Inside the Washington DC beltway, one hand washes the other. Thus, it is no surprise that with the polling company Penn, Schoen & Berland being up against the ropes on its flawed methodology conducting an "exit poll" in Venezuela last Sunday, that a beltway insider like conservative columnist Michael Barone would rise to the firm's defense.
Barone, a columnist for U.S. News & World Report and the right-wing TownHall.com, won himself a "favor owed" from the polling firm yesterday with his column in U.S. News.
Of course, Barone has zero experience in Venezuela (does he even understand the Spanish language?) and goes way out on a limb in his ignorant presumptions
Barone crawled so far out on that limb, that it won't take much effort to bring out the fact-checking chainsaw and cut him back down into the sewers of beltway insider punditdom. Vroom! Vrooooom! Let's go
Barone writes:
"Were NY Pollsters Just Playing a Joke on Chavez?" That was the typically cheeky headline on an item about the Venezuela election in The Hotline political digest (nationaljournal.com) this week. The item quoted a press release from the polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland Assoc. saying, "Exit Poll Results Show Major Defeat for Chavez." The release, dated 7:30 p.m., said, "With Venezuela's voting set to end at 8 p.m. EST according to election officials, final exit poll results from Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates, an independent New York-based polling firm, show a major victory for the 'Yes' movement, defeating Chavez in the Venezuela presidential recall referendum." The poll showed 59 percent in favor of recalling Chavez, 41 percent against.
The next morning, Chavez was declared the winner by an almost exact opposite margin. "About 58 percent said 'no' to a recall, while 42 percent said 'yes,'" wrote the Washington Post.
The Hotline was evidently having a little fun twitting a polling firm. But was the result as clear as theyand official election observer Jimmy Carterthought? There is good reason to believe it was not. In fact, it's something of a scandal that American news media have been taking the official vote count in Venezuela at face value. There is very good reason to believe that the exit poll had the result right, and that Chavez's election officialsand Carter and the American mediagot it wrong.
Narco News Chainsaw Translation:
What upsets Barone has little to do with Venezuela or referendum results. It is, rather, that his pals at Penn, Schoen & Berland have been made laughing stocks over at The Hotline, a subscriber-only ($3,795 dollars a year, as of four years ago
the publisher's own website doesn't reveal how much it costs now in 2004). This expensive weekday insider daily for two kinds of people: those who get the big bucks for doing political consulting, and those who pay the big bucks. The rest of us are locked out of the game.
In other words, being ridiculed on The Hotline is the worst thing that could have happened to the future business prospects of Penn, Schoen & Berland. That is why the archconservative Barone has come to their aid. Now, read on: let's get to the specifics
Barone claims:
Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has been running an authoritarian regime. By various means he has taken control of the legislature, the courts, the armed services and the police. His thugs have been intimidating and even killing the regime's opponents.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Hmmm. According to Barone, an elected government's "control" of the three branches of government and law enforcement agencies is somehow "authoritarian." We ask: Who, other than the voters, via the ballot box, should control the government? It is not Chávez who picked a majority in the Congress. It was the voters! The army and the police, as in the United States, answer to the executive branch of government. If not that, who does Barone propose direct law enforcement? The courts, also, as in the United States, have judges chosen by the executive branch, subject to legislative review and approval.
What Barone calls "authoritarian" is, in fact, democracy itself. Barone reveals his hostility to an authentically democratic system of government, in which the vote of a poor man and woman has the same weight as that of a rich man and woman. As for Barone's canard about intimidation and "even killing" of "the regime's" opponents: there has been a comparable (albeit very low for any Latin American nation) amount of killing on both sides of the Venezuela conflict.
Few in the English-language Commercial Media have spoken of the drive-by shooting against Chávez voters last Sunday in Petare, where 12 were wounded and one voter died. Bloomberg reported on Monday:
"In this year's referendum, the only violence reported so far was a shooting in the capital, Caracas, that killed one person and injured 12. The gunfire came from a vehicle passing near a line of voters in the eastern Petare neighborhood at about 5 p.m. local time yesterday
."
Petare voted 70 percent in favor of Chávez; whoever shot into that crowd knew that the vast majority of victims would be Chavistas
but the English-language press barely touched it, preferring to make a huge deal over wealthier victims of another shooting a day later
and so it goes, eternally, with a Commercial Media that values rich people's lives over the rest of ours.
The only source Barone offers for his claims is a Wall Street Journal opinion columns - not a single news article - by the discredited Thor Halvorssen (who, last year, tried to float the lie that Chávez had funded Osama bin Laden! He was smacked down by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (a watchdog group that is often critical of Chavez), in this revealing letter to the Washington Times, which showed that Halvorssen violated journalistic ethics by not revealing - get this - that he was once Venezuela's drug czar under the corrupt pre-Chávez regimes! Read the whole thing, it's quite astonishing, really, that anyone still publishes the work of that professional liar).
