Reply #44: Freeman's response (from MG's thread)

[CalmMan]

Freeman wrote a response. It doesn't seem like they published it, at least not yet, but here it is (I got it from Melissa G's thread).

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I would like to thank the Bucks County Courier Times for covering my presentation to the American Statistical Association (Re: Was 2004 presidential election stolen? by J.D. Mullane http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/219-10202005-557... ).

But what kind of journalism is it for a reporter who acknowledges that he “is lousy at math” to render a pronouncement on a presentation to statisticians without even taking the trouble to try to understand what “correlation” means? Wouldn’t your readers be better served by learning what the statisticians and others in the audience thought?

Just to set the facts in order, the thrust of my presentation was:

We had an election in which (1) extensive malfeasance and count corruption has been documented, and far more has been alleged, but has gone uninvestigated; (2) in Ohio, a state in which Kerry had a decisive edge in the exit poll numbers, a manual count which could have verified the official count was obstructed by the Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, who also served as chair of the Ohio Bush/Cheney campaign; and (3) 30% of Americans cast their ballots on electronic voting machines providing absolutely no assurance or verifiability that votes were counted as cast.

Given such a context, an exit poll discrepancy of 6 percentage points between the official count and exit poll projections warrants investigation. Especially given a nationwide 6.5 percentage point Precinct-Level Deviation. This is the difference between how 114,559 voters in selected precincts across the nation reported casting their ballots in confidential questionnaires as they exited the polls and the official counts in those very same precincts where the exit polls were conducted. Moreover, these are the final numbers, not the “half-time score” as Mitofsky and Mullane imply.

My talk to the American Statistical Association showed that the official explanation that Bush voters disproportionately – and by a large margin – refused to fill out the questionnaires offered by pollsters is unsubstantiated by the facts. I documented 17 statistical improbabilities and mathematical impossibilities that result from this hypothesis. Readers can read the text and view the slides in the presentation at a web site I established for this research: http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep.htm

By the way, Mullane should brush up on metaphor as well as math. “Sour grapes” refers to a rationalization made by a hungry fox as he walked away from succulent grapes that eluded his reach.” I am saying exactly the opposite, that nothing could be more important than a clean election. As John Roberts acknowledged in his confirmation hearings, the right to vote and have that voted counted is “preservative of all other rights.” Because of that, we can’t just move on and walk away from damning evidence of a stolen election.

Steve Freeman
Center for Organizational Dynamics
University of Pennsylvania