It’s been happening for years now. On the day after elections like last Tuesday’s, media figures begin navel gazing to figure out how pre-election polls, created by dozens of independent pollsters using dozens of different methodologies, could all find the same thing but turn out to be so wrong once the election results are in.
The presumption is that the results are always right, and if they don’t match the pre-election polling, its the polling that must be wrong, as opposed to the election results.
On Wednesday morning, after Tuesday’s mid-term election surprise in which Republicans reportedly won handily in race after race despite pre-election polls almost unanimously predicting much closer races or outright Democratic victories, FiveThirtyEight statistics guru Nate Silver declared “The Polls Were Skewed Toward Democrats”.
His analysis of aggregated averages from dozens of different pollsters and polls this year found that the performance of Democrats was overestimated by approximately 4 percentage points in Senate races and 3.4 points in gubernatorial contests. Silver’s assessment relies on a “simple average of all polls released in the final three weeks of the campaign,” as compared to the (unofficial and almost entirely unverified) election results reported on Tuesday night. He doesn’t suggest there was anything nefarious in the polling bias towards Dems this year, simply that the pollsters got it wrong for a number of speculative reasons.
Citing the fact that nearly all of the polls suggested Democrats would do much better than they ultimately did, when compared to the reported election results, Silver asserts it wasn’t that the polls were more wrong that usual, per se, but that almost all of them were wrong in a way that appears to have overestimated Democratic performance on Election Day.
“This year’s polls were not especially inaccurate,” he explains. “Between gubernatorial and Senate races, the average poll missed the final result by an average of about 5 percentage points — well in line with the recent average. The problem is that almost all of the misses were in the same direction.”
Silver is much smarter than I when it comes to numbers; I’m happy to presume he has the basic math right. But he seems to have a blind spot in his presumption that the pre-election polls were wrong and the election results were right. That, despite the lack of verification of virtually any of the results from Tuesday night, despite myriad and widespread if almost completely ignored problems and failures at polls across the country that day, and despite systematic voter suppression and dirty tricks that almost certainly resulted in election results (verified or otherwise) that were skewed toward Republicans…
No doubt you’re familiar by now with many of the surprising results Silver cites — he describes them as “missed ‘calls'” and “errors”. For example, he notes, pollsters erred in the governor’s races “including in Illinois and Kansas and especially in Maryland, where Republican Larry Hogan wound up winning by 9 percentage points despite trailing in every nonpartisan poll released all year.”
In Senate contests, he wrote earlier on Wednesday, “Some of the worst misses came in states like Kentucky and Arkansas where the Republican won, but by a considerably larger margin than polls projected. There was also a near-disaster in Virginia. It looks like Democratic incumbent Mark Warner will pull out the race, but the polls had him up by 9 points rather than being headed for a photo finish.”
There are many more examples you likely know by now. There were similar surprises in some ballot measures and down-ticket races as well. For example, in Kansas, controversial Republican Sec. of State Kris Kobach was reportedly “tied” with his Democratic challenger last week, according to KSN-TV’s SurveyUSA poll. Yet, according to the results on Kobach’s own KS Secretary of State site, he “won” the election by a remarkable 18 points. (That’s a single poll, not an average of many, but you get the idea.)
Those results, as well as the ones cited by Silver, could, in fact, be correct. The trouble is a) we don’t know, because nobody bothers to verify the computer-reported results (even in states which use paper ballots systems that could be verified, unlike states that use touch-screen systems) and b) they ignore all of the problems with voting systems and the ability of voters to even access them in the first place.
While many Americans may be familiar with the surprise of Tuesday’s reported results, not nearly as many are aware of the problems that plagued voters across the country. So, here, for those who aren’t regular BRAD BLOG readers, are just a few examples of those problems where not all, but most, seemed to skew the election and its results away from Democratic voters and towards the GOP:
• Polling place Photo ID and other voter ID voting restrictions have been shown, over and over again, in study after study and court case after court case, to adversely and disproportionately disadvantage Democratic-leaning voters. Wendy Weiser of NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice released a report on Wednesday, asking “how much of a difference did new voting restrictions”, making it “harder to vote in 21 states” this year, have on the reported outcome of the elections?