Barone also offered - and this is funny! - a link to a column that had no mention of Venezuela at all. In his haste to defend his fellow beltway insiders, Barone is just as sloppy as the pollsters he defends.
Barone's ideological lens is cloudy indeed. He writes, in antiquated Cold War nostalgia, that Chávez is, "an enemy of the United States, and he has shown no commitment to democratic principles." Let's see
the guy has won, now, eight national elections in six years! How does that show a lack of commitment to democratic principles? Barone doesn't elaborate.
Barone claims:
As Doug Schoen of Penn Schoen points out, his firm has conducted exit polls in Mexico and, just a few days ago, in the Dominican Republic, which produced results very close to the election results.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Barone doesn't mention the big missing fact from his claim: that Penn & Schoen's unethical behavior in Mexico, in 2000, violated the law, and caused a national polemic by editorial boards and journalists well vetted, at the time, by Narco News (see my update from earlier this week for links and details of Penn, Schoen & Berland's history as electoral delinquents in Mexico, for the archived facts).
Barone claims:
Mark Penn points out that the firm conducted two previous exit polls in Venezuela, both of which were on the mark.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Barone doesn't mention, here, that those polls were taken by subcontractors - professional pollsters - whereas Penn, Schoen & Berland's "exit poll" on Sunday was taken by extremist, upper-class "volunteers" (read: partisan ideologues, incapable of following basic polling methodology, from a group, Sumate, already caught in a gigantic web of knowing falsehoods and deceit toward the public and press). Barone does mention it later in his column, though, and our chainsaw will get there in a moment
Barone claims:
Warren Mitofsky's firm, Mitofsky International, has produced exit polls with similar results in Mexico and Russia. Mitofsky recalls that in 1994, Mexican President Carlos Salinas, seeking credibility with foreign investors for that year's Mexican elections, asked him for advice on what to do. Allow independent exit polls, Mitofsky advised, sponsored by the media, and allow the results to be announced soon after the voting. Mitofsky's exit poll results, announced soon after the polls closed, did in fact come close to the official results, as did another Mitofsky poll in 2000. More important, they provided independent confirmation of the fairness of the count.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Barone's citing of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as an agent of "credibility" in elections is one of the factoids that makes Barone a laughing stock, today, of all who have covered and followed recent Mexican history. Salinas is the inventor of electoral computer fraud in Latin America. That fact is undisputed. For details, see my accounts, with links to original source materials, of the 1988 "election" in Mexico that Salinas stole, and the very same 1994 election cited by Barone, that Salinas directed, so that his hand-picked candidate could steal it. Paging The Hotline: Don't let Barone get away with this one. He deserves the most punishing ridicule imaginable for citing the narco-president Salinas as a friend of clean elections.
Barone claims:
In Venezuela, Schoen's firm was hired by businessmen who were almost surely opponents of Chavez. The Chavez regime intimidated local interviewing firms, who refused to provide interviewers for Penn Schoen at the polls. As a result, the firm trained volunteers. Critics of the firm might argue that these volunteers, undoubtedly mostly anti-Chavez, may have tried to present a false result.
But that would in fact be difficult to do. Mitofsky points out that in countries emerging from autocracy into democracy, about 90 percent of voters approached by exit pollsters agree to participate. That is almost double the rate in the United States. Moreover, exit pollers work in teams; there would have to be massive collusion for them to produce fraudulent results. The Penn Schoen exit poll was conducted at about 200 polling places and produced more than 20,000 responses. Changing those results from something like 42-58 (the Chavez announced figure) to 59-41 would be quite a feat.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Violating all journalistic ethics, Barone withholds the key fact from his narrative: that the "volunteers" came from a leading opposition group, Sumate! And Barone's unsourced, unsubstantiated, claim of supposed "intimidation" against polling firms is made a lie by the fact that all the Venezuela polling companies did frequent polls during this campaign. If they didn't share their workers with Penn, Schoen & Berland, it was not a matter of intimidation, but quite the opposite: It's that they had so much work and business themselves that they didn't have workers to spare!
In any case, Barone, who fancies himself as a political expert, ought to know better: Many polling firms go into other countries and recruit their own workers. It is a simple process. You take out Help Wanted adds in the newspapers, interview prospective employees, and hire them! The claim that Penn, Schoen & Berland had to rely on a partisan group for "volunteers" reveals the first major flaw in the methodology behind the bogus "exit poll." Volunteers, by nature, have an axe to grind. That two would have to agree to cook results together is hardly convincing: the entire recent history of Venezuela has been fraught with such agreements among oligarchs to lie and cheat - to even attempt coups d'etat! - to get their way.
And even if one gives the benefit of the doubt to these squalid "volunteers," I repeat my observation of the other day: Has anyone seen these Sumate people? They wear fancy imported clothes and jewelry, all their visible leaders are whiter than bleach, they have hundred-dollar haircuts on their five dollar heads, and if one of them were to place himself or herself outside a polling place, they would be shunned by the Venezuelan masses, educated in the necessity to distrust the games by the upper classes. You can smell the Chanel perfume on these people from around the corner! They're the last people who can get accurate results from the poor and working masses.
