Who won? 555
doom writes "I think they call them "exit polls" because people
bolt for the exits when you mention them, but I'm still
fascinated by the subject myself, and this book is one of the
reasons why. In Was the 2004 Presidential Election
Stolen?, the central focus is, of course, on the infamous
exit-poll discrepancies of the 2004 US Presidential election;
but the authors also put it into context: they discuss the
2000 election, the irregularities 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." Read the rest of doom's review
| Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? | |
| author | Steve Freeman & Joel Bleifuss |
| pages | 265 |
| publisher | Seven Stories Press |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | doom |
| ISBN | 1583226877 |
| summary | Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count |
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: That the exit-poll discrepancies had a statistically significant correlation with the use of electronic voting machines, with races in battleground states, and in almost all cases favored the Republicans. 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: 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. 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 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 into the peculiarities he had noticed.
Overall, this is an excellent book for people interested in evaluating the data; with 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.'"
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, HR 550 has stalled out.
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."
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.
You can purchase Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
That was covered (Score:5, Informative)
An Agenda (Score:1, Informative)
"Joel Bleifuss is an American journalist. He is the editor of In These Times, a progressive news magazine based in Chicago. Bleifuss has worked as an investigative reporter and columnist for In These Times since 1986.
Bleifuss writes frequently on US politics and foreign policy, and environmental affairs. His articles have been featured on Project Censored's list of suppressed news stories more than any other American journalist."
Did you actually rtfa? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:freaking me out (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know of very many people who say that GWB "engineered" anything, much less large scale election fraud. You do realize that the people in this administration number more than 1, right? You do realize that the people who would stand to gain from this kind of fraud aren't limited to people named George.
Actually, Gore won the popular vote in 2000. In addition, in case you missed it, Clinton had had 66%+ approval rating [pollingreport.com] when he left office. Most political analysts now say that Gore's reluctance to embrace Clinton, coupled with how incredibly boring the man is, cost him the election. (Or, rather, made it as close as it was.) Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was the Supreme Court that handed Bush the win in 2000, stopping a recount that we now know would have resulted in a Gore win.
Except that the book we're commenting on here offers evidence that this was not what happened, and in fact it was fraud that won Bush his second term. If you would like to dispute the data, then sobeit, but making pronouncements like that doesn't make them true.
Who, exactly, are you talking to? The authors of this book never claimed to be Democrats. Furthermore, if what they're saying is true, the very foundations of our Democracy are at risk. One would think people would be a little more concerned over it.
RTFR (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting book but... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Lets get over it already (Score:3, Informative)
A strong impetus for election reform, to minimize the likelihood of future fraud?
dKos and other left sites generally believe... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/12/23/9122
Ok, I shouldn't say kos... as it was DemFromCT, but it did get promoted to the front page.
Re:freaking me out (Score:3, Informative)
You mean the recount of heavily Democratic counties ordered by the Democratic Florida Supreme Court that used different criteria per county, thus violating the Florida state constitution and election laws? The truth is the Supreme Court stopped the Florida Supreme Court from trying to find a way to steal the election for Gore. And all of the analysis I've seen shows that Bush would have won after most recount methods - something like 5 out of 7 different voting criteria. Get over it.
Re:freaking me out (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly, we don't have a popular vote. Simply adding up each states votes is not the same thing. Bush, Gore, and every serious presidential contender since has spent their time and their dollars according to the electoral college system. Bush spent damn little time appealing to voters in highly populous states like CA, NJ, etc because it was a foregone conclusion that he was going to lose those states. If it were a popular vote system, then he would have been well advised to spend time in more populuous states. Likewise, many Republican-leaning voters in those states may well have chosen to stay home since they couldn't sway the presidential election.
Secondly, the difference in the sum of the voters was approximately 540K votes or a mere ~.19% of the entire nation. This is hardly reflects a real nationwide preference for Gore given the circumstances.
Thirdly, fun fact: Bush got about 6M more votes in 2000 than Clinton got in 1992. Does that make Clinton illegitimate in your view?
