Reply #103: Some posters on this thread are...

[euler]

...saying things like:

"But, Conyers report says..."

"But, TIA says..."

"The authors of this report are in on the fraud..."

"The authors of this report are politically biased..."

"This is so bogus"

I asked people concerned about the authoirs qualifications, to type the names into Google and see who the authors are and then make your opinion. At least one poster did do this. Now I am doing it here:

The first author listed is interesting. Some have cslled him biased, but not in the direction you might think.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University: His resume is here -http://macht.arts.cornell.edu / But what I found more interesting is his 33 page analysis of the 2000 presidential election and his conclusion:

"Examination of 2000 election ballots in the decisive state of Florida shows that a plurality of the voters there intended to vote for the Democrat, Al Gore, and not the Republican, George W. Bush, notwithstanding the fact that the legal and political process produced a victory for Bush."

The entire analysis can be read here: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/overvotes.pdf

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)

"Professor Brady received his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. His areas of interest include Quantitative Methodology, American and Canadian Politics, and Political Behavior. He teaches undergraduate courses on political participation and party systems and graduate courses on advanced quantitative methodology. He is former president of the Political Methodology Group of the American Political Science Association. His current research interests include political participation in America, Estonia, and Russia, the dynamics of public opinion and political campaigns, the evaluation of social welfare programs, and the impact of computers on social policy making. Brady has co-authored two books. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada in 1992-1993. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) was featured in an American Political Science Review symposium in 1997. Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics."

His entire Bio is here: http://www.polisci.berkeley.edu/Faculty/bio/permanent/B... /

Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota

Guy-Uriel E. Charles is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology. He received his B.A. degree in Political Science, cum laude from Spring Arbor University in 1992 and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1997 where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. He is also finishing a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He clerked for The Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and has taught as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toledo School of Law prior to joining the University of Minnesota. He is an attorney and a member of the Michigan Bar Association. Professor Charles teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, civil procedure, election law, law and politics, and race. He is the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year 2002-2003 at the University of Minnesota Law School.

His entire bio is here: http://www.law.umn.edu/facultyprofiles/charlesg.htm


Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1998.
M.A. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1992.
A.B. Brown University, magna cum laude, Political Science, 1990.

Highton Publications

-----“Who Reports? Self-Reported Versus Proxy-Reported Voter Turnout.” Public Opinion Quarterly. In press.

-----“Beyond the Roll Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress” (co-authored with Michael Rocca). Political Research Quarterly. In press.

-----“How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Registrants” (co-authored with Raymond E. Wolfinger and Megan Mullin). State Politics and Policy Quarterly. In press.

-----“Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States.” Perspectives on Politics 2 (September):507-515.
-----“Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion.” Political Behavior 26 (June):181- 200. 2004.
-----“White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress.” Political Behavior 26 (March):1-25. 2004.
-----“Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the 1998 Congressional Elections.” Public Opinion Quarterly 66 (Spring):1-18. 2002.

-----“New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States” (co-authored with Arthur Burris). American Politics Research 30 (May):285-306. 2002.

-----“The Political Implications of Higher Turnout” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). British Journal of Political Science 31 (January):179-192. 2001.

-----“The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). American Journal of Political Science 45 (January):202-209. 2001.

-----“Senate Elections in the United States, 1920-1994.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (July):483-506. 2000.
-----“Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Voter Turnout.” Political Behavor 22 (June):109-120. 2000.
-----“Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). Political Behavor 20 (June) 9-104. 1998.

-----“Easy Registration and Voter Turnout.” Journal of Politics 59 (May):565-75. 1997. Other Scholarly Publications
-----“Alternative Tests for the Effects of Campaigns and Candidates on Voting Behavior.” In Capturing Campaign Effects, Henry Brady and Richard Johnston, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. In press.
-----“How Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Shape the California Electorate (co-authored with Jack Citrin). San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. (95 pp.) 2002.
-----“Voting: Turnout.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser and Paul J. Baltes, eds. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. 2001.
His entire bio is here: http://ps.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/vitae/BenHightonCV.pdf

Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
PDF Resume is here (sorry, couldn't copy paste): http://k.web.umkc.edu/kropfm/vitae.pdf

Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

Professor Traugott studies the mass media and their impact on American politics. This includes research on the use of the media by candidates in their campaigns and its impact on voters, as well as the ways that campaigns are covered and the impact of this coverage on candidates. He has a particular interest in the use of surveys and polls and the way they are used to cover campaigns and elections. His most recent book is The Voters' Guide to Election Polls.

