a
different direction.
This section makes an exciting read (in
a nerdy sort of way) it's an impressive
piece of statistical judo: Freeman and
Bleifuss take on Edison/Mitofsky with
their own data, and totally shred their
conclusions.
The authors show:
o That the exit-poll discrepancies:
o had a statistically significant
correlation with the use of
electronic voting machines,
o also correlated with
races in battleground states,
o and in almost all cases
favored the Republicans.
o The "Reluctant Bush Respondant" theory looks
extremely unlikely: response rates actually
look slightly better in Bush strongholds than
in Kerry strongholds; and while media
skepticism remains strong among
conservatives, it has been on the rise among
Democrats and yet the data shows no shift in
relative avoidance of pollsters.
They also deal with the various other excuses that
were floated shortly after the election:
o The discrepancies can't be shrugged off with an
"exit polls are not reliable" -- theory shows
that they should be better than any other survey
data, and history shows that they always have
been pretty reliable.
o There was no upswing of support for Bush throughout
election day -- that impression was entirely an
artifact of the media "correcting" the exit-poll
figures to match the official results.
One of the book's authors,
Steven Freeman, was one of [ref]
the first to examine the
exit-poll discrepancies,
and as a professor at
University of Pennsylvania
with a background in survey
design, he was well
equipped to begin delving [ref]
into the peculiarities he
had noticed.
Overall, this is an excellent book for people
interested in evaluating the data: there are
lots of graphs that make it easy to do
informal estimates of the strength of their
conclusions (just eye-balling the scatter,
the correlations they point to look real,
albeit a little loose, as you might expect).
There's also an appendix with a very clear
exposition of the the concept of statistical
significance, and how it applies to this
polling data. There are of course, limits to
what one can conclude just from the exit-poll
discrepancies:
"We reiterate that this does not prove the
official vote count was fraudulent. What it
does say is that the discrepancy between the
official count and the exit polls can't be
just a statistical fluke, but commands some
kind of systematic explanation: Either the
exit poll was deeply flawed or else the vote
count was corrupted. "
This is a remarkably restrained book: unlike
many authors addressing this controversial
subject, Freeman and Bleifuss have resisted
the temptation to rant or speculate or even
to editorialize very much. Freeman claims
that he is not a political person (and adds
"I despise the Democrats"); possibly this has
helped him to maintain his neutrality and
focus on the facts of the case.
Personally, I found this book to be something of
a revelation: in the confusion immediately after
the 2004 election, I had the impression that the
people who wanted to believe that it was
legitimate at least had some wiggle room. There
was some disagreement about the meaning of the
exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that
found significant problems, but then the MIT
study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do
you believe?
The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they
got it wrong: they used the "corrected" data, not
the originally reported exit poll results. The
media never covered that development, and I missed
it myself...
On the subject of electronic voting machines,
They include a chapter discussing electronic voting
in general which covers ground that is by now
familiar with most readers here: the strange case of
Wally O'Dell and Diebold; and also the lesser known
problems with ES&S. Have you heard this one?
"In 1992, Hagel, then an investment banker
and president of the holding company McCarthy
& Co., became chairman of American
Information Systems, which was to become ES&S
in 1999. [...] In the 1996 elections, Hagel
launched his political career with two
stunning upsets. He won a primary victory in
Nebraska [...] despite the fact that he was
not well known. Then, in the general
election, Hagel was elected to the Senate in
what "Business Week" described as 'an
unexpected 1996 landslide victory over Ben
Nelson, Nebraska's popular Democratic
governor.'"
Also, my experience is that a lot of people need to hear this point:
"The voting machine company Datamark, which
became American Information Systems and is
now known as ES&S, was founded in 1980 by two
brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Today,
Todd is a vice president at ES&S and Bob is
CEO of Diebold Election Systems."
It's impossible to see how you can come away from this
situation without seeing that we badly need reform of
the electoral system: even if you don't believe the
2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next
one isn't going to be? A paper trail that can
actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? But
only a start. As the author's point out:
"We devoted a chapter to the ills of
electronic voting, but a critical lesson of
the 2004 election is that not only DREs, but
all kinds of voting machine systems are
suspect. Edison/Mitofsky data showed that
while hand counted ballots accurately
reflected exit-poll survey results, counts
from all the major categories of voting
machines did not."
In one short passage, the authors list a few "grounds for
hope", but following up on these points is not
encouraging:
The Diebold-injunction law suit in California brought
by VoterAction has since been denied and one attempt
at a paper trail amendment,
[ref]
And HR 550 has stalled out:
[ref]
But then if you look around you can still
find other grounds for hope,
"HR 6200, the Paper Ballot Act of 2006":
[ref]
Oh, but if you're looking for an answer to the question
posed by the book's title, the authors conclude: "So how
did America really vote? Every independent measure points
to a Kerry victory of about 5 percentage points in the
popular vote nationwide, a swing of 8 to 10 million votes
from the official count."
So, of the many and various potentially
depressing books out there about the state of
the United States, I recommend this one highly:
it addresses a critical set of issues that
everything else depends on (when you hear from
yet another monday-morning-quarterback about
what the Democrats need to do to win, remind
yourself that maybe they haven't actually been
losing).
A prediction for the upcoming election, in the
light of this book: The Republicans may let the
House go, but they will drop a heavy finger on SOFT_PEDDLED
the scale to retain the control of the Senate.
Keep an eye on the three close states:
Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia.
See Andrew Tanenbaum's site:
[ref]
Note that Tennessee and Virginia are both high
risk states without paper-trails, so you can
expect "surprise" upsets in favor of the
Republicans there. Missouri is in better
shape as far as election integrity goes, but
even if there's an actual upset there in favor
of the Democrats, control will still (just
barely) remain with the Republicans.
[ref]
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