Lastly, please keep on re-fighting 2000 - it's a winning strategy
Re:I still haven't been sold on electronic voting (Score:3, Informative)
Seems to me it is a solution without a problem. Couldn't you avoid vote-counting concerns entirely by casting paper ballots, then allowing anyone with an interest in the counting process to witness the tally. Count the votes publicly, perhaps in a gymnasium or library, with a camera to record the counting process as well as to transmit a feed to an internet site. I believe they do something similar in Canada now. I would gladly exchange the additional time necessary to conduct the count manually with witnesses for a repeat of the Florida fiasco during the Presidential election in 2000.
They've always done this in Canada.
In Canada, polling stations usually service a few hundred households. They are typically set up in local school gymnasiums, church halls, the basements of apartment blocks etc. Voters show up, are checked off the list of registered voter and are handed a (paper) ballot. The voter's list is taken from the national tax records and so is generally quite accurate. For those who aren't on the voter's list because they moved (or declined to have the tax office register them), they can register at the polling station by showing the appropriate ID.
The actual voting is done behind a cardboard screen, and the ballot is put into the ballot box. For federal and provincial elections, the ballot box consists of a standard Elections Canada cardboard box whose sides have been sealed and certified. The box design is remarkably simple and inexpensive, enough so that boxes are often sent to new democracies running their first elections. Municipal elections in large cities often use optical recognition counters, but the ballots themselves are still paper. Voters mark their X for each vote, and an optical scanner does the tallies; the paper ballots are retained in case manual recounts are required.
When the polling stations close, the boxes are opened up and the counting begins. Each polling station reports its results to a central clearinghouse, and the totals are tallied. Candidates may appoint scrutineers for each polling station, but in fact anyone may watch (but not interfere with) the counting provided they are inside the counting room before the poll closes and the room is shut. Counting the votes for the entire election generally takes only a few hours; when the country goes to bed there will be roughly five races out of three hundred that are too close to call.
Open source voting system (Score:5, Informative)
Voting machine:
1. Setup linux distro with apache, tomcat, whatever
2. Install ballot web app
3. Setup CUPS printer
4. Setup firefox for kiosk mode, home page is voting app
Ballots print like this, one measure per line:
PRESIDENT: AL GORE
SENATE: JAMES WEBB
STEM-CELL: YES
During the election, voters take their printout and drop it into the ballot box. After the election these are counted individually at each polling place using a counting machine.
Counting machine:
1. Setup linux distro
2. Install ballot counter program
3. Run ballots through OCR software
4. Update counters (in realtime as scanned)
For the counting program, all it needs to do is keep a count of unique lines on the ballots as returned by the OCR. It should include a simple display showing the most frequent lines and their count (sorted by count) along with the last vote scanned. This way it doesn't need to know anything about the election in order to count it.
For the voting machine you can add fancy CSS styles, javascript to prevent accidental undervoting, screen readers, on-screen keyboard, etc. To polish the system you will want to have some specific printer hardware so the votes print on something smaller than a sheet per vote.
Re:Speaking of statistics (Score:4, Informative)
Here you go:
Clint Curtis [wikipedia.org] testified before congress that
"At the behest of Rep. Tom Feeney, in September 2000, he was asked to write a program for a touchscreen voting machine that would make it possible to change the results of an election undetectably. This technology, Curtis explained , could also be used in any electronic tabulation machine or scanner. Curtis assumed initially that this effort was aimed at detecting Democratic fraud, but later learned that it was intended to benefit the Republican Party.
West Palm Beach was named as an intended target, but used punched card ballots in the 2000 elections. Indeed, West Palm Beach was famous for the "hanging chad" recounts of that election."
Here's [alternet.org] a video of his testimony.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate (Score:1, Informative)
The exit poll discrepancies were the basis of challenging the Ukrainian elections.
Exits are a "Survey" not a Poll (Score:2, Informative)
There has been endless debate about this, but a good primer can be found here: http://www.mysterypollster.com/main/2004/11/exit_p olls_what.html [mysterypollster.com]
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate (Score:4, Informative)
Historically US exit polling results are all over the map and have only been getting worse. It also doesn't help that poor training leads to improper sampling or that laws in certain areas restrict pollers access to voters.
Outside of the US exit polls are much more accurate but that can be easily explained by differences in polling techniques and voter mentality.
A good source for a little less bias polling info is Pollster.com [pollster.com] as opposed to a book co-written by an editor of an progressive magazine run by an admitted socialist.
