Reply #70: Well, no, it isn't silly

[Febble]

it may be wrong (although I wouldn't be making it if I thought it was) but it isn't silly.

But before I explain, let me say: I DO NOT TRUST THE VOTE COUNT. If I did, I wouldn't have spent over a year of my life poring over exit poll data to try and find out who won.

The fact that the election result for the leader of the world's most powerful nation can even be considered a matter for statistical inference and not a simple fact is what is wrong, what we are fight for, and, too often, about.

So I am with you all the way on that. I am also with you all the way on voter suppression, as well as forms of vote miscounting that differentially disadvantages Democrats, and, indeed, cost Gore the presidency.

So, we are left with trying to figure out from the exit polls whether Bush really won the popular vote (they are useless for figuring out who won the electoral college vote, as they don't have enough statistical power at state level, and in any case, Ohio, the closest, is likely to have cost Kerry far more in suppressed votes, which wouldn't show up in the exit poll data).

Because the exit polls can tell us something about whether the votes people thought they'd cast were counted. They are problematic, of course, because they are only a sample, and there is no guarantee that the sample was not biased. So you do need to do some clever stats on them to control for bias.

And, as you no doubt know, I actually found myself in a position to do those clever stats. And I looked extremely hard for fraud, and also for bias, and I found bias, a little evidence for vote-miscounting on older technologies (levers, punchcards) which may indicate old-fashioned differential residual vote rates disadvantaging Democrats in urban areas. However, I did not find evidence for vote-switching fraud; more importantly, I found rather powerful evidence against it.

Fraud, as you know, would be reflected in "redshift", and fraud on the scale of millions of votes would result in substantial "redshift". Pro-Kerry bias in the poll will also show up as redshift, so we need to tease them apart. And the way to do that is this:

• Redshift due to pro-Kerry bias in the poll will be unrelated to Bush's performance
  
• Redshift due to pro-Bush fraud will.

And because we can use 2000 as a reasonable baseline (redshift was considerably less than in 2000) we can test whether redshift in 2004 is correlated, or not, with "swing" towards Bush relative to 2000. In other words, if Bush's apparent popular vote improvement in 2004 over 2000 was largely due to vote-switching fraud, then we would expect to see greater redshift where that improvement was greatest, and lesser redshift, or blueshift, where his improvement was least, or negative. And this is a relatively simple statistical test.

And the answer is an emphatic no. There is no such correlation, not even a sniff. Even when I controlled for mean state WPEs, when I improved the signal to noise ratio by accounting for possible other sources of variance in redshift, and in swing, there was still no correlation. It remained stubbornly slightly, but insignificantly, below zero. Even when I looked at interactions between factors we might expect to be associated with fraud (we might, for example, postulate that fraud was only present in large precincts, or Kerry precincts) - there was still no tendency for redshift to be correlated with swing to Bush.

I then attempted to model, in various ways, distributions of vote theft, of varying magnitudes, that might even be consistent with that finding. And of course, because all data is noisy, I can't rule out some fraud, and indeed, as I said I DO NOT TRUST THE COUNT. But it is possible to put fairly severely probabilistic constraints on the kinds and extent of vote-switching fraud that are consistent with the finding, and it is small. I can't give you a precise figure, because I can smuggle various amounts of fraud into the plot depending on the assumptions I make, but sticking with some fairly generous, but nonetheless realistic parameters, there is no room for millions, and problems for hundreds of thousands, of stolen votes. And the MOST probable number, statistically speaking, is zero.

Now, you may not be convinced by this, and of course you are perfectly at liberty to disbelieve it. But it is not SILLY, and it is certainly an argument that will be taken seriously in some informed quarters. Which is why I keep saying, that if you want to make a good case for election reform, when it comes to the transparency, reliability, auditability and security of voting methods, those are your best arguments - not the case that millions of votes were stolen in 2004, because although it is mathematically possible it is very unlikely.

Which, as I keep saying, is GOOD NEWS, because it means the mountain Democrats face is climbable.

As long as you fix voter suppression, which IMO, probably cost Kerry more votes than any other form of disenfranchisement in 2004. And as long as you fix the voting machinery so that not only is it much more difficult to steal votes with, but so that TRUST IN THE COUNT is restored, because without that you don't have a democracy anyway.