Comments on CANNONFIRE: Vote notes

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2005-10-31T07:54:00.000-08:00

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I read you blog and thought it was great! But you...

2005-10-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

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Hey Blogger, I am conducting some research on vari...

2005-10-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

Hey Blogger, I am conducting some research on various Detective sites and ran across this page. Even though it wasn't "exactly" what I was searching for, I think the readers of "Vote notes" still might be interested in reading our review of Detective sites and other similar websites. As you know, the more information people have before spending their hard earned money, the better. Sorry for the self-promotion, just trying to get the word out while looking for more sites to review. On to the next -- Thanks!

I just ran across "Vote notes" while conducting so...

2005-10-26T23:04:00.000-07:00

I just ran across "Vote notes" while conducting some research on various Instant Detective sites. Even though it wasn't really what I was searching for, I think the people who visit your site might still be interested in reading our reviews of various sites including Instant Detective. I started creating these review sites to help people determine what's good and what's bad on the net. As you know, the more information people have before spending their hard earned money, the better. Your readers can even add their opinions for others to read. By the way, I enjoyed reading the posts on your site.

cmg, see comments here. The gist is that the noise...

2005-05-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

cmg, see comments here. The gist is that the noise in polling makes Senate-President an unhelpful comparison; bias in presidential polling does not automatically translate into senatorial polling, even within the same state.

However, there needs to be more work done on this topic, as I haven't seen (or can't recall, anyway) a definitive treatment of this.

demfromct: The ticket splitting itself isn't the c...

2005-05-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

demfromct: The ticket splitting itself isn't the confounding thing. The confounding thing is that the results for senate, as predicted by the exit polls, were accurate. But the results for president as predicted by the exit polls were off the mark.

Thos of us who are impressed with febble's work an...

2005-05-01T05:45:00.000-07:00

Thos of us who are impressed with febble's work and wish it to be disseminated for more peer review do not disagree with checking out voting irregularities, suppression etc, and do not disagree with the concept of needed voter reform. Blackwell, along with Kathryn Harris, remain models of what Secretaries of State should NOT be. Local insistance of nonpartisan SoS is at least as important as paper trails, etc.

As for the difference between senator and president in exit polls, there is always a huge amount of ticket splitting that confounds polling. The discrepancy is not proof of anything.

A response:I have not attempted to "explain away" ...

2005-05-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

A response:

I have not attempted to "explain away" the exit poll disparity. I have simply demonstrated that one inference made by USCV from the data, namely that the data we have indicate "Bush strongholds have more Vote-corruption" is not justified. My math is "fraud-neutral". My concern is that the E-M report dealt with a measure of error (the "within-precinct-error" or WPE) that is mathematically confounded with vote margin. This means that any analysis of WPE by vote margin (i.e. how much of a Bush or Kerry stronghold a precinct was) is confounded by the fact that WPE is itself a function of vote margin.

The tables (given in the E-M report) of mean and median WPE values by precinct category, are therefore suspect, as are any inferences by USCV based on them. By modelling the kind of error likely to be introduced into the E-M tables by the confound, I concluded that, contrary to the USCV claim, that tables are also consistent with over-estimates of Kerry's vote that are randomly distributed across all precinct categories.

This remains true whether the cause of the over-estimates is fraud or differential non-response.

The arguments for the latter are not in my paper, but in the E-M evaluation, which reports that the over-estimates were greatest were sampling protocol was poor. This is a strong finding, as there would be no reason to suppose that fraud would be greatest where the pollsters were messing up. However, because of their use of a confounding variable, I believe these analyses should be re-done, using my variable.

I would also like to see whether a plot of my variable against vote margin confirmed or refuted the idea that overestimates were greatest in Bush strongholds. I am not saying they weren't. I am saying that it cannot be inferred from the data we have.

Regarding response rates. It is not correct to say that "Bush responders in Republican precincts were MORE inclined to speak to the exit pollsters." The E-M report states that there was no significant difference,although they do not give details of the statistical test. However, it is true that the "differential response" hypothesis predicts that response rates should actually be lower in Bush strongholds than in Kerry strongholds - because allegedly, Bush voters don't like responding.

This is an important argument. However, statistically, a small difference is only detectable if you have enough statistical power. The predicted difference is small (in theory you should get 56% response from an all-Kerry precinct, and 50% in an all Bush district, so the maximum difference is 6 percentage points). Statistical power depends on two things - plenty of data and good signal-to-to noise ratio.

Here the numbers are small where it matters - in the extreme precincts where the differences should be maximised. There were only 90 "high Kerry" precincts and only 40 "high Bush precincts". So the data would have to be pretty clean. We know it was not, as the E-M report gives as a value called the "absolute" error, which, without going into too much detail, tells us how much noise there was in the data.

When I did my model, I compared the amount of noise in my model data with the amount of noise in the real data. I had less, and even so, statistical significance of the lower responses in my "high Bush" precincts was only borderline. I estimated that if I increased the noise so that it matched the real data, the difference would be lost in the noise. It only takes a couple of stray data points to lift the response rates at the "high Bush" end, or lower them at the "high Kerry end" to destroy the effect.

So I concede that the lack of evidence of lower response rates in "high Bush" precincts than in "high Kerry" precincts is an argument worth considering. However, the way statistics works that what you test, statistically is a "null hypothesis". If you cannot show that an effect is unlikely to have occurred by chance you "retain the null". If you "retain the null", have not proved that the effect was not there. You simply have not proved that it was. It is the statistical equivalent of "presumption of innocence".

Unless E-M provide us with better data, I do not think we can reject the null hypothesis that over-estimates of Kerry's vote were randomly distributed amongst precincts of all degrees of partisanship.

Whatever the reason for the over-estimates.

Re the last sentence: I believe 118,000+ was the ...

2005-04-30T19:36:00.000-07:00

Re the last sentence: I believe 118,000+ was the official final vote difference in Ohio.

One more thing re exit polls: how was it that in Colorado the polls for US Senator were accurate, but for president there was a large swing to Bush?