Weiser rounds up up summaries of data in four states suggesting that “in several key races, the margin of victory came very close to the likely margin of disenfranchisement.”
In the Kansas gubernatorial race, Weiser explains, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) beat challenger Paul Davis (D) by “less than 33,000 votes”. That, despite a strict Photo ID law “put into effect right before the 2012 election, and a new documentary proof of citizenship requirement for voter registration,” implemented by Sec. of State Kobach. “We know from the Kansas secretary of state that more than 24,000 Kansans tried to register this year but their registrations were held in ‘suspense’ because they failed to present the documentary proof of citizenship now required by state law.”
Silver cites the pre-election polling average in the state that gave the Democrat Davis a 2.8 point advantage over Brownback in the days leading up to the election. Brownback reportedly won the race on Tuesday — Silver calls it the “Actual Result” — by 3.8 points, a 6.6 swing between pre-election polls and election results.
How many voters couldn’t vote because they were blocked due to Kobach’s scheme to disallow voters who didn’t turn in some sort of “proof” of citizenship, even though they’d registered to vote with the national voter registration form that says nothing about a need to supply such documents?
Weiser goes on to cite the Senate race in Virginia, where Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner, who had been pegged by pre-election polls to win by 8.5 points, beat Republican challenger Ed Gillespie by just .6, or “just over 12,000 votes”. That, despite the state’s new Photo ID law, enacted last year, which, according to the Virginia Board of Elections, means that “198,000 ‘active Virginia voters’ did not have acceptable ID this year.” Moreover, as Silver himself estimated when he worked for the New York Times (he now works for ESPN), such restrictive voting laws reduce turnout by about 2.4%, meaning, according to Weiser, “a reduction in turnout by more than 52,000 voters” in Virginia.
In Alabama, on the Friday before the election, the state Attorney General quietly issued an edict that Public Housing IDs would no longer be allowable for use in voting there under that state’s Photo ID voting law. How many lost their right to vote on Tuesday?
In Arkansas, though the state’s Photo ID restriction was struck down by the state Supreme Court after being found a violation of the state’s constitution, poll workers were reportedly asking voters for Photo ID anyway, leading the Arkansas Times to declare there were “voter suppression reports from all over” on Election Day and a “steady stream of complaints…from voters who say election officials around Arkansas demanded a photo ID before they could vote today.”
In that state, pre-election polls predicted that Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor was likely to lose to Republican Tom Cotton by 4.7 points. The results show him as having lost by 17.
In Texas, reportedly, “the number of provisional ballots cast more than doubled since the last mid-term election in 2010.” That, after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a strict polling place Photo ID law to be implemented this year, and despite a U.S. District Court finding, after a full trial, that the GOP law was “purposefully discriminatory”, an “unconstitutional poll tax” and could disenfranchise as many as 600,000 disproportionately minority and poor registered voters.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a study earlier this year that polling place Photo ID restrictions in Kansas and Tennessee had decreased voter turnout in those states by 2 to 3% after they were enacted in 2012, and at even higher rates for minority and young voters.
While we’ll have to wait to learn more about the specific effect of Photo ID restrictions on voters this year — and we’ll never know how many didn’t even bother to show up, knowing that they lacked the specific type of Photo ID now needed to vote — is it too early to consider how all of that voter suppression affect the reported election results this year in TX, AR, AL, KS and VA? More or less than the “Democratic bias” Silver finds in almost all of the pre-election polling averages?
• The Electronic Voter ID system went down for still unknown reasons in Florida in the Democratic stronghold of Broward County, resulting in voters who were unable to vote on Election Day. Gov. Rick Scott (R) is said to have defeated former Gov. Charlie Crist (D) there by just over 1%. Moreover, as Weiser notes, a host of new voting restrictions enacted by Florida Republicans over the last several years, included “a decision by Scott and his clemency board to make it virtually impossible for the more than 1.3 million Floridians who were formerly convicted of crimes but have done their time and paid their debt to society to have their voting rights restored.” Might any of that had an adverse effect on the Democrats’ results in the Sunshine State Tuesday night, an effect that wasn’t picked up on in pre-election polls?
