Reply #76: I certainly agree with your main points

[Time for change]

Spoilage has been going on for years, certainly since before the Mitofsky exit polls have been in operation, and they certainly have created red shifts. The degree of red shift that they have created is open to some question, but perhaps is as large as 1% or so, which would account for about half of the red shift in 88, 96, and 2000, but only about 20% of the red shift in 92, and even less than that in 04. So, you are quite correct that we should then see a relative blue shift when the problem is partly corrected, as was supposedly the case in Florida and SC in 2004. But that would be difficult to evaluate, I think, first because I'm not aware what the FL and SC polls showed in the other years, and second because the relative blue shift, I believe, would have been too small to be statistically significant.

In any event, I certainly do agree that a good portion of the exit poll discrepancy in 2004 was due to fraud, especially in Ohio, PA, and FL. As I said in another post, even if one quarter of the overall exit poll discrepancy was due to fraud, when added to other kinds of fraud that would not be detectable in the exit polls, that fraud very well could have been enough to swing the popular vote to Bush, and this would be even substantially more likely in Ohio.

But I'm still confused about the Florida 2000 thing. The Miami Herald recount showed 13,153 spoiled ballots for Gore and 12,158 for Bush. Certainly enough to make a huge difference in the 2000 Florida election, but the ratio is far less than what you are surmising. There were also nearly 24,000 ballots that had no mark whatsoever -- but what reason would there be for believing that these ballots were characterized by a substantially different ratio than the ones that were counted? I'm not saying you're wrong about your assumptions of distribution, but I just don't understand the discrepancy.