Reply #83: Forget the terms

[Febble]

What are you trying to say?

That the data shouldn't have been weighted at all? That it shouldn't have been weighted to the vote returns? That the unweighted data should have been made available? That the data weighted only to demographics etc should have been made available? (it was).

That there should have been a different poll? That the networks should not have commissioned the one they did (designed to allow them to "call" each state) but rather one that would audit the election?

Look, you may not like the way the poll was done. But it wasn't, as I said in another post to you that perhaps you haven't read, "cooked" to cover fraud. The data was originally "cooked" to give as good a possible estimate of the likely outcome, based on known facts about the distribution of the "raw" data (demographics of non-respondents, geographical data about the precinct locations) and these projections were not "leaked" - they were broadcast. Later the data was "cooked" again to take into account the actual returns. It happens in the UK too. The early projections of the winning party are based on the exit polls alone, and as the results come in, the prediction is tweaked to take account of the known results. By the time most of the results are in, the predictions are pretty close to the eventual results.

The only difference between the UK and the US is that we can pretty well rely on our vote count. The fact that in the US you can't is not the fault of the pollsters.

No-one is covering up anything except the information that would make it possible to identify respondents. This is because it is quite unethical to collect data from participants in a study and then publish it in such away that the confidentiality of the participants could be violated.

The argument, really, truly, is not about fraud on the part of E-M - it is about fraud in the vote count. We can use what E-M HAVE published to analyse the discrepancy between the real RAW data and the vote count and to try to figure out whether it was due to polling bias or fraud. No-one denies the discrepancy was large, and impossible to have occurred "by chance" least of all E-M, who for perfectly valid reasons, believe it was polling bias. They may be wrong. But there is no reason to suppose they are lying.

I think you need to direct your fire at a more appropriate target.