• Mysterious robocalls over the weekend before the election resulted in 2,000 election judges failing to show up for work at all in Illinois’ Democratic stronghold of Chicago on Tuesday morning. The failure of one-fifth of the city’s judges to show up resulted in many polls being short-handed during the morning rush or unable to open at all. Might that have affected the reported results in the Illinois Governor’s race where the incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn was expected to win by .3, according to Silver’s aggregated poll averages, but ended up losing instead by almost 5 points?
• Touchscreen votes were reported as flipping Democratic to Republican in Texas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Virginia and elsewhere, including in North Carolina where 100% unverifiable touch-screen votes reportedly flipped from incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan (D) to her challenger Thom Tillis (R). She was predicted to win by a small margin in the pre-election poll average — and even, reportedly, according to Election Day exit polls late in the day — but she ended up reportedly losing by almost 2 points or about 48,000 votes.
North Carolina voters also faced the most extreme voter suppression law since the Jim Crow era this year. Hundreds of voters are known to have been disenfranchised during the much smaller turnout during the state’s primary election in April. As Weiser reports, during “the last midterms in 2010, 200,000 voters cast ballots during the early voting days now cut” by the new Republican law, a huge number of them were minority voters who tend to vote Democratic. Moreover, same-day registration for voters was nixed this year by the same law. Additionally, she writes, “7,500 voters cast their ballots outside of their home precincts” in 2012, but this year, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed all of those provisions of the new GOP law to be implemented, even after the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals had struck them down, finding “that African-American voters disproportionately used those electoral mechanisms and that House Bill 589 restricted those mechanisms and thus disproportionately impacts African-American voters.”
Might any of those issues have resulted a Republican skew in the election results, many of which are based on ballots cast that were cast and registered — either correctly or incorrectly, we can never know — on 100% unverifiable electronic voting systems?
(For the record, unverifiable touch-screen votes also reportedly flipped in either unknown directions or from Republicans to Democrats in Arkansas, Illinois, Virginia and Maryland. Though reports of D to R flips are historically much more common, they also flip from R to D as well on occasion, a factor not accounted for at all in pre-election polling or in Silver’s analysis of results.)
• Registration issues plagued voters in a number of states. I’ve already mentioned the thousands of Kansas voters unable to vote in state elections this year, but what of those 50,000 voter registrations in Georgia collected during a progressive registration drive there? It’s alleged they were never entered into the system by the state’s Republican Sec. of State. Might that have had an impact on the perceived “Democratic bias” in the polls compared to the results collected on the state’s 100% unverifiable touch-screen voting system in the race for Georgia’s open U.S. Senate seat between Democrat Michelle Nunn and Republican David Perdue? In that contest, the pre-election poll average projected a 6.4% better result for the Democrat than the one ultimately reported by the computer tabulators.
In New Mexico and in Louisiana, where there were important races for Governor and the U.S. Senate respectively, the GOP-controlled states are accused of undermining voter registration by failing to properly implement National Voter Registration Act requirements to offer voter registration opportunities to residents via social services outlets, such as those applying for drivers licenses or medicaid or food stamps.
Across the nation, as Greg Palast reported at Al-Jazeera last week, millions of voters were threatened with disenfranchisement in some 20 states, thanks to an “Interstate Crosscheck” database created by Kansas’ Kobach with a number of other GOP-run states. The database, while secretly implemented, is supposed to check for possible multiple registrations by voters in those states. Palast reports, however, that the system is plagued with errors, disproportionately targets minority voters, and might have resulted in unknown numbers of voters inappropriately removed from the voting rolls entirely and/or challenged at the polls on Election Day.
• Not enough paper ballots left voters unable to vote verifiably in Ferguson, MO and elsewhere in St. Louis County, as well as the city of St. Louis. The jurisdictions scrambled to print and deliver new ballots throughout the day, but many voters were effected, particularly during the morning rush and late in the day, when lines grew long and polls had to stay open to accommodate those who could afford to wait. At one polling place in Florissant, a town just adjacent to Ferguson, a poll supervisor reported that when they opened the polling place in the morning “they only had five of one of the paper ballots when they typically need about 300 of that version.”