His entire Bio is here: http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/mtraugott.html
Original Message
"Exit Polls: National Research Commission on Elections Report"
Posted by euler
National Research Commission on Elections and Voting

released a report titled: INTERIM REPORT ON ALLEGED IRREGULARITIES IN THE UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2 NOVEMBER 2004

The authors of the report are:

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)
Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota
Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)
Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University
Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

The main web site is here: http://election04.ssrc.org/research/academic /

The report is here: http://election04.ssrc.org/research/academic /

Key Findings:

Discrepancies between early exit poll results and popular vote tallies in several states may be due to a variety of factors and do not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud in the current election.

On November 2, early exit poll results showing significant leads for John Kerry in several battleground states were leaked to the public via the Internet. One consequence was that observers could see shifts in the exit poll results through the afternoon and evening on the websites of both news organizations and well-known blogs, raising suspicions that the early exit poll results were correct and that the actual vote totals had been manipulated or reflected administrative or tabulation errors.

Although these disparities have alarmed many observers, for several methodological reasons there is no a priori reason to believe that these differences reflect problems with the actual vote tallies. Rather, exit polls as currently designed and administered in the United States are not suitable for use as point estimators for the share of votes that go to different candidates. Their results, in conjunction with other elements of statistical models used by the National Election Pool (NEP) and the decision desks of their news organization members, are best suited for determining the difference between the two leading candidates and whether it is safe to call a particular race for one of them. Furthermore, the current design of exit polls is not well-suited to estimating whether certain aspects of an election functioned properly or not (for instance, efforts to assess whether particular types of voting machines were accurate). The usefulness of exit polls as currently administered in the United States is limited by (a) the sampling of a relatively small number of precincts, (b) the difficulty of knowing whether a random sample of voters was contacted at each precinct, and (c) the difficulty of combining Election Day information with data on absentee and early voters.

Because exit polls may not obtain a strictly random sample of voters at each precinct, exit pollsters typically weight their data to adjust for non-response and for known characteristics of the population. The problem of estimation is further complicated by the fact that partial data, such as were released in the afternoon on Election Day, are often unadjusted, not yet weighted for known attributes of the population or historical patterns of voting behavior. An unusual increase in turnout could introduce additional biases with regard to any or all of these assumptions. For the independent analyst examining the results of exit polls after Election Day, these issues are complicated by the fact that exit poll organizations do not typically disclose details regarding the source and quality of raw data or the transformations that have been performed on them. By the time that exit data are archived, they have been adjusted for such things as patterns of non-response and weighted to the actual outcome of the election. Thus, because of these and other limitations intrinsic to their sampling methods, current exit polls are not well-suited for estimating differences in measures like turnout or vote division by voting device, as the samples are not designed to reflect counties, or even specific county groups. There are other forms of statistical analysis, based upon designs that look like a natural experiment, to address some of these issues, and these analyses will be pursued by researchers when the appropriate data on election returns become available. Nevertheless, some analysts inappropriately attempt to use current exit poll results to investigate whether the results in a locale (state or country) are accurate or whether fraud might be involved in an election. A certain form of exit poll could be used for this purpose, but again the designs would have to be different. To validate results in specific precincts or from particular machines, the designs would have to incorporate larger numbers of interviews with voters leaving the polls for precision. And the stratification strategy would also need to be different, focusing on a combination of machine types and geography, for example, including a larger number of precincts at the first stage. There is little likelihood that the member organizations in the NEP would be willing to support the costs of such a design.


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...saying things like:

"But, Conyers report says..."

"But, TIA says..."

"The authors of this report are in on the fraud..."

"The authors of this report are politically biased..."

"This is so bogus"

I asked people concerned about the authoirs qualifications, to type the names into Google and see who the authors are and then make your opinion. At least one poster did do this. Now I am doing it here:

The first author listed is interesting. Some have cslled him biased, but not in the direction you might think.

Walter R. Mebane, Jr., Cornell University: His resume is here -http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/ But what I found more interesting is his 33 page analysis of the 2000 presidential election and his conclusion:

"Examination of 2000 election ballots in the decisive state of Florida shows that a plurality of the voters there intended to vote for the Democrat, Al Gore, and not the Republican, George W. Bush, notwithstanding the fact that the legal and political process produced a victory for Bush."

