WARNING: This post is about the 2004 election and exit polls. It is about facts and fraud. If such posts tend to throw you into a fit of uncontrolled rage
please make yourself useful over here where I am gathering facts, graphs, and stats to use in SOTU rebuttles.
Thank you.
NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: January 31, 2005
NEW REPORT BY NATION'S PROMINENT STATISTICIANS AND VOTE-ANALYSIS EXPERTS REFUTES EDISON/MITOFSKY `EXPLANATION' FOR EXIT POLL DISCREPANCY, URGES INVESTIGATION OF US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
(US) - A new study (See report at www.USCountVotes.org) was released today co-authored by prominent statisticians and vote-analysis experts from a diverse range of Universities including Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Temple. Their study strongly refutes the `explanation' by pollster Edison/Mitofsky (E/M) that their exit polls (Kerry winning by 3%) differed so widely from the final certified tally (Bush by 2.5%) due to Kerry voters' answering pollsters questions at a higher rate than Bush voters.
The full Press release and more after the jump.....
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NEW REPORT
NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate Release: January 31, 2005
CONTACTS:
Zack Kaldveer, Commnications Director, CASE America, 510-938-2664
Susan Truitt, President, CASE America, 614-270-5239
Joan Krawitz, Executive Director, CASE America, 847-962-5290
NEW REPORT BY NATION'S PROMINENT STATISTICIANS AND VOTE-ANALYSIS EXPERTS REFUTES EDISON/MITOFSKY `EXPLANATION' FOR EXIT POLL DISCREPANCY, URGES INVESTIGATION OF US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Experts conclude unprecedented 5.5% discrepancy between exit polls and final tallies indicate possible systematic, nationwide shift of the vote
(US) - A new study (See report at www.USCountVotes.org) was released today co-authored by prominent statisticians and vote-analysis experts from a diverse range of Universities including Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Cornell, and Temple. Their study strongly refutes the `explanation' by pollster Edison/Mitofsky (E/M) that their exit polls (Kerry winning by 3%) differed so widely from the final certified tally (Bush by 2.5%) due to Kerry voters' answering pollsters questions at a higher rate than Bush voters. The US Count Votes report "debunks" this hypothesis and adds to the mounting evidence that the answer to the exit poll mystery lies in the vote counting, not the accuracy of the exit polls.
"The new Edison/Mitofsky report fails to provide any evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that Kerry voters participated in exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters, or that exit polling errors caused exit polls to favor Kerry by 3% when Bush won the election by 2.5%," said Kathy Dopp, President, US Count Votes. "The possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly."
Among the revelations uncovered in the study was that the response to exit pollsters was actually higher in precincts that strongly favored Bush than in those that strongly favored Kerry. This contradicts the E/M hypothesis that Kerry voters' tended to cooperate more, and suggests that if anything, the exit polls may have been skewed towards President Bush, not Senator Kerry.
"The report's findings add one more study to a growing list that indicate our democracy was compromised on November 2nd by an assortment of un-democratic tactics," said Susan Truitt, President and Chief Counsel, CASE America. "Putting faith in partisan corporations to correctly count our vote `with secret proprietary software' was a catastrophic mistake. We should be spending less time worrying about bringing democracy to Iraq and more time working to ensure we practice it here at home."
CASE America (The Citizens' Alliance for Secure Elections) is a non-partisan, pro-democracy organization that is partnering with The National Ballot Integrity Project to ensure elections are free, fair, accountable, and accurately reflect the intentions of the voters. The group plans to achieve these goals through research, information and education, grassroots organizational and leadership development, and support and pursuit of various legal and legislative initiatives.
Other key reports detailing the overwhelming evidence suggesting possible electoral fraud are: "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio", by Rep. John Conyers; "Evidence of Election Irregularities in Sohomish County Washington", by Paul R. Leto and Dr. Jeffrey Hoffman; "Myth Breakers: Facts about Electronic Elections", by VotersUnite.org; "The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy", by Dr. Stephen Freeman; and "New Mexico State Election Data", by Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart.
Problems found in nearly every post election investigation, all of which favored the re-election of the President, include: voting machine shortages; ballots counted in secret; lost, discarded, and improperly rejected registration forms and absentee ballots; touch-screen machines that registered "Bush" when voters pressed "Kerry"; precincts in which turnout was suspiciously high, including many which had more votes recorded than registered voters; precincts in which the reported turnout was suspiciously low; and high rates of "spoiled" ballots and under-votes in which no choice for president was recorded.
Among the electoral reforms CASE America and other pro-democracy organizations are calling for are national voting standards, a voter verified paper trail, non-partisan election officials, the mandatory counting of every vote; and the abolishment of the Electoral College.
A taste of what you will find at USCountVotes:
Press Release:
Monday, January 31, 2005
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/USCountVotes_Re_Mitofsky-Edison.pdf
Prominent Statisticians Refute 'Explanation' of 2004 U.S. Exit Poll Discrepancies in New Edison/Mitofsky Report and Urge Investigation of U.S. Presidential Election Results.