Could the difficulty voters had casting a vote in the predominantly African-American areas of St. Louis served to skew final results in favor of Republicans there?
We could go on. And on. And on. And on. There were many more problems across the country, and undoubtedly others yet to come to light, but you get the idea. And, of course, none of that takes into account whether any of the reported results themselves were accurately tabulated by the oft-failed computer systems which tabulate almost all our nation’s ballots.
How much impact did all of those factors — and more we haven’t mentioned and more still rolling in — have on the results? We don’t yet know. But to simply presume the independent pre-election polls by dozens of different pollsters, each using their own unique methodology, were all simply wrong (skewed towards Democrats) seems presumptuous at best, at this hour, and recklessly misleading from someone like Silver (whose work, I should add, I generally admire).
Perhaps a question that he might better be able to help us all answer is: “What are the statistical odds of so many races all skewing towards the GOP?”
Am I suggesting that elections were stolen by the Republicans? There is no doubt it was a good year for Republicans. But there is also no doubt that it was GOP voter suppression laws that affected turnout and the ability of many voters to be able to cast their votes at all, so that could certainly have swung a number of contests. On the other hand, stealing that many elections wholesale in that many states via electronic voting systems, without leaving evidence behind — particularly on our nation’s hodge-podge of different types of systems — would be a very difficult feat, most likely requiring a very large conspiracy. In such cases, it’s usually difficult to keep such a large conspiracy quiet. There are a few ways it could be done with a somewhat smaller conspiracy of insiders, but we’ll leave that discussion for another day.
Whether races would have had a different winner is ultimately unknown, but all of the items mentioned above could have had an effect on the polling averages versus the reported election results.
While Silver’s focus on polling and reported results is understandable, the analysis he offered is itself a skewed picture of what actually happened on Tuesday. It presumes that election results reported on our terrible electronic voting and tabulation systems, amidst voter suppression efforts unprecedented since the Jim Crow era, are accurate, while it was the pollsters who must have got it all wrong — and wrong, by a remarkable coincidence, in a way that supposedly overestimated Democratic turnout in almost every case.
While an analysis of such numbers is interesting media bait — particularly for those to whom elections are little more than a horse race, rather than an exercise of the fundamental right which supposedly protects all others in this nation — it offers Americans a skewed and misleading story. It suggests, without any evidence to support such a broad assumption, that the results were “right” and the pollsters were “wrong.”
That may be an easy to story to tell, but it just isn’t an accurate or helpful one. It serves only to skew our nation and our media even further from a once-great representative democracy to little more than a biennial ESPN Sports Center extravaganza.
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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And of course the Democratic Party is busy shooting itself in both feet with every piece of ordinance in their considerable arsenal… the banned user list at Daily Kos seems to be expanding at a remarkable rate.
Brad, have you interviewed mathematicians about the odds of the discrepancy between election results and exit polls differing so much? Is it even possible? Media silence on the issue is both baffling and suspicious — it is cult-like.
This is criminal, there should be an investigation.
I wondered if in states/counties without EV voting or in a state like Oregon which has all postal voting if the polls more accurately reflected the voting results. That’s probably somebody’s doctoral thesis, I realize … but it would be interesting to see as that would go a long way toward scientifically reinforcing Brad’s premise here.
Thanks Brad great sum up. I find it odd that many of these races that were supposed to close and ended up not being, and the ones that were lost closing, no one is trying to quantify the effects of voter suppression for a take away lesson that thousands of article are so eager to write about.
Brad,
As always, you have done an outstanding job with your tireless efforts to inform an uncomprehending public about the dangers of electronic voting and/or counting as well as the voter suppression tactics that are so blatantly used and too often accepted with an “oh well” sort of shrug.
You have my gratitude and thanks.
What else can we do to inform, enlighten, convince, or at least engage the attention of our good (but clueless) fellow citizens?
Adam @2 asks:
As I understand it, unlike the 2004 election that entailed exit polls, the polls Brad addresses in this instance were pre-election polls.
