Thursday, November 11, 2004
Ohio, we may have a problem
It's been over a week, and I still think there's a need to understand what exactly caused the large discrepancy between exit polls and vote totals on election night. I have seen a number of pages on the net purporting to show evidence of (or more circumspectly, evidence consistent with) rigged counting, but haven't found any of it very persuasive.
Now comes a paper from Steven Freeman, a UPenn political scientist, noting that the end of day exit polls were far off. I was willing to believe that the mid-day totals could be off, if Democrats were racing to get to the polls for some reason, but end of the day? Historically, those are right on the money. As Freeman points out, the publically provided reasons for exit poll failure seem a bit farfetched (my favorite silly argument is that exit-pollsters oversample women because they want to chat them up; you'd think exit polls all through history would be biased if this were so).
Freeman points out that if we take the confidence intervals on the polls seriously, the likelihood of simultaneously getting such large pro-Bush margins in Florida and Ohio, and such a narrow Kerry victory in Pennsylvania, is vanishingly small. By itself, this is quite disturbing.
But he also points out this pattern was consistent across all the battlefield states, save MI, IA, and WI. But instead of making the election fishier, this makes me more worried about the exit polls. Widespread fraud, even in states with Democratic election officials, seems a bit hard to pull off. Systematic failure to choose representative precincts, perhaps? Systematic errors in data processing? It happens. So open up the polling records.
I really think we need to know the answer to this question. Moreover, I would feel better if a trusted international group of election monitors did their own count of the ballots of some of the key states. Part of the reason for suspicion is distrust of the officials who are supposed to safeguard the election. Katherine Harris was the very opposite of a dispassionate vote counter, and her actions cast a pall over the officials of the rest of the country, fairly or unfairly. And when you hear Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell say "The last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress", well, you can't help but want a second opinion on the count.
It would go a long way towards restoring legitimacy, and if Bush has been honest, he has nothing to fear.
Now comes a paper from Steven Freeman, a UPenn political scientist, noting that the end of day exit polls were far off. I was willing to believe that the mid-day totals could be off, if Democrats were racing to get to the polls for some reason, but end of the day? Historically, those are right on the money. As Freeman points out, the publically provided reasons for exit poll failure seem a bit farfetched (my favorite silly argument is that exit-pollsters oversample women because they want to chat them up; you'd think exit polls all through history would be biased if this were so).
Freeman points out that if we take the confidence intervals on the polls seriously, the likelihood of simultaneously getting such large pro-Bush margins in Florida and Ohio, and such a narrow Kerry victory in Pennsylvania, is vanishingly small. By itself, this is quite disturbing.
But he also points out this pattern was consistent across all the battlefield states, save MI, IA, and WI. But instead of making the election fishier, this makes me more worried about the exit polls. Widespread fraud, even in states with Democratic election officials, seems a bit hard to pull off. Systematic failure to choose representative precincts, perhaps? Systematic errors in data processing? It happens. So open up the polling records.
I really think we need to know the answer to this question. Moreover, I would feel better if a trusted international group of election monitors did their own count of the ballots of some of the key states. Part of the reason for suspicion is distrust of the officials who are supposed to safeguard the election. Katherine Harris was the very opposite of a dispassionate vote counter, and her actions cast a pall over the officials of the rest of the country, fairly or unfairly. And when you hear Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell say "The last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress", well, you can't help but want a second opinion on the count.
It would go a long way towards restoring legitimacy, and if Bush has been honest, he has nothing to fear.
