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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24682)	1/3/2005 6:12:59 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Respond to of 90947

Thousands of provisional ballots were not counted. Most likely just a bookeeping error. Distribution of voting machines was not equitable. Just an administrative error. Say, who was manning those polling stations in the poorer precincts?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24682)	1/3/2005 6:13:06 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 90947

"Don't you think that fraud needs to be found out and extinguished?" I do. I also notice which people are most vocal about it and how they are much less vocal about querying fraud accusations against dems.

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24682)	1/3/2005 6:14:21 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Respond to of 90947

More "Enron Math" in King County My promised scoop that I broke on the Dori Monson Show: I found a specific case of ballotless voters. Three precincts that share a polling place in Issaquah [2602, 3464 and "Gilman"] where the total number of voting voters noticeably exceeds the number of ballots counted. Unlike some of the similar discrepancies I found with polling place ballots, this one can't be explained by adjusting with other precincts from the same polling location. The only possible explanations that I can imagine: (1) A number of voters were erroneously recorded as having voted when they didn't vote. (2) ballots disappeared and weren't counted. (3) ballots were mixed up in the counting center and placed with other precincts. (4) The ballot counts are bogus. I suspect we'll never know the answer. Either way, this is just another sign that we're facing an irreparable mess and the only solution is to throw out the election and have a revote. [I'll post specific details later today] Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 02:51 PM \| Comments (0) Categories: 2004 Governor's Race

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24682)	1/3/2005 6:56:10 PM
From: WWWWWWWWWW	Respond to of 90947

Take a look at this article. It helps show the results of an exit poll can differ from the actual outcome. To conclude there was "fraud" because the numbers didn't match is a leap of reasoning and not a proper application of Occam's Razor which points instead to the margin of error of the exit poll. Exit polls out of whack Early numbers told wrong story BY ADAM LISBERG DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Crawford, Tex., election judge Marlene Englebrecht, with Bush cutout, shows where he kissed her when he arrived to vote. Millions of people were captivated on Election Day by the unfolding story of John Kerry's victory in the exit polls - except that, once again, the polls were all wrong. Republicans panicked, Democrats gloated and the stock market tumbled after numbers meant solely for the eyes of news editors were leaked to Internet blogs and other Web sites. The raw data showed Kerry beating President Bush by three percentage points (he lost by three), winning Ohio by two (he lost by two) and winning Florida by two (he lost by five). "It was a total failure and an embarrassment," Republican pollster Frank Luntz said of the polling commissioned by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and The Associated Press. "The numbers were so far off that they're unusable." Marty Ryan, Fox News executive producer for political coverage, called the polls "disappointing," and AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll said the news agency will look at what, if anything, went wrong this time. But pollsters at the National Election Pool, which works for AP and the five networks, said all along that the early numbers were incomplete and unreliable. Anyone who took them as gospel should blame themselves for getting it wrong, officials said. "People believed them, and it's particularly the case with Internet bloggers," said CBS poll director Kathy Frankovic. But "it's a good exercise because it reminded people that early exit polls can be unreliable." NBC spokeswoman Barbara Levin noted that "the networks were cautious and got it right" when it came to the numbers and that not a single network blew an Election Night call, unlike in 2000, when some prematurely called Florida for Al Gore. The NEP was formed in the wake of the networks' blown calls. Slate magazine columnist Jack Shafer, who posted the numbers online, warned they were only as good as the fourth-inning score in a baseball game. No matter - soon after the early numbers emerged, the stock market fell 100 points, the Kerry campaign got confident, and the Bushies got scared. Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman told supporters shortly after 4 p.m. that the exit polls looked bad for Bush, and by 8p.m., many supporters on a Bush conference call were convinced the race was over, barring a miracle. Meanwhile, Democrats were convinced Kerry would win with a two-point margin in the popular vote. They didn't start getting nervous until 9:30 p.m., as vote totals started working against them in Florida and Ohio. Their real shock came at 12:41 a.m., when Fox News Channel said Bush would win Ohio - seemingly locking up the election for him. Pollsters said they did the best they could, given a close race, a large number of new voters and widespread voting before Election Day. "When you've got a race that's within two or three percentage points, that's within the margin of error," said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication. With Maggie Haberman Originally published on November 4, 2004 nydailynews.com

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (24682)	1/3/2005 6:59:36 PM
From: WWWWWWWWWW	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Also, this... Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research and one of the directors of the exit polls, conceded that the surveys, which aimed at questioning every 10th voter leaving 1,480 precincts nationwide, had missed the mark. "A superficial reading of the data would have indicated that Kerry had a slight lead," he said in a telephone interview. But he defended the survey's final result, calling it "well within the sampling error," which ranged between 2 and 5 percentage points." "I've been doing exit polling since 1987," he said. "I know the margin of error. The differences we saw in just about every state fell within those calculated errors." reflector.com Exit surveys, by their nature, always vary somewhat from the actual vote count. In recent years, they have tended to over-estimate the support for Democratic presidential candidates. Writing for the Century Foundation, a liberal policy group, Ruy Teixeira tracked past preliminary exit poll numbers and found the Republican vote to be consistently under-estimated before the data were adjusted to reflect actual vote results. In 1988, for example, initial findings showed Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis with 50.3 percent of the vote, although George H.W. Bush won the election. Another issue is why some of the early results had an over-representation of women, who tended to favor Kerry over Bush. "There's also an issue of whether Democrats were more willing to talk than Bush voters," Frankovic said. She added that experience shows that older voters are generally less willing to participate in exit polls than younger people. Other unknown factors are the interviewers, since experience shows some are far more successful at coaxing voters to answer the survey than others. "Polls are pretty blunt instruments," Frankovic said. "They are not as precise as I think some people would like to think."