However, when it came to the marked discrepancies between exit-polls and official results in the 2004 Presidential election, the analysis that was offered by Stephen Freeman, Ph.D., a member of the teaching faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate Program of Organizational Dynamics, in Was the 2004 Election Stolen? seems apropos.
Hi Brad,
Has there been any analysis of Colorado’s vote by mail vs. in person voting. I heard Mark Udall commenting that young voter turnout was very low.
If a lot of people voted by mail, how could anyone know?
Thanks for your excellent reporting!
Best regards,
Bob
Lora asked @ 3:
Share, share and share. Tweet, re-tweet, like, and re-share. Email, share and tweet, tweet, tweet.
Helps more than you might realize.
Ernie Canning @ 7 said:
Correct. Though I did include one reference (with link) to Exit Polls this year that further raise questions about the results, which reminds me very much of this specific moment after the surprise victory of Hillary Clinton in NH in 2008: https://bradblog.com/?p=5535
Same exact pattern, by the way. Media presumed pre-election polling was wrong and unverified results were right. That, despite even the Exit Poll stuff that Matthew notes at the link above, just as Josh Marshall did on Tuesday night in reference to the NC Exits.
Other than that one 2008 moment, this week reminded me more of 2004 than any election I’ve covered since then.
Yes, the pattern is indeed the same, Brad. The one difference with exit polls, as revealed by Freeman, is that the pollsters themselves will (
correct, alter) domestic exit polls to conform to the official count. Unless publicly captured before those “corrections” are made, the record of the disparity between the official count and the exit polls vanishes in the same manner that inconvenient facts were incinerated in “memory holes” inside the “Ministry of Truth” in George Orwell’s 1984.Of course, no exit poll “corrections” are made with respect to foreign elections. And if the result in the foreign election is disfavored by the U.S., the discrepancy is cited as evidence of election fraud.
Brad, I’m wondering why you chose not to print my comment? It was a call for action. Perhaps you could link to some NGOs, like http://www.democracymovement.us/
Sherri Losee @12:
Not sure what you’re referring to, Sherri. Comments are posted automatically (without my, or anybody else’s intervention) unless a comment gets caught in the moderation filter for some reason. I don’t see anything currently in the moderation queue, however.
Bottom line… what can be done about this? Whose job is it to investigate..the Justice Dept.?
It has been very apparent since Bush-Gore that dirty (and should be illegal) tactics have been and are being used… again, who can do anything about it and who will? No one.
Thanks Brad. Why my monthly subscription (as I consider it) is always well spent.
The thing that stands out in my mind about the 2004 “election” is when Mark Crispin Miller was on C-Span talking about John Kerry telling him he knew his election was stolen and then instantly folded on his promise to count every vote.
I heard a giant sucking-up sound.
Howard Dean would never have done that.
If Nate Silver is the wonder boy they say, he should be able to tell us what the early polls AND the election results will be.
Thanks, Ernie. Have any recent mainstream articles pointed out the mathematical impossibility of these recent elections. I tweeted The Perimeter Institute to suggest that they examine it, since they’re known to explore the math behind a lot of phenomenon, but I never heard back from them.
This is a crime brazenly committed out in the open before multitudes of people, but almost no one says a thing.
I wonder what Stephen Freeman would have to say about recent elections. Has he ever been interviewed for Brad Blog?
“History repeats itself, and that’s one of the things that’s wrong with history.” – Clarence Darrow
Let’s hope that what happened following the 2000 and 2004 elections is not the same pattern.
Big wars. Big dangerous wars.
Assault on global warming induced climate change science.
Assaults on civil rights.
I mean in terms of degree, intensity, and impunity.
Torture.
Loss of what U.S. reputation still remains in the world.
Surges in propaganda and ignorance.
Yes, a pattern (Once Upon a People).