The entire analysis can be read here: http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/overvotes.pdf

Henry E. Brady, University of California (Berkeley)

"Professor Brady received his Ph.D. in Economics and Political Science from MIT in 1980. His areas of interest include Quantitative Methodology, American and Canadian Politics, and Political Behavior. He teaches undergraduate courses on political participation and party systems and graduate courses on advanced quantitative methodology. He is former president of the Political Methodology Group of the American Political Science Association. His current research interests include political participation in America, Estonia, and Russia, the dynamics of public opinion and political campaigns, the evaluation of social welfare programs, and the impact of computers on social policy making. Brady has co-authored two books. Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (1992) won the Harold Adams Innis Award for the best book in the social sciences published in English in Canada in 1992-1993. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (1995) was featured in an American Political Science Review symposium in 1997. Brady has also authored numerous articles on political participation, political methodology, the dynamics of public opinion, and other topics."

His entire Bio is here: http://www.polisci.berkeley.edu/Faculty/bio/permanent/Brady,H/

Guy-Uriel Charles, University of Minnesota

Guy-Uriel E. Charles is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for the Study of Political Psychology. He received his B.A. degree in Political Science, cum laude from Spring Arbor University in 1992 and his J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1997 where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law. He is also finishing a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He clerked for The Honorable Damon J. Keith of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and has taught as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Toledo School of Law prior to joining the University of Minnesota. He is an attorney and a member of the Michigan Bar Association. Professor Charles teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, civil procedure, election law, law and politics, and race. He is the Stanley V. Kinyon Teacher of the Year 2002-2003 at the University of Minnesota Law School.

His entire bio is here: http://www.law.umn.edu/facultyprofiles/charlesg.htm


Benjamin Highton, University of California (Davis)

Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1998.
M.A. University of California, Berkeley, Political Science, 1992.
A.B. Brown University, magna cum laude, Political Science, 1990.

Highton Publications

-----“Who Reports? Self-Reported Versus Proxy-Reported Voter Turnout.” Public Opinion Quarterly. In press.

-----“Beyond the Roll Call Arena: The Determinants of Position Taking in Congress” (co-authored with Michael Rocca). Political Research Quarterly. In press.

-----“How Postregistration Laws Affect the Turnout of Registrants” (co-authored with Raymond E. Wolfinger and Megan Mullin). State Politics and Policy Quarterly. In press.

-----“Voter Registration and Turnout in the United States.” Perspectives on Politics 2 (September):507-515.
-----“Policy Voting in Senate Elections: The Case of Abortion.” Political Behavior 26 (June):181- 200. 2004.
-----“White Voters and African American Candidates for Congress.” Political Behavior 26 (March):1-25. 2004.
-----“Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the 1998 Congressional Elections.” Public Opinion Quarterly 66 (Spring):1-18. 2002.

-----“New Perspectives on Latino Voter Turnout in the United States” (co-authored with Arthur Burris). American Politics Research 30 (May):285-306. 2002.

-----“The Political Implications of Higher Turnout” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). British Journal of Political Science 31 (January):179-192. 2001.

-----“The First Seven Years of the Political Life Cycle” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). American Journal of Political Science 45 (January):202-209. 2001.

-----“Senate Elections in the United States, 1920-1994.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (July):483-506. 2000.
-----“Residential Mobility, Community Mobility, and Voter Turnout.” Political Behavor 22 (June):109-120. 2000.
-----“Estimating the Effects of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993” (co-authored with Raymond Wolfinger). Political Behavior 20 (June):79-104. 1998.

-----“Easy Registration and Voter Turnout.” Journal of Politics 59 (May):565-75. 1997. Other Scholarly Publications
-----“Alternative Tests for the Effects of Campaigns and Candidates on Voting Behavior.” In Capturing Campaign Effects, Henry Brady and Richard Johnston, eds. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. In press.
-----“How Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Shape the California Electorate (co-authored with Jack Citrin). San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California. (95 pp.) 2002.
-----“Voting: Turnout.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Neil J. Smelser and Paul J. Baltes, eds. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science. 2001.
His entire bio is here: http://ps.ucdavis.edu/Faculty/vitae/BenHightonCV.pdf

Martha Kropf, University of Missouri (Kansas City)
PDF Resume is here (sorry, couldn't copy paste): http://k.web.umkc.edu/kropfm/vitae.pdf

Michael Traugott, University of Michigan

Professor Traugott studies the mass media and their impact on American politics. This includes research on the use of the media by candidates in their campaigns and its impact on voters, as well as the ways that campaigns are covered and the impact of this coverage on candidates. He has a particular interest in the use of surveys and polls and the way they are used to cover campaigns and elections. His most recent book is The Voters' Guide to Election Polls.

His entire Bio is here: http://polisci.lsa.umich.edu/faculty/mtraugott.html