A Plea.

[pmb]

Despite my disappointment at the outcome of this election, what is most important to me is that the people have at least nominally spoken. The election has been held, and we support the system, even if we do not support the winner. At all.

To that end, if faith in the system is lost, then all is lost. Because you can't fix anything within a broken system. So please, please, PLEASE, someone tell me where the fault in this graph lies. Because I desperately want to believe that he actually won. The alternative is too awful.

Comments

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

1. This is not statistically significant. You are looking at a population of 10 states with electronic voting, and only 2 (!) with paper ballots.
2. We should expect exit polls errors to vary systematically from state to state. Exit polls use non-uniform sampling . Not all counties, polling places, and times of day are represented equally. The accuracy of the poll depends on the accuracy of the pollster's demographic and turnout models, which in turn will vary state by state.
3. The vertical scales have been manipulated. If you adjust the vertical range for Wisconsin (paper ballots), you can get a graph essentially identical to Pennsylvania (electronic voting) and New Hampshire (electronic voting).

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I second this. There's no way to know that the person constructing that image didn't and pick and choose what states to include. We need to see all the states, and the y-axis should be the same on all the graphs.

[leech.livejournal.com]

Weren't those all swing states?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

1) Agreed. More data is essential. This is not conclusive, but is suspicious.

2) Exit polls are traditionally used as the primary means of investigating whether or not a count will be honest. We've had 50-odd years to hone our methodologies. And everybody got it wrong in the exact same way this time? Too fishy.

3) Ummm. I'm not seeing that. I agree that the vertical scales have been manipulated, but the primary point of interest for me is the discrepancy between the exit polls and the tabulated votes. Wisconsin (paper) went from a exit polled 52/48 win for kerry to a 51/49 win for kerry. That intuitively seems well within the margin of error. Pennsylvania (electronic voting) went from an exit polled 60/40 win for Kerry to a tabulated 51/49 win for Kerry. 9% is way outside any intuitive margin of error. New Hampshire went from a 41/57 win for Kerry to a 50/49 win for Kerry. Again, 7% is way outside any reasonable margin of error.

Doing some quick math... the exit polls were off by an average of 1.5% in the paper ballot states shown, and by 5% in the electronic voting states shown. That's 5% for each candidate - which means they got the spread wrong by an average of 10%, as opposed to 3% in the paper states. Something was systemically wrong with the polling or the voting. And we've been polling in basically the same way for half a century, while the electronic voting machines are pretty new.

[lucasmembrane.livejournal.com]

I'd like to find the raw data and do some more in-depth statistical analysis. In addition to the factors you mentioned, there's also the fact that the polls were *consistently* off in favor of Kerry. If there's a problem with the sampling technique, some polls would favor Bush and some would favor Kerry.

Er, I guess you mentioned that in point 2. But yeah. Fishy.

Damn, I need more free time in my life for projects like this. And I need to find my old statistics book.

Anyway, if you find a good source of buttloads of raw data, point me to it. I may be able to throw something together.

(And as far as giving you hope is concerned, I'm afraid I can't help. I fully believe that the election was stolen, and, lacking an audit trail, that we will never know for sure.)

[olstad.livejournal.com]

I think you're moving a bit too fast on the 50-year validation of exit polling. You can't just take an SRS of voters; you don't have access to the whole population at once...
a) We did have record turnout this year (and from different ages/groups)
b) Most Americans feel _very_ different about exit polling than they did during the last pres. exit poll
c) Even during the campaign, we noticed that different organizations (notably, Gallup vs. whoever MoveOn thought was better) got notably different answers on polls, apparently due to different survey architecture.
d) Some of the voting rules changed this time (e.g. provisional ballots in all states-- it is possible this changed who went to which polling places).

All that said, I'd be much more comfortable if we could get some checkable data here...