'Red Shift' a given?
Jim Wright
is now accepted as the standard
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/23/91222/483
The posting says:
"The 'red shift' is the tendency to get an R vote count while the polls
skew D, a pattern seen and reported in the past.
It happened again this year even as the Dems took Congress.
The idea that ‘exit polls really do skew D’ is supported by this year’s
data.
Arguments challenging the concept should be made with caution and
supportive data, because it seems pretty clear after this review that
'red shift' (or exit polling skewing D) is an established concept."
They don't claim a reason for this necessarily or that it disproves fraud
But is it true that this is established wisdom at this point?
Kathy Dopp
> TOPIC: 'Red Shift' a given?
> Date: Sat, Dec 23 2006 12:37 pm
> From: Jim Wright
Good Question Jim. No it is not true.
Markos, the owner of Daily Kos has systematically banned any user at
Daily Kos who has the mathematical wherewithall and knowledge of the
specific and complex mathematics of exit poll discrepancy analysis who
have had the time available to debunk of the
Liddle/Lindeman/ESI/Mitofsky falacious red shift arguments. The
people that have been banned from Daily Kos (often for simply posting
the data and analysis that refutes Markos' and Blumenthal's positions)
include myself and TruthisAll, and I assume others as well.
TruthisAll's posts to Daily Kos were impeccably polite and he was
banned solely to censor his position there. Markos is very
close-minded to the idea of vote fraud and machine miscount being the
cause for exit poll discrepancies, and refuses to examine the
evidence.
Exit poll discrepancies which show that Dems have greater share than
Repubs in exit polls than in official machine counts have been found
to be associated with evidence of vote tampering, highly suspicious
patterns of vote counts including high undervote rates, voter
disenfranchisement statistics like higher use of provisional ballots
and uncounted provisional ballots targeted to Democratic districts,
and many other indicators of vote fraud and miscount and targeted
voter disenfranchisement; and with jurisdictions who refuse to release
any records publicly that could be used to verify the integrity of
their vote counts.
In addition, the "red shift" folks have no data to back up their
claims, in large part due to the historical lack of any verifiable,
transparent, manual audits of machine counts; and the refusal to
publicly release detailed precinct-level exit poll and election data;
and the indications are that the data that is available actually shows
that "adjusted" exit poll data that matches the official machine
counts grossly over-represents Republican voters.
Some of the counter arguments to the Febble/Lindeman/ESI/Mitofsky "red
shift" crap is posted here:
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/IncorrectElectionDataAnalysis-06.pdf
and TruthisAll has been diligently posting many arguments against the
Febble/Lindeman continued sophistry and I have to say, frequently less
than honest arguments of Liddle and Lindeman, where they continually
"forget" that some of their logic and arguments have been previously
soundly disproven, or "forget" what they themselves have said in the
past.
http://http://www.progressiveindependent.com/dc/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=120
Please take the time to post a copy of your email at the Election
Forum on ProgressiveIndependent.com and if TruthisAll is well enough
(he's been sick this year), he will take the time to thoroughly rebut
the falacious sophistry at DailyKos at ProgressiveIndependent.com.
However you or someone else would have to post back to Daily Kos due
to Markos' censorship and bias on this very issue.
Best,
Kathy
Verified...@aol.com
Kathy Dopp
Thank you Kathy. I have been too personally disgusted and worn out to respond to Liddle and Lindeman's crap but I'll get around to it before long. We have plenty of data and it's all public. How they can keep a
Thank you for all your work. Where is all your data and report again? Is it all complete?
straight face while suggesting that a national exit poll sample giving Bush 42% approval (19% strong approval!) could be skewed Democratic is entirely beyond me, but that was the 7 pm Election Night sample that gave the Dems an 11.5% margin (or a net shift of 3 million votes).
Yes. That does seem invalid to claim that Dems are over-represented in a sample that gives Bush a 42% approval rating. Why do you suppose that Dems had a strong 11.5% margin in a sample showing such high support for Bush?
I have learned, however, from bitter and exhausting experience the futility of engaging in unmoderated "debate" with Liddle and Lindeman. ... Anyone ever hear of independent review, disclosure of data, or at least an umpire acceptable to both proponent and challengers? In other words, scientific method. Or would that be too burdensome in this trivial case? I don't know what master those two serve, or where they've stowed their consciences, but I feel quite the fool for ever believing in their bona fides.
The two have an unusual amount of persistance, skill, and time to twist facts. My work was a target of their mischaracterizations and Liddle invented and told an untrue story about me; and so I understood early what they were doing. Why is another question.
All the best. Have a happy, healthy New Year--Jonathan
My New Year's wish is for more honesty and truth.
