Reply #13: I will try

[Time for change]

This is the way I see it, though I would feel more comfortable if the involved statisticians would confirm that I'm stating this properly:

First, I would go to my recent thread, "A non-statistician's view of the E-M exit poll controversy, and look at item #s 3, 4, and 5:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=371726&mesg_id=371726

Item # 3 briefly explains Mitofski's explanation of what he considers to be exit poll bias, and this explanation is referred to as the reluctant Bush responder (rBr) hypothesis, because it postulates that Bush voters were more reluctant to participate in the exit poll than Kerry. Item #s 4 and 5 describe some simple insights that USCV came up with which explain why the rBr hypothesis logically seems implausible. This is very important, because if the exit poll bias argument is implausible, that leaves election fraud as the only reasonalbe alternative.

Since USCV demonstrated in general terms the implausibility of the rBr hypothesis, they then decided to see if they could prove statistically whether or not the rbr hypothesis was plausible. What they came up with was a complicated statistical explanation which they said proves the implausibility of the rBr hypothesis (I believe that Ron Baiman was the primary author of this explanation, which is why he is now defending it). I don't understand this explantion well enough to offer an opinion on it, but as I note in item # 9 of my thread, I don't really think that it matters much, because USCV had already demonstrated the implausibility of the rBr hypothesis via a simple logical explanation -- certainly well enough to warrant a serious federal investigation into the integrity of the election.

Anyhow, Febble, who was a member of USCV at the time, at some point came to disgree with the USCV statistical explanation, and she broke away from the group and published her own paper on the subject. To make the point again that this whole argument between Febble and USCV doesn't matter much to the central issue of whether or not fraud occurred, here is a quote from Febble's response to Ron Baiman's thread: "My point was never to say that fraud did not occur, simply that it was not concentrated in high Bush precincts." So I say to that, who cares where the fraud was concentrated?

One more thing: Febble also said in her response (part g) that she "believes" that if major fraud occurred then there should be some correlation between the amount of bias in a precinct and the partisanship of the precinct (I'm translating her here, so I hope to be corrected if I'm mis-translating her), and she says that there was no correlation, therefore implying that major fraud did not occur. Whether or not such a correlation existed is beyond my understanding of this matter. But I certainly cannot see why the absence of such a correlation means that major fraud did not occur. In other words, what I'm saying is that if major fraud occurred, why couldn't it occur in different kinds of precincts, with no correlation to the partisanship of the precinct?