Subject: Exit Poll-Election Questions were NOT Answered in Miami

 

Dear Warren and members of the AAPOR community:

 

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, either 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 "irregularities" (a.k.a. vote suppression, vote manipulation, and mistabulation) were documented, and where counts and "recounts" are conducted in secret, the exit poll results stand out as conspicuously suspicious. The exit poll data, for all its limitations, is one of the only means to gain both national and local insights into whether, in fact, the official reported results of the presidential election were even in the ballpark.

 

That the relevant data has not been made available for independent analysis is inconsistent with the principals of a scientific community – or, for that matter, a democracy.

 

Indeed of all the multitude of unanswered questions, perhaps the most puzzling is how highly intelligent, decent people can take the position that the data ought not be independently analyzed.

 

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Steven F. Freeman * Center for Organizational Dynamics * University of Pennsylvania * (215) 898-6967 * Fax: (215) 898-8934 * stfreema@sas.upenn.edu

* www.organizationaldynamics.upenn.edu/center * www.appliedresearch.us/sf/

 

election research/writing: www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep

 

 

-----Original Message-----

From: Warren Mitofsky

Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 00:41

Subject: Re: For those of us who didn't go to Miami

 

Marc Sapir once again is talking without knowing what was said in Miami. The exit polls do nothing to establish or disprove the claim of fraud in Ohio. The so-called unexplained questions I thought were answered in Miami.

 

The other fraud arguments were never discussed. Only five of the original 20+ something who made up the group that raised the questions about the 20+ exit polls signed their current release. Their own members don't believe their arguments any longer -- just Marc.

 

warren mitofsky