Thursday, May 19, 2005

MORE DATA FROM US COUNT VOTES

ELECTION REFORM NEEDED ASAP. Feel ripped off? Trust your instinct.

Those in denial will say, "Oh, those conspiracy theorists and sore losers are still agitating." Perhaps. Perhaps not. Read the numbers, because, in the end, it is really all about the bottom line, and the numbers, is it not? Or is it?

No more commentary here. Read the text and numbers. It is up to you to decide.

Received today from Kathy Dopp, President of US Counts Votes, a non-partisan, non-profit organization in which Ph.D mathematicians, statisticians and computer scientists volunteer their time and professional skills to do voter analysis.


Hello Everyone,

Significant revisions have been made to US Count Vote's newest analysis of the exit polls which contribute substantially to the science of exit poll analysis, and more strongly rebut the reluctant Bush responder hypothesis.

In particular, the derivation of the formula for exit poll discrepancy, WPE, caused by vote shift, and more accurate charts of the exit poll discrepancy patterns caused by vote shift were added today.

Now it can be stated that the exit poll pattern in the Edison/Mitofsky exit poll data is clearly more consistent with vote shift of 6% from Kerry to Bush + an exit poll response bias that is considered very normal (i.e. Kerry voters responding slightly more in Kerry strongholds, and Bush voters responding more in Bush strongholds) than it is with the reluctant Bush responder hypothesis of Edison/Mitofsky.

If you have done what we must all do to ensure that the correctly elected candidates are sworn into office in January 07, by forwarding a copy of our newest paper to your elected representatives to educate them, you may want to re-forward the revised copy, or plan on forwarding it as soon as it is finalized in a few weeks.

US COUNTVOTES ANALYSIS


Below is an excerpt from Steve Freeman's email today to Mitofsky, the exit pollster:
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The fact that the original authors of the USCountVotes papers, myself
included, did not sign the current release does NOT imply that we no longer
believe the arguments, just that we lack time and resources to uphold our
end of a fruitless non-debate.

The recent fuss over WPE and alternative analyses is about whether the E/M
model proposed to account for unprecedented differences between their exit
polls and the recorded vote is impossibly implausible or just highly
implausible.

The bottom line remains that there is no evidence - or even theory - of
differential response. There has never been any. The E/M data itself fails
to substantiate the claim, and may, in fact, undermine the claim entirely.
Without access to the data, it's difficult to know.
The unexplained questions about the exit poll and the election have
certainly NOT been answered in Miami or anywhere else. In a system where
campaign managers serve as election supervisors, where voting machines
provide no assurance that votes are counted as cast, where a wide array of
other "irregularities" (a.k.a. vote manipulation and mistabulation) were
documented, and where counts and "recounts" are conducted in secret, the
exit poll results stand out as conspiciously suspicious. The exit poll data,
for all its limitations, is one of the only means to gain both national and
specific insights into whether, in fact, the official reported results of
the presidential election were even in the ballpark.

That this relevant data has not been made available for independent analysis
is an outrage for members of an organization that considers itself part of
the scientific community. It's an outrage for people that consider
themselves patriotic citizens of a democratic nation.

Indeed of all the multitude of unexplained questions, perhaps the most
puzzling is how highly intelligent, apparently decent men can take the stand
that the data must not be independently analyzed.
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USCOUNTSVOTES

Anyone who may be able to help us obtain funding for USCV's National Election Data Archive Project, please email me.

Best,

Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org

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