President Bush won November's election by 2.5% yet exit polls showed Kerry leading by 3%. Which was correct?
"There are statistical indications that a systematic, nationwide shift of 5.5% of the vote may have occurred, and that we'll never get to the bottom of this, unless we gather the data we need for mathematical analysis and open, robust scientific debate.", says Bruce O'Dell, USCountVotes' Vice President.
The study, “Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report”, was co-authored by a diverse group of professors and academicians specializing in statistics and mathematics. The USCountVotes team included Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., Temple University Statistics Department; Kathy Dopp, M.S. in mathematics, USCountVotes President; Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar & Affiliated Faculty, Center for Organizational Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania; Brian Joiner, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics and Director of Statistical Consulting (ret), University of Wisconsin; Frank Stenger, Ph.D. Professor of Numerical Analysis, School of Computing, University of Utah; Richard G. Sheehan, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Finance, University of Notre Dame, Elizabeth Liddle, M.A. (UK) Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nottingham, Paul F. Velleman, Assoc. Professor, Ph.D., Department of Statistical Sciences, Cornell University; Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D., Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University; Campbell B. Read, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Department of Statistical Science, Southern Methodist University. Their study does not support claims made by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International that exit poll errors were to blame for the unprecedented 5.5% discrepancy between exit polls and official 2004 election results.
According to this analysis by a group of senior statisticians, the new data just released by the exit-pollsters shows that the possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously. “Now we have statistical evidence that these reports were the tip of a national iceberg. The hypothesis that the discrepancy between the exit polls and election results is due to errors in the official election tally is a coherent theory that must be explored,” said statistician Josh Mitteldorf.
Their paper titled "Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report" notes that the Edison/Mitofsky report offers no evidence to support their conclusion that Kerry voters “participated in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters”. In fact, the data provided in the Edison/Mitofsky report suggests that the opposite may have been true: Bush strongholds had slightly higher response rates than Kerry strongholds.
The statisticians go on to note that precincts with hand-counted paper ballots showed no statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results, but for other voting technologies, the overall discrepancy was far larger than the polls’ margin of error. The pollsters at Edison/Mitofsky agreed that their 2004 exit polls, for whatever reason, had the poorest accuracy in at least twenty years.
USCountVotes, a nonprofit, non-partisan Utah corporation was founded in December 2004. Its mission is to create and analyze a database containing precinct-level election results for the entire United States; to do a thorough mathematical analysis of the 2004 election results; and to fully investigate the 2004 Presidential election results. USCountVotes actively seeks volunteers and accepts donations to help make this unprecedented civic project a reality – visit www.uscountvotes.org for further information.
For more information, contact Bruce O'Dell, Vice President of US Count Votes, in Minneapolis, MN: bruce@uscountvotes.org 612-309-1330
The statisticians' study is available online at
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/USCountVotes_Re_Mitofsky-Edison.pdf
The full text of the Edison/Mitofsky report is available at
http://www.exit-poll.net/election-night/EvaluationJan192005.pdf
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USCountVotes is new, volunteer scientific research project to objectively investigate the accuracy of elections in America.
Voting accuracy is a controversial topic: More than 27,000 anecdotal reports of irregularities in the 2004 election were submitted to the independent "Election Incident Reporting System". An alleged pattern of discrepancies between exit poll results and final tallies in several key states is still regarded with suspicion by many observers. In response to Congressional request, the General Accounting Office plans to launch an investigation into the security and accuracy of voting technologies, the distribution and allocation of voting machines, and counting of provisional ballots.
The Interim Report of the Social Science Research Council's Commission on Election and Voting states that "... incomplete data and insufficient transparency of the election administration process do not allow for a conclusive statement regarding the accuracy or fairness of specific results..."
Compounding this crisis of confidence, many electronic voting machines do not create a paper audit trial, and as a result an independent recount cannot be performed. These machines may malfunction or possibly even be reprogrammed by malicious insiders, with no independent method of detecting that a problem occurred. Concerns about potential problems with unauditable electronic voting machines are widespread in the computer science community; in a recent survey of US members of the world's oldest and largest computer society, 95% of respondents opposed deployment of unauditable electronic voting machines.
Our Response: USCountVotes proposes to create and analyze - for the first time ever - a database containing precinct-level election results for the entire United States. This rich mine of data will be made publicly available and analyzed by our project's affiliated mathematicians, pollsters and statisticians, as well as by an independent peer-review board. Our goal is to use this data to develop and test techniques to reliably detect precinct-level vote counting errors worthy of investigation.
By the national election in November 2006, for the first time in American history, it could be possible for candidates to be reliably warned of indications of machine or human-caused vote count errors in time to challenge the results. With a sound scientific approach and methodology, it may be possible for USCountVotes' project staff to develop statistical evidence in support of legal filings and serve as expert witnesses for candidates, regardless of party affiliation.