:-)
Best,
Kathy
Verified...@aol.com
Where is all your data and report again? Is it all complete?
Kathy Dopp
>
>
> In a message dated 12/25/2006 7:56:22 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
> kathy...@gmail.com writes:
> Where is all your data and report again? Is it all complete?
>
>
> Kathy--
> The basic "Landslide Denied" is home page at
> electiondefensealliance.org. We've gone through a lot of the state data as
> well, and it looks very shifted for key states like TN and MO etc. The
> proble is in coming up with an apples-to-apples yardstick. Bush approval
> would seem to work, but the wording of the questions differs between Survey
> USA and Edison-Mitofsky. In fact, so far only Rasmussen asks the same Q. as
> E/M and there is no state-by-state Rasmussen (also I don't trust Rasmussen's
> numbers--I think his skills are first rate but he seems to have figured out
> that there is always a Right-shift and to have incorporated it into his
> sampling, so he "gets it right," as it were).
Is he sampling more right-leaning precincts? I assume that he can't
sample people within precincts selectively.
> I'm looking for other Bush approvals that ask the same way as E/M
> (strong, somewhat, somewhat, strong) and ideally have state-by-state
> breakdowns, but all the majors I've seen so far ask approve-disapprove only.
> Rasmussen states that when the two were asked together of same survey, the
> four-point Q. registered 3-4% greater approval (I've asked him whether that
> 3-4% difference was approval or approval-disapproval margin, but got no
> response: this is key; perhaps someone less "marked" would like to contact
> him and find out) than the two-point question. In any case, this yardstick
> problem has put the state-by-state analysis on hold.
Have you tried asking him again, or asking him in a different way, or
faxing or calling him with the question? Perhaps he was just busy or
did not sufficiently understand the question. Often smart people don't
realize that the discrepancy is double when you take the difference
between approval1 - disapproval1 - (approval2 - disapproval2) versus
approval1 - approval2. It is very easy to get confused on it.
I have a feeling (from your statement) that Rasmussen meant approval1
- approval2. Did you try doing the state calcs that , just to see
what you got?
> The national analysis does tell the story, however--the crosstabs make
> it very clear that Democrats were not oversampled relative to turnout; if
> anything, the 7 pm exit poll over-represents Bushophiles.
Did you do an estimate on how many additional US Congressional races
would have gone Democratic if votes had been counted accurately?
> I'll tell you how I feel right now though, personally: I've (we've)
> busted my ass and screwed up my life to sound the alarm, over and over
> again. If Liddle and Lindeman and DailyKos and the Democrats and the MSM and
> the public want to ignore it and whistle past the tomb of democracy, then
> they deserve the fascist, rigged, lie of an America they are going to get.
> Let them carry the ball for a bit. Unlike Cassandra, I do not believe we are
> under any Olympian compulsion to cry unheeded eternally.--Jonathan
I am also feeling the same way. There is not much else I can do since
I've never gotten enough funding to hire even one person (funding is
not my forte) and I can't keep pouring money and time into something
and not earning income. If people, particularly the Dems, are not
interested in ensuring accurate, fair elections by implementing
sufficient manual transparent verifiable independent audits of machine
counts and making election data and records public, it is hard to
justify continuing efforts, while being ignored, banned from sites
like DemocraticUnderground and DailyKos for telling the truth,
name-called, mischaracterized and not funded - and having
organizations who helped cause the problems and do not understand
either the problems or the solutions get all the funding, access to
Congress, and acclaim, as if they are solving the problems. I've been
amazed at how difficult (impossible?) it is to get people to do the
obvious right things - like sufficient independent audits that the
public can verify and making election records public. Here in Utah,
our local press only interviews the "lying-if-mouth-is-open" state and
salt lake county election officials and does not reports the facts or
interview any scientists or activists.
So, I'm planning to finish my appeal to the Utah state records board
for election records and print and mail or fax our recommendations and
list of experts to some members of the US Congress in January and then
to quit working on the election integrity issue entirely, unless
someone offers me a paying job to do so, which seem unlikely; and then
I'm packing up my belongings in the Spring and moving out of Utah
because I can't stand the utter corruption and dishonesty here any
longer.
