Reply #48: Yes, let's be straight

[Febble]

You're smart enough.

I've no objection to politics, nor to partisan politics. What I do object to is when people infer political partisanship from the scientific conclusions arrived at by other posters.

Speaking for myself, I'm certainly not promoting a position, whatever you may think. OK I'll rephrase that: I AM promoting the position that the evidence of the exit polls is far from clearcut evidence for fraud and may even be evidence against fraud.

However, I am only "promoting" that "position" because it is my honest reading of the facts as I currently see them. And, as I state in my sig, I do not claim any special authority for my views, apart from the statistical logic of my arguments. I'd love to be wrong. I simply point out what I see as the relevant statistical evidence, and what I think it can be said to tell us and what it cannot be said to tell us. It happens that I simply disagree with most of TIA's inferences. Not, I have to say, on the basis of his arithmetic, but on the basis of the assumptions he makes. All statistical inferences depend heavily on assumptions, and I think his are mostly faulty.

And the only "political" "position" I am promoting is the position I have stated elsewhere, which is that I think your democracy has been violated by the lack of transparency and accountability in your electoral system and by the unconscionable disenfranchisement of many of your citizens - the majority of whom would probably (statistically speaking) have voted for Kerry.

So why am I "promoting" the first position if I also want to "promote" the second? (You didn't ask me that, but you should).

Two reasons:

One is that I don't think it helps a case to present bad arguments, and I think that some of the statistical arguments, especially the exit poll arguments are bad arguments. I don't believe in presenting your opponents with ready made straw men.

Second is that I do think the exit polls tell us some important things about what unethical (and even fraudulent) practices may have occurred - by telling us what probably did not occur. If we take your own point (which was my starting point also) that Bush's victory simply does not make sense (because it makes no sense to vote for Bush) then if the exit polls are telling us, as I believe they are, that vote-switching probably did not occur, then it directs us to look for things like vote-suppression (a term I use advisedly, as it includes things like provisional vote allocation/rejection; spoilage, and voter suppression). In other words I actