Reply #95: I have several points to make about this

[Time for change]

1) The two main participants in this debate are both members of US Count Votes (USCV), a voluntary organization that is dedicated to analyzing data to determine what happened in the 2004 election AND advocating election reform. They are both dedicated to this very important effort, they have been working very hard at it for months, and I doubt that they have received any money for these efforts. So I think that we can learn a lot by listening to what they both have to say. Yes, Bruce O'Dell's statement was incendiary. That's what happens sometimes when people debate emotionally laden issues. But at least they refrained from personal attacks or questioning each other's motives.

2) In the hope of furthering this debate along, I recently posted a thread entitled "Does Mitofsky's AAPOR presentation support his conclusions": http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=373817. In the first sentence of this post I say "No, I don't think so", and then I go on to explain why I believe that not only did the information presented by Mitofsky at AAPOR not support his rBr hypothesis, but it may argue against it.

Unfortunately, IMHO, that thread didn't receive a lot of attention, and as soon as I posted this thread it didn't receive any attention at all (I think that a large part of the reason for this is that, unlike my previous post that you refer to, this one used a statistical language that most DUers don't understand because they don't work with statistics regularly.) So, if you want this debate to be balanced out by somewhat of a counter argument (though nobody, including Bruce O'Dell, is arguing for rBr), then why don't you go back and start the discussion going again on that thread?


3) In the thread that I refer to above, one of the arguments that I mention refers to the USCV report that concluded, through the use of mathematical simulations, that analysis of Mitofsky's own data leads to implausibly high Kerry voter completion rates in the Bush stronghold precincts. As you know, this report has come under a lot of criticism, especially from USCV's own Vice President, Bruce O'Dell.

I honestly do not understand this argument well enough to make useful comments on it. However, since the USCV report was under attack for this I found another way, without using mathematical simulations, to calculate what the Kerry and Bush voter completion rates would have to be in the 40 Bush stronghold precincts combined. What I came up with (assuming a Bush vote count for those 40 precincts of 85%) is 75% Kerry voter completion rate, versus 53% Bush voter completion rate -- something similar to what the USCV report came up with. I don't know if that bolsters the USCV report or not. But I do feel, though other honest people may and do disagree, that those numbers seem at least somewhat implausible in the absence of fraud. Maybe I should start a new post on that.


4) My posting of Bruce O'Dell's statement on the DU did not make this issue public, because it was already public. What it did do, in my opinion, was provide interested DUers with the opportunity to become more familiar with the issues and engage in a debate which could lead to a better understanding of the issues and therefore a greater ability to discuss them in public.


5) You say that I mentioned that I'm a professor, and asked if at my university we engage in incendiary debate like this. I have never said on the DU that I'm a professor. I am not currently a professor, but I used to be an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Currently I am an epidemiologist who works for the FDA. It's interesting that you made the comment about public incendiary debate. Less than a year ago I attempted to publish an article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery that questioned the safety of a medical device that I had been studying. Most people might not have considered the article to be incendiary, but the manufacturer of the device certainly did. The Journal accepted the manuscript for publication, and it was about to be published, when suddenly the manufacturer found out about it, complained about it to the FDA, and the FDA ordered the Journal to pull it. The Journal pulled the article, as requested by the FDA, though the editor of the Journal wrote an editorial in his own journal, which was highly critical of the FDA for doing this. And then somebody leaked the whole story to the Wall Street Journal, which published it on their front page. So I'm used to incendiary arguments being aired in public, and I can tell you that I don't regret for a minute that this issue was aired in public, or the role that I played in it. Sometimes airing things in public helps greatly, by helping people to become better eductated about things.