Re:Not this crap again (Score:2, Informative)
Kerry lost because he was a very bad candidate. I knew he would lose. I sat in the Washington state democratic caucus and told people that he couldn't win and we should nominate someone else (John Edwards or Wes Clark). No one listened.
Re:of course it was stolen (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate (Score:3, Informative)
That is not even close to a true statement. I know you really want to believe it because it is good ammo that the election must have been stolen "this time" but it is simply not true. Go to one of the referenced studies [exit-poll.net]. Flip to page 32. Starting there - polling data is compared with actual returns from every state from 1988-2004. The negative numbers are when the polls overestimated Democratic turnout. There are a lot of negative numbers. Skip down to page 34 (second table). In every election the democratic position has been overstated. It just so happens that in 2004 it was overstated by the largest margin (6.5% error). However, the error in 2000 was only 1.5%. Interstingly, the next largest bias in the polling after 2004 was in 1992 at 5% (so you will obviously say it runs in the family...) which doesn't make the 6.5% value such a stretch. If you skip down another page they show the correlation between voter "paying attention to the election" and poll bias. Interestingly, the more interest the voting public has in the election, the greater the turnuout and the bias against the republicans in the polls.
Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)
The population of South Dakota is 776,000. (2205) South Dakota Quick Facts From The U.S. Census Bureau [census.gov] The typical Congressional district has a population of 690,000. (2006) United States House of Representatives [wikipedia.org]
Representation in the House has always been based on population.
That is why money bills must originate in the House. (Think of it as The Commons) Each state gets a minimum of one Congressman. Representation in the Senate is by state, two senators per state, elected at large. There has never been such a thing as a senatorial "district."
That is how the game has been played for over two hundred years.
And no, I'm sorry, I can't recall what legislation or governmental change it was which resulted in the marginalization of the House and the electoral college, but there was one (iirc it was at about the time of the civil war/war between the states/war of northern agression
The Electoral College became problematical as early as 1800 with the tie vote that tossed the choice between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson to The House of Representatives. (where it took 36 gut-wrenching roll calls to reach a decision) and with the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824 that ended with John Quincy Adams in the White House and Henry Clay as Secretary of State.
Re:freaking me out (Score:2, Informative)
Most of that sounded about right, but "we now know"? In the first place, there wasn't just one recount, there were individual recounts in numerous precincts and counties, and in the second place none of the recounting changed the outcome for the entire month of November (sparkly graph) [washingtonpost.com].
Subsequent to the Supreme Court ruling, there were numerous independent recounts by news organizations and other interested parties. I think it was in 2002 that I saw a summary of 17 such efforts, most of which used different rules and methods for counting the votes. 15 placed Bush as the winner, and one of the two that favored Gore had done so by discarding absentee votes (including overseas military) as Gore had sought to do in the actual recounts. I don't recall the methods of the other being as questionable, just outweighed by the results of perhaps a dozen other methods.
So maybe you can see how I'm at a loss to understand how "we now know" that the recounts would have given Gore a win. Was there another final, ultimate, and authoritative recount that I maybe missed, or perhaps just yet another method of counting the votes that resulted in putting Gore ahead?
Re:typical Doc Ruby (Score:5, Informative)
Because Fox spreads misinformation, therefore Fox fans tend to be misinformed. People who are happy to be misinformed tend to be idiots. That's why.
This isn't just a general impression. Studies have shown that the more you watch Fox, the more likely you are to be misinformed on key political issues. See this PDF document [psqonline.org].
Well, it depends where you put the centre ground. If you classify all sane people as being on the "liberal" left, and all the genocidal maniacs as being on the "conservative" right, then perhaps most non-Fox media is "liberal". But I don't think that's a fair place to put the dividing line.
I'd say that all networks with a systemic bias in favour of the establishment (see the Propaganda Model [wikipedia.org]) must be classified as right-wing or at least centrist. This puts Fox at the extreme right, with other networks in the centre-right and centre, and alternative news sources such as Democracy Now [democracynow.org] at the left.
You can find examples of people who have passed through the education system, and yet still believe in gods, angels, fairies, aliens, homoeopathy, astrology, moon-landing conspiracies, feng shui, tarot cards, Iraqi WMDs, virgin birth, Fox impartiality, and cigarettes making you look cool. However, this doesn't stop the fact that such beliefs have a strong scientific correlation with having shit for brains (specific example given above).