Evidence Mounts That The Vote May Have Been Hacked

"Suggesting" a donation is soliciting by any definition.

"Of course, in the conservative mind, there is only black and white and no shades of grey"

More delicious irony - this from the other side.

You dispute that? This is one of theprimary traits that define the difference between liberal and conservative thought. Your characterization that this comes from "the other side" supports my statement. And another post that ie merely nothing but a snide remark is duly noted.

Again I am going to state it wasn't my intention to solicit, this is beginning to get absurd and the discussion is off topic as well. A liberal open-minded person would understand this.

Lol - Harper - you - like Gunga, whose similar statement I savoured the irony of earlier, are mistress of the snide remark. The statement of yours which I am criticising is but one of many such.

Your blanket statement about conservatives knowing naught but black and white is such a perfect illustration of thinking only in black and white yourself that I wonder you could post it with any seriousness.

You do your "side" - with which I generally agree - a disservice by making such remarks - just as the far right make theirs look ridiculous with similar ones.

Another snide remark.

Lol - you mean a liberal open-minded person must always agree with you???

Oh dearie dearie me!

A liberal open minded person would accept the fact that it was not my intent to promote a website for donations, if my intent was to promote the site I would have posted a new thread and simply referenced the information at the site.

Snide remark to follow.

nimh wrote:

{One thank-you though: for pointing out that the currently published exit polls have been reweighed in order to fit the actual results. That makes perfect sense (considering exit polls are intended for analysing voter breakdowns with, not second-guessing the actual result) - and I had suspected as much - but I hadnt included that in my previous posts, when I was still blasting at people who said the exit polls were off so much by pointing them to how wholly correct the published results now are. Shame on me.}

nimh,

This is the point upon which your stance here is shaky. You assume the final count is right and deny that the discrepancies are a cause of concern. Surely you agree that exit polls may be used as a tool in determining the likelihood of accuracy in the count of the actual vote.

Isn't it odd how some posters immediately assume you must be a conservative, as soon as you disagree with them?

soliciting: 1 a : to make petition to : ENTREAT

b : to approach with a request or plea

2 : to urge (as one's cause) strongly

3 a : to entice or lure especially into evil b : to proposition (someone) especially as or in the character of a prostitute

4 : to try to obtain by usually urgent requests or pleas
intransitive senses

No matter your intent Harper, you solicited donations.

Nothin' odd about there at all, nimh. Works the other way too, sometimes.

"If you refuse to see things my way you not only are ignorant, but inherently evil" is a mindest immune to fact and reason. Not much of a leap from there to "You must be destroyed".

There are varieties of political opinion, and among those varieties there is varying intensity of fervor.


Thank God for The Bell Curve.

"May be used" - but only with the greatest of caution and reservations - it's a poll, after all - of which I see nothing here.

And no. Yes, it was my bad to hammer onto Fox and others, who claimed the exit polls had been "wildly off", that the exit poll numbers that are published now are wholly correct and thus constitute the 'evidence' that the exit polls were in fact very good. That obviously doesnt work that way, since they are wholly correct because they have been modified to be so. But my case against Cyclo's and others' claims of voter fraud are not solely based on the exit poll numbers that are published now. In fact, those play hardly any role in my argument whatsoever.
My argument, instead, notes that:

- the exit polls are polls and can thus easily be off without implying some great conspiracy
- they can be easily off because (at least, if they work in the States the same way) they're based on a sample that was selected because it proved to be representative in previous elections, but that does not need to have been representative now because the make-up of the state's electorate can change
- the exit poll data that appeared during election day was based on incomplete returns and 'raw' data, and were not accompanied just for fun by everpresent ample warnings about how such data "are routinely unreliable"
- the exit poll numbers as they were updated during the day actually moved more towards what the actual results turned out to be - which to me looks like a confirmation rather than a disproval that the results are probably more or less right
- the last batch of preliminary exit poll numbers actually were within what your average margin of error would be for most of the states
- the states for which they were still notably off are NOT some striking selection of all the relevant battleground states (an assertion that was easy to debunk), and the speculation that that's because "there's no point in messing around anywhere except for where it matters" is therefore simply baseless
- "previous polling data up until the 2nd" does not reinforce some big gap between polls and actual outcome, because in most all non-Southern states the last state polls that were published before the elections on average were pretty much on-target
- even had they not been so, it wouldn't have proven much because (see first point), polls can be and have indeed been collectively off in the past
- articles quoted to prove voter fraud brought here such as "Kerry won" and "Analysis Of Exit Polls Vs. Supposed Ballot Counts" are so riddled with inconsistencies, use of selective logic and outright mistakes (as I hope I've shown) that I would tend to reject them altogether

If stuff went wrong, which I'm sure it did, by all means dig it up. Collect testimonies, gather evidence, interview voters - not because it stands any rational chance to prove that "Kerry won", but because its necessary to improve the system. But using the polls as evidence, especially in the simplistic one-on-one way in which it's been done here, proves damn close to nothing.

You and D being counted opposite liberals... That's rich.

Read more...

nimh,

These polls ought be used as part of a body of evidence to test the validity of the election result. For that purpose results obtained by applying the predetermined conditions are more appropriate than adjusted results. I agree any particular poll may be wrong and expect a random scatter of error. A recurring pattern of error is cause for alarm. Not, itself, evidence of a manipulated vote but reason for further enquiry.

A "random scatter of error"?? I'm not sure I know what that would be.

Why should the earlier polls be considred a deciding factor? There were numerous reports for weeks before the election about how people that only had cell phones were automatically excluded from all polling (interestingly, those were mentioned quite often by Kerry supporters as one reason why he was behind in the polls) and that population was supposedly 10% of voters (mostly younger voters).

If pollsters adjusted their earlier polls to account for the expected higher turnout of younger voters figuring that many weren't able to be contacted and then the rate of younger voters didn't actually increase doesn't that invalidate the earlier poll's methodology?

That's only one example of how earlier polls could have gotten things wrong. You have to keep in mind that pre-election polls are based on "registered voters" or "probable voters" responses. Not all of them actually DO vote though. The exit polls taken while voting is in progress are polls of ACTUAL voters - most of whom were never polled before.

Bell curve distribution of error, centered at or very close to 0.

And I think we were talking about exit polls.

Isn't a bell curve a linear distribution? *shrugs* Not really relevant I guess..

It seems the polls being discussed are pretty much any of them. But you can't get an accurate exit poll until you've actually polled the entire spectrum of people that have voted (which, I think, has been nimh's position for some time here..).

fishin',

Ok , I guess you need black and white. Here it is.

I have assumed for the purpose of the exercise the actual count is accurate. I hope you can understand that for many reasons it is unlikely that any given exit poll will predict the actual count with perfect precision. I call the differences between the the correct outcome ( defined as the actual count) and the predicted outcomes of the various exit polls errors. There is one error in respect of each exit poll and together these form a set of errors. I anticipate that these errors will be scatterred in a random manner about their mean.

I do not advocate the use of partial or progressive polls and I have not referred to pre-polling in my post. Exit polls are a measure of what people have done and, if sampling is random, reliable indicators of the outcome of actual counts.

May I suggest you examine Nimh's expertise about polls on this thread? Do that... and you'll likely come back here and say; thank you for correcting me, Nimh.