Reply #44: The blue line only has that slope

[Febble]

if you stick to those precise category boundaries, which are arbitrary, and not even quintiles. Move the boundary down by 1 percentage point and it drops to the level of the other categories because you include a low data point. Move the boundary up a bit and drops again, because you miss four high data points.

All the graph shows is that the mean in that particular high Bush category was high - and it is high because there are some high data points (four). There are also no real low ones.

But it doesn't mean that there are not equally high data points in lots of other parts of the plot - there are. But they didn't pull the mean up in their categories, because there happened to be low ones too. You'd expect that in higher N groups.

So the claim that there was more vote corruption in high Bush precincts still seems to me to be unsupported.

The next question therefore is - what about whole sale vote shift? But that should produce an actual across-the-board-slope, which again, isn't there. (Try my simulation - to produce the red shift with randomly distributed fraud you have to induce a slope). In fact, the plot is consistent with randomly distributed bias.

Which would be consistent with differential non-response.

It would also be consistent with more prevalent fraud in high KERRY precincts.

Which is defnitely interesting. But it is rather different to the original USCV hypothesis.