Prof Questions Bush's Tallies
By charlie smith
Publish Date: 18-Nov-2004
A U.S. academic has written a paper suggesting that "systematic fraud" or "mistabulation" of votes could have occurred in the most recent U.S. presidential election. Steven F. Freeman, a professor of organizational dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that this was a "premature conclusion" but an "unavoidable hypothesis", based on his comparison of exit polls with the final results in 11 key battleground states.
Freeman released his 11-page paper, called "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy", on November 10; it has not been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. He wrote that in 10 of the 11 battleground states, President George Bush's final-tally percentages were significantly higher than the predicted margin in the voting-day exit polls.
In three of the heavily populated states--Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida--Bush's final tallies were 6.7 percent, 6.5 percent, and 4.9 percent higher than the exit polls. Freeman, who has a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed that there was less than a one-in-a-thousand chance of this occurring in Ohio, less than a two-in-a-thousand chance of it happening in Pennsylvania, and less than a three-in-a-thousand chance of it resulting in Florida.
"The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million," Freeman wrote. "The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error."
Bush won Florida by five percent and Ohio by 2.5 percent; Kerry won Pennsylvania by a 2.2-percent margin. Exit-poll sample sizes in the 11 states ranged from a low of 1,849 in New Hampshire to a high of 2,846 in Florida.
Freeman stated in the paper that Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International conducted exit polling for the National Election Pool, which is a consortium of the major television networks and Associated Press. Freeman added that he relied on "uncalibrated" data (not yet "corrected" to conform with announced vote tallies), which remained on the CNN Web site (www.cnn.com/) until 1:30 a.m. election night.
"At that time, CNN substituted data 'corrected' to conform to reported tallies," he wrote. "I have attempted to obtain the raw exit poll data from AP, Edison Media Research, Mitofsky International, and the NY Times, but have as yet received no response."
Bush's differential between the final tallies and exit polls improved most markedly in New Hampshire (9.5 percent), but Kerry won this state. Kerry led exit polls in Iowa, Nevada, and New Mexico, but in all three states the final tallies favoured Bush.
Freeman cited several instances in the past in which exit polling produced accurate data. He also quoted former top Clinton advisor Dick Morris's contention that these surveys are "almost never wrong".
Freeman claimed that his purpose was not to allege "theft" in the recent U.S. presidential election. "Rather, I have tried to demonstrate that exit poll data is fundamentally sound, that the deviations between exit poll predictions and vote tallies in the three critical battleground states could not have occurred strictly by chance or random error, and that no solid explanations have yet been provided to explain the discrepancy," he wrote.
On November 11, Washington Post journalists Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating cowrote an article claiming that "spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists are filling the Internet with head-turning allegations". However, their article alleged that the claims don't stand up to scrutiny. "Many experts say the theory that the exit polls were correct is deeply flawed because the polls oversampled women," Roig-Franzia and Keating wrote.
Freeman, however, refuted this in his paper. "CNN and others released data presenting male and female preferences separately, thus automatically weighting sex appropriately," he wrote.
According to Freeman's paper, pollsters Warren Mitofsky and Joe Lenski, whose companies conducted the exit polls, reportedly told Gallup Poll managing editor David W. Moore that Kerry voters were more willing to participate in exit polls than Bush voters. Freeman, however, wrote that this explanation requires independent evidence.
According to the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project, 79 percent of the electorate in New Hampshire used optical-scan voting machines; in Florida, 53 percent used electronic machines and 47 percent used optical-scan voting machines.
. If not for that idiocy, I'd be doing far better, but still I make a damned decent living at it (I actively day-trade stocks, commodities, futures, financial instruments, and currencies, devoting on average 10 to 12 hours per day to the pursuit - I'm online and at the keyboard a lot, visiting A2K and other websites, and following live newsfeeds, inbetween revenue-producing transactions, along with doin' some contract IT Security/Privacy-related stuff) even after plowing money into a farm that is more of an expensive hobby than anything resembling an income source.
