Reply #29: And this stuff makes me so angry, I'm going to continue....

[Febble]

They tried to explain Bush's MYSTERIOUS, late-in-the-day win by a bunch of gobble-de-gook about "reluctant Republican responders,"

Far from being gobble-de-gook, they had actual evidence for it, non-response bias is a well-attested and well-researched phenomenon, and their subsequent detailed investigation supported it.

which turned out to be the opposite of the truth.

As you give no reference for this assertion I have no way of countering it except to repeat that there is excellent evidence in the data, and in past data, for the phenomenon.

Alert bloggers and others caught the exit poll reports before they changed them--took screen shots of them--and established that Kerry won the exit polls.

Bloggers and a few million others round the world, who hoped that the early exit poll estimates were going to turn out to be good.

Edison-Mitofsky LATER had to admit that this was true.

Yup, and they "admitted" BEFORE the election that the projections would be based on vote-returns as well as exit poll data, as they do every election. Not much opacity there.

E/M then DENIED access to the raw data to Conyers' committee, and to statistical experts, who requested it. And they still have not given it up!

They have made copious data available, including precinct-level data for Ohio, after blurring.

And the upshot of all this DEVIOUS behavior was to DENY the American people vitally important evidence of a stolen election--the undoctored exit polls--that might have spurred effective protest.

Well, I protested, and you protested, and Conyers protested, and everyone was talking about the exit poll discrepancy, and whether it might have been due to fraud, and some of us where hoping it did, but aware that non-sampling error might have been responsible, and Mitofsky was talking about what might have caused it. The point is that LOADS of people knew there was a discrepancy BECAUSE NO-ONE WAS SAYING THERE WASN'T ONE.

They took it off the TV screens that night (after a mysterious "glitch" in the computer reporting system);

Well, what they did is that they gradually updated the estimates, and there was a discontinuity during the glitch. But the numbers that you regard as the "real" exit polls weren't particularly real, any more than the height of a 12 year old is any more the "real" height of the 18 year old he will become than the height of the same child at 10. They were an early snapshot of the process.

they said that the doctored polls were the real ones;

No, they assumed their reweighted tabulations would be more accurate than the un-reweighted tabulations. And they projected the winners using vote returns. No-one claimed that any set of numbers, early or late, were "real".

they obscured the truth; they fuzzied the issue,

Well sure, the truth got obscured, and the issue got fuzzied, just as posts like yours continue to obscure and fuzzy the idea people have about how exit polls work. Whether that was the fault of E-M (who posted an extremely explicit and detailed account of exactly what they would do, BEFORE the election, so I'm not sure how much I blame E-M, though I do fault the networks for not making it clearer) or the fault of people like you, I don't know. But misunderstanding there certainly was, and is. And which I am trying to clear, NOT because I had a contract with Mitofsky (undertaken, as you well know, WELL after the election and BECAUSE I was critical of their analysis) but because I respect FACTS, and I don't like history being rewritten as FICTION.

and they lied about it and just made shit up.

Well, shit has certainly been made up.

They acted just like Bushites and their war profiteering corporate news monopoly propaganda machine. And guess what? That's who was paying them! All the bastard so-called news organizations who lied to us about the war--some of them making direct profit off the war in their octopus of subsidiaries, and their five rightwing CEO billionaires making enormous profit off Bush tax cuts and deregulation. That's who paid for this exit poll collusion.

Except that your initial premise is simply wrong.

There is no excuse for this.

There isn't an excuse for continuing to post these assertions, which are not only unsupported by evidence but actually contradicted by evidence that you could easily google.

Edison-Mitofsky should have cried foul BEFORE the election, and should have refused to participate in any election that was unauditable and unrecountable. It was a breach of ethics that they did not. And instead they did everything possible to make that election look legitimate.

Bullshit.

Edison-Mitofsky and the corporate news monopolies they worked for colluded in COVERING UP major evidence of election fraud--the type of evidence that brought down a government in the Ukraine, and that is ROUTINELY USED throughout the world to verify elections and check for fraud.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Exit poll evidence was NOT used to bring down a government in Ukraine - did you forget about the acid in the ballot boxes, and the fact that one candidate was poisoned and mutilated by the other side? And exit polls are NOT "routinely used throughout the world to verify elections and check for fraud." Name one election in which this has been done (I can, I wonder if you can).

It was HIDDEN from the American people.

Hidden in plain sight apparently.

And it's STILL HIDDEN. E/M has done NOTHING to un-hide it!

Sigh. Read my other post, check the links.

If people hadn't gotten screen shots before they took down the real exit poll numbers, we wouldn't know about it.

Well true, I suppose - if people hadn't watched TV they might not have known there was an election either. But no-one was stopping me watching - were they stopping you?

And E/M has done nothing but obscure the matter since then--including keeping the tell-tale raw PRECINCT data secret. The argument about "confidentiality" is bullshit. Experts peer review confidential material all the time.

Not true. I do a fair bit of peer-reviewing, but I never actually see the data, precisely because of confidentiality constraints, although sometimes peer-reviewers do ask to see data. But it is never made publicly available, and should not be, unless it is first "anonymised". Funnily enough I spent this morning "anonymising" data, and anonymised data was released, as always, to the Roper Centre and the University of Michigan.

OK, back to Lamont. I am immensely cheered that he won.