The problem with the Penn, Schoen & Berland poll was in its methodology: unprecedented in the history of credible exit polling. No serious polling firm would rely on partisan "volunteers."
Furthermore, in violation of the ethics code of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), Penn, Schoen & Berland have still not disclosed the methodology. Were these polltakers really "volunteers"? Or were some, or all, of them already on the staff of Sumate? The pollsters continue to withhold the real facts.
Barone claims:
Chavez had every motive for cheating: polls before the election mostly showed him under 50 percent, and he should have reasonably concluded that those not for him were against. Adjusting the count was one sure way to win.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Barone again withholds a key fact: those very same polls showed Chávez winning! The poll by Stanley Greenberg, for example, had the pro-Chávez "NO" vote at 49 percent
compared to only 44 percent for the opposition! Using Barone's own logic, the pre-election polls gave the incentive to cheat to the losing side of those polls, not to the confident victors (and since I was in Venezuela prior to the vote, and speak the language fluently, I can also testify that the consensus of Chavistas and all international political reporters prior to election day was that Chávez would win handily. I reported this, from Venezuela, prior to the vote, on August 12th.) Barone, who didn't set foot in Venezuela during this campaign (or ever?), is making up fictions to support his flimsy defense of his now disgraced beltway buddies.
It's shameful, really, for a guy who prides himself on having visited every congressional district in the United States and implies that anyone who hasn't can't report as accurately as he does. Barone is famous for that hubris, but he doesn't apply the same standard to his remote-control fantasies about Venezuela.
Barone claims:
By way of comparison, Penn Schoen has no motive whatever for cheating.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Penn, Schoen & Berland didn't have to "cheat," per se, for its poll results to have been so wrong, wrong by 36 percentage points. They simply did a sloppy job at methodology. They let activists run their "exit poll" for them when they should have known better. And then when the results proved disastrously inaccurate, they then had all the motive in the world to deny it. Why? Because for Penn, Schoen & Berland to admit that their methodology was so errant, that they cut corners and handed their "exit poll" over to U.S.-government funded extremists and partisans, would call into question the professionalism of Penn, Schoen & Berland.
Penn, Schoen & Berland were left with just two options after the vote: to admit that they screwed up their methodology in unprofessional ways, or to cry "fraud." Note that Penn, Schoen & Berland - like the partisans that hired them - do not offer a shred of evidence as to how the "fraud" was supposedly carried out (which is why not a single observer from the Carter Center to the OAS believes him). Doug Schoen simply claims that his poll was right and everybody else's (including the Evans McDonough exit poll that showed a 55 percent to 45 percent victory for Chavez, and was within the professional margin of error to the final result of 59-41) was wrong. What a crybaby!
I can understand why Schoen stonewalls - contrary to Barone's defense, Schoen has all the motive in the world to deceive
he's just trying to blow smoke to cover his own ass and deflect from his unprofessional corner-cutting, his violation of Venezuelan law, his violations of the AAPOR ethics code (by refusing to disclose his methodology, as all serious pollsters do), his use of partisans to staff the poll, and his woefully inaccurate results.
Mark Penn's defense - that Penn, Schoen & Berland have polled accurately in Venezuela before - is equally unconvincing: That's because THEY DIDN'T USE PARTISAN "VOLUNTEERS" IN THOSE PREVIOUS EXIT POLLS!
Barone concludes with a defense of "exit polls" in general (something no one has taken issue with):
Independent exit polls are one of the guarantors of democracy in countries emerging from or under authoritarian rule. Political junkies may think it amusing that there is such a wide discrepancy between an exit poll and official results. But for people in Venezuela and perhaps in other parts of Latin America it's more likely to be tragic.
Narco News Chainsaw Fact-Check:
Exit polls can be, and usually are, a good thing. The Evans McDonough exit poll, for example, was accurate within the margin of error. That is not the question at hand.
At issue is the sloppy methodology by Penn, Schoen & Berland, and the reprehensible post-referendum accusations by Doug Schoen of "fraud" that he can't and doesn't substantiate or document.
The whole world is wrong, but Schoen is right?
Carter is wrong but Schoen is right?
The OAS is wrong but Schoen is right?
Evans McDonough is wrong but Schoen is right?
The consensus of every international political reporter on the ground in Venezuela is wrong but Schoen, sitting on his ass in New York City, is right?
All the pre-referendum polls were wrong but Schoen is right?
The will of the voters is wrong but Schoen is right?
Schoen's stance is childish and irresponsible. He and his company did not act professionally or legally, and now he is in hot water, with the temperature rising.
And that another beltway insider, Michael Barone, comes to his defense in the you-wash-my-back-I'll-wash-yours incest between Washington political columnists and Washington pollsters and political consultants is unconvincing. Vroom, Vrooooom, indeed!