There is little I can do in addition to what I've done already,
without support and without access to policy-makers and with little
cooperation among election integrity activists some of whom seem more
interested in promoting themselves, or who are more interested in
promoting a particular voting system than in solving the basic
problems. Utah's hopelessly corrupt Lt. Governor has more access to
make changes than I do, having been appointed to a group at Pew
Charitable Trust to work on the election "integrity" issue, along with
equally corrupt and incompetent Georgia officials. Meanwhile, after
years of sacrifice and hard work, I am treated with disrespect by
local press and officials, one of whom last week called me a
"conspiracy theorist" during a City Council meeting, and another who
publicly on the local radio told everyone that my motivation is that I
"hate Diebold" - and the radio station did not give me an opportunity
to rebut and the local newspaper editor invented lies about me in her
editorial (as had one of her reporters done in two articles months
ago); and the editor tells her reporters not to cover NIST's,
Princeton, Brennan Center, or any of the computer scientists
statements that have found security flaws in and are against the use
of software-dependent DRE voting systems - and did not cover even the
firing of Emery County's Clerk Bruce Funk by Utah's Lt. Governor.
I can't get Holt's staffer who works on election legislation to return
a phone call or an email; and the same goes for Senator Feinstein's
staff person working on elections legislation. But I'll bet that they
would speak with DailyKos's Markos, or Mark Blumenthal or the guy that
runs the Democratic Underground even though all three are closedminded
and ignorant re. election integrity issues - being misled by the
sophistry of Liddle and Lindeman.
Insufficient numbers of Americans seem to care about honest accurate
democratic elections, and no amount of my sacrifice and effort seems
result in my being given any respect or access or support to change
that, so I plan to quit working on election integrity after January. I
don't see what else I can do, sadly. I have only worked for so long
under such adverse conditions because I realize that there are
millions of people elsewhere in the world that are being affected
adversely by the lack of honest accurate democratic elections in
America.
--
----
Kathy Dopp
http://electionarchive.org
National Election Data Archive
Dedicated to Accurately Counting Elections
Subscribe to announcements by emailing election-...@uscountvotes.org
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body
and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day," wrote
Thomas Jefferson in 1816
Jim Wright
as well as with state and county boards and meetings on these issues, is
there is no formal debate structure in place
So, you start on a topic and make some assertion, perhaps with evidence,
then the response addresses the original point to some degree, but also
a slightly different aspect of the problem
The next response again starts to include yet another aspect, and so on
So, it's not a worthless conversation, but you never get to the end of
it, and determine in a final way, the status of the debating points as
originally construed, in a way that satisfies the person who posed them
In a sense you never really agree exactly what the debating points are,
and so it spins into a larger and larger ball of wax
You may also never agree what the emotional tone and standards of
conversational behavior are, and so there is no closure as to it being a
real conversation
No trust or sense of addressing each other on-the-level is established
and so no closure is possible
This doesn't make it worthless, in the end some change happens, but
there is a lot of excess effort and time put into the process
So, not sure how it should be organized, but there's got to be a better
way to do discussions of this sort
Have something more like a formal debate with an umpire who ensures that
both sides stay on track and complete points raised before moving to the
next
Both sides would have to agree to the umpire's decision for it to be
valid, including the meaning of words used
And with both sides perhaps alternating as to what the next point will be
It may or may not be dishonesty involved
I think some of the issues are that political advocates and sites really
want people more involved, not less
They often feel that questioning the vote count in a general way is the
surest way to condition at least a part of the electorate not to vote at all
So they have a very strong disincentive to entertaining certain discussions
They'd rather see the problems get worked out in the background
somewhere, in such a fashion that you don't have huge drops in turnout
and passion because of the nature of the process along the way
Others are afraid to get tagged as 'conspiracy' theorists or as
unserious, reactive, emotional, always blaming a particular actor
regardless of facts, etc
These aren't excuses, but just to note all these drivers of behavior are
in play
Many people in reality are comfortable with some sloppiness in
arguments, but the specific kind of sloppiness they tolerate varies from
person to person
Depends what you consider important at a technical level and also at the
level of possible outcomes from certain kinds of debate
A universal debate-norm would be good, to make the conversations clearer
Jerry Policoff
Rasmussen uses a computerized methodology that basically uses a computer
both to select and question respondents. i.e. the entire process is
mechanized. I know there are a lot of pollsters who feel that methodology
creates its own set of biases (is there a type of person who will respond to
a computer versus versus one who will not?). Whether that it true or not is
probably debatable. I don't know if the methodology has been tested. I do
know that Polling Report.com does not list Rasmussen polls or other polls
that use what they consider to be suspect methodology (including Zogby's
interactive polls and, I believe, Survey USA)
--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.409 / Virus Database: 268.15.28/604 - Release Date: 12/26/2006
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.409 / Virus Database: 268.15.28/605 - Release Date: 12/27/2006
Paul Velleman
The red-shift issue will be settled best by fighting for verifiable
voting methods. If the red shift disappears when votes are less
vulnerable, we can all say "Aha" and move on. Most of the political
sites do support better voting practices, although they don't agree
on what that means. We can argue for that without having to argue
over whether previous elections were stolen.
-- Paul