Reply #67: Ron, please see my response

[Febble]

to your other post.

But there are a few points worth mopping up here too.

A "pervasive" Kerry bias would not necessarily produce an "inverted U" with respect to Kerry's vote share. A uniform Kerry bias would. A distribution of biases, including some pro Bush bias, would produce a distribution of precincts with a tendency (absent too much other variance) to have a positive linear correlation with Kerry's vote share. In a noisy plot, it won't tend to be significant, and in fact it isn't. But it means that we can further discount the tendency, as the predicted relationship for a given mean alpha is going to be a slight positive linear correlation.

Your statement that "random non-sampling error would produce more or less equivalent Kerry and Bush descrepancies across the sample" is simply not true, as you MUST know if you read my paper - maybe you didn't. But if you did, don't you remember the sigmoid?

So in fact there is no "absence" of a serious explanation, I've just given you a purely mathematical one.

As for your last statement - there is no "inconsistency" that has not been clearly explained, and can be googled by anyone interested. The Roper set will have a greater standard error because the samples are smaller. Because they are a subset. They are the subset used for the crosstabs.

Lizzie