I’m beginning to think Nate Silver is “dumb like a fox” and knows the polls are right and the elections are what are “off”. And his job is to go in TV before elections and pacify everyone into accepting the future shifts in the upcoming elections. He was on TV before the elections telling everyone how the GOP was going to take back the senate.
johnathon simon explains why the polls underestimate democrats,,,,the exact opposite of what silver is saying….
snip>>>>>>>>
richard charnin has been doing analyst on the statistical probability of the repubs benefiting from every “incorrect” poll for years…the chances are like one in a trillion that the repubs always benefit
and then there is the soe software that is used across the country to report the results…a foreign owned company with bain capital roots,what could go wrong?….u did not mention that piece of the puzzle at all
quinn’s loss in illinois is probably just the beginning as 2014 was the last election voters do not need to present id
It’s not that the machines aren’t one hundred percent accurate, it’s that we have no way of knowing.
That story is never told.
Enter the Likely Voter Cutoff Model, or LVCM for short. Introduced by Gallup about 10 years ago (after Gallup came under the control of a right-wing Christianist heir), the LVCM has gathered adherents until it is now all-but-universally employed. The LVCM uses a series of screening questions—about past voting history, residential stability, intention of voting, and the like—to qualify and disqualify respondents from the sample. The problem with surveying registered voters without screening for likelihood of voting is obvious: you wind up surveying a significant number of voters whose responses register on the survey but who then don’t vote. If this didn’t-vote constituency has a partisan slant it throws off the poll relative to the election results—generally to the left, since as you move to the right on the political spectrum the likelihood of voting rises.
But the problem with the LVCM as a corrective is that it far overshoots the mark: that is, it eliminates individuals from the sample who will in fact cast a vote, and the respondents/voters so eliminated, as a group, are acknowledged by all to be to the left of those who remain in the sample, skewing the sample to the right (a sound methodology, employed for a brief time by the NY Times/CBS poll, would solve the participation problem by down-weighting, but not eliminating, the responses of interviewees less likely to vote). So the LVCM—which disproportionately eliminates members of the Democratic constituency, including many who will in fact go on to cast a vote, by falsely assigning them a zero percent chance of voting—should get honestly tabulated elections consistently wrong. It should over-predict the Republican vote and under-predict the Democratic vote—by 5% – 7%, just about enough to cover the margins in the kind of tight races that determine the control of Congress and key state legislatures……
the snip that did not post the first time^^^^
Hey Brad,
The beginning of this paragraph needs a little cleaning up, I think–
Sounds like you’re talking about Kansas but it looks like you must mean Georgia.(please feel free to delete this comment after. No reason to take up space with it)
I think it’s probably off-target to attribute knowing miscalculation to Nate Silver. My sense is that he and any number of other very bright people have enormous blind spots when it comes to taking a good hard look at the outrageously undemocratic unreliability of our voting machines and process. Just too painful to go there, is how it seems to me.
I had an online argument with Josh Marshall right after the 2008 NH exit polling/election results discrepancy(Brad mentions in #10) became known. He just couldn’t go there.
Same thing when I tried to bring this subject up with Chris Hayes at a book signing. Just couldn’t go there.
To me it looks like their consciousness can’t entertain the POSSIBILITY of consideration of this most obvious, fundamental problem.
I don’t know what it would take for all these really smart people to acknowledge the reality and danger of the absurd and completely unexplained Alvin Greene outcome. But we haven’t found it yet.
If you need evidence to prove to Mr. that the machine results are only as good as the programming, then I would point him to 2014 Stoughton Wisconsin this year and 2006 Pottowatomi County Iowa
Karen McKim here in Wisconsin is urging every one in the election integrity community to stop referring to machine generated paper as results but as output instead.
So in the case of Stoughton, the machine output printed on election is clearly incorrect but election results will be available after the Stoughton municipal audit on Monday.
Love the reframing to “output”. Yeah. Got to reframe this sucker. And maybe, just maybe somewhere down the line the 100th monkey will jump on the bandwagon.
Thank you, Brad!
David Lasagna said @ 24:
Thank you. Have clarified. Writing, editing and proof-reading at 4am never seems to end well 🙂
John Washburn @ 26:
Thanks, John. I would also include what happened in Palm Beach County, FL in 2012 to that list.
Hello Brad, can you please promise us you will get to the bottom of this story? I haven’t the slightest idea what went wrong here, but this is the smelliest election since 2004.
Either of two things happened, as you note:
1. Massive fraud, probably with voter machines.
2. Massive voter disenfranchisement keeping Democrats from voting.
There are problems with both theories. The problem with Theory 2 is that the LVM likely voter model consistently showed high numbers of Democrats as likely voters. They were likely voters all the way up until the day before the election. The LVM overestimates Republicans, not Democrats. It actually underestimates Democrats.
The problem here is that huge numbers of voters do not tell posters they are going to vote and then not vote. It doesn’t happen. If they say they are going to vote, they vote. However, the opposite does occur. Many people who say they are going to vote do not vote.
So the likelihood that huge numbers of Democrats told pollsters they were going to vote all the way up until the day before the election and then did failed to show up is virtually nil. I am sure you can figure out a nice unlikely statistic that might occur. It simply didn’t happen.
What might have happened is that many Democrats were determined to vote but were somehow thwarted. I am not sure how this might work, but it is a good working theory.
The theory that I like much better is fraud, massive or not. In particular, the Kay Hagan race in North Carolina looks like fraud. Exit polls had her leading by 2 points and then she lost the election by a point. I believe that statistically that is very suspect.
The fraud theory via voting machines once again must be explored along with the theory that the Kay Hagan race is the most obvious case of fraud of them all.
We need to get mathematicians and statisticians working on this.
Also we need to get Thom Hartmann working on this. He did great work on the other recent stolen elections, but he is sitting this one out.
Right now, Brad seems to be the only person on this story. We need to other writers on it and Brad needs to dig into and mine this story for all its worth, wherever it leads us.
Let’s not forget the impact of gerrymandering on the House election dynamics.
silver doesn’t “go there” because his livelihood depends on him not “going there”
keith o mentioned it and look whr it got him
Nate Silver’s whole schtick is averaging polls together, while accounting for historical “bias” in past polls by the same organizations. That is, if previous polls by XYZ newspaper showed Dems 3% higher than later published election results, Silver just subtracts 3% from the Dem side of everything he gets from XYZ.
His mathematical model says nothing about where these discrepancies come from. He’s not saying which is wrong, XYZ or the official outcome. He’s just trying to predict the official outcome.
You can just as well describe the biases he accounts for as actual statistical measurements of election fraud.
But if he did that, somehow I doubt he’d be working for ESPN much longer.
Hey Brad come take a look at the website for the city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They put up their past elections data. They use the machines and show an “undervote” percentage of almost 25%. You would think somebody would say something about a system that throws in the garbage one out of 4 votes.
I mainly agree with David Lasagna@25, that:
“To me it looks like their consciousness can’t entertain the POSSIBILITY of consideration of this most obvious, fundamental problem.”
Even if their livelihood depends on it as per Karen of Illinois@33, that doesn’t mean quite a bit of cognitive dissonance isn’t occurring as well.
We need to keep putting the truth out there in packets that are at least somewhat digestibile.
When you believe in your heart that some things are sacred and that certain down-and-dirty tricks are limited in scope, it takes an entire shifting of worldview to see it any other way. Takes time, patience and persistence. Facts alone aren’t enough.
Sad to think that Nate Silver is a Black-Box-Voting-Fraud denier. I thought he was a god! Either he’s in denial of massive systemic Republican vote-count tampering, or else he’s abetting a felony and aiding the destruction of our democracy.
I’d love to hear him address this, instead of just chiming in with the morning-after crepe hangers.
NOTE: THE BLOG TITLE IS WRONG in the right column above.
“The RESULTS were skewed to Republicans
Confusing, infuriating at first.
Leonard Carpenter @ 38:
Yeesh. Thank you, Leonard! Fixed! Duh.
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/wisconsin-2014-governor-true-voteexit-poll-analysis-indicates-fraud/
Wisconsin 2014 Governor True Vote/Exit Poll Analysis Indicates Fraud
For the first time since 2000, I decided not to do election forecasting and post-election True Vote analysis for 2014. Systemic Election Fraud has been proven beyond any doubt, so why bother? Nothing has changed, the media remains mute on election fraud and congress refuses to do anything about it.
I have worked with Wisconsin activists on the 2011 Supreme Court election, the state recalls and the Walker recall. I was so removed from 2014 election analysis that I did not even know who was running against Walker. When I was asked to look into the Wisconsin Governor race, I felt like Al Pacino in Godfather III:Just when I think I am out of it, they pull me back in again.
Once again, the mantra must be repeated: The key to understanding how elections are rigged is to take a close look at the exit polls. The unadjusted exit polls are not released until years later, so we must look at the adjusted exit poll (national, state, governor) for clues. The 2014 election was 2012 deja vu all over again.
[Read rest of post here…]
[Ed Note: Richard, as per our rules for commenting here, please do not copy/paste entire articles here. A few grafs and a link to the original is fine and appreciated. I’ve truncated the one above and added another link to it. Thanks. – BF]
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/a-reply-to-nate-silvers-ten-reasons-why-you-should-ignore-exit-polls/
A Reply to Nate Silver’s “Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Pollsâ€
Richard Charnin (TruthIsAll)
Oct. 29, 2010
Update: March 25, 2013
Nate, you have it all wrong in your book. The Signal is the 52-42% Democratic lead in the 1988-2008 unadjusted presidential state and national exit polls. The Noise is the media propaganda that the Democrats won by 48-46% as shown in the published adjusted polls. But we all know that it is standard operating procedure to force the exit polls to match the (bogus) recorded vote. The media (that means you) want the public to believe that Systemic Election Fraud is a myth.
Nate, this is a reply to your November 2008 post Ten Reasons Why You Should Ignore Exit Polls. It’s four years later but it would be instructive to review your comments on exit polls to see if you feel the same way about them. I’m still waiting for your response to my open letter regarding your pathetic last-place ranking of pollster John Zogby . I would also be interested in your answers to these twenty-five questions. It would enable readers to gauge your perspectives on election fraud.
Are you asking us to ignore a) the final exit polls or b) the unadjusted, preliminary state and national exit polls? If it’s (a), then you must believe that election fraud is systemic since unadjusted exit polls are always forced to match the recorded vote, even if they are fraudulent. If it’s (b), then you must believe that election fraud is a myth and that the recorded vote reflects actual voter intent (i.e. the true vote). Based on your writings, it must be (b). After reading your “ten reasonsâ€, I can come up with ten reasons why you have never responded to my posts.
[Read rest of post here…]
[Ed Note: Richard, as per our rules for commenting here, please do not copy/paste entire articles here. A few grafs and a link to the original is fine and appreciated. I’ve truncated the one above and added another link to it. Thanks. – BF]
Richard Charnin, it is elucidating to get confirmation from a mathematician that US election appear to be fraudulent from a mathematical and statistical standpoint. I made a tweet about your analysis on Twitter.
Oh, and let’s not forget Florida.
http://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/florida-2014-governor-true-voteexit-poll-analysis-indicates-fraud/
Florida 2014 Governor True Vote/Exit Poll Analysis Indicates Fraud
Richard Charnin
Nov. 14, 2014
Our democracy was stolen on Nov.22,1963: Click Reclaiming Science:The JFK Conspiracy to look inside the book.
This is how elections are stolen. Click Matrix of Deceit: Forcing Pre-election and Exit Polls to Match Fraudulent Vote Counts to look inside the book.
For the first time since 2000, I decided not to do election forecasting and post-election True Vote analysis for 2014. Systemic Election Fraud has been proven beyond any doubt, so why bother? Nothing has changed, the media remains mute on election fraud and congress refuses to do anything about it.
I decided to analyze the Florida Governor election since there has been a strong response to the Wisconsin Governor post. This post will essentially duplicate the Wisconsin analysis. Only the numbers will change. Important general comments on Election Fraud will be repeated here.
Once again, the mantra must be repeated: The key to understanding how elections are rigged is to take a close look at the exit polls. The unadjusted exit polls are not released until years later, so we must look at the adjusted exit poll (national, state, governor) for clues.
[Read rest of post here…]
[Ed Note: Richard, as per our rules for commenting here, please do not copy/paste entire articles here. A few grafs and a link to the original is fine and appreciated. I’ve truncated the one above and added another link to it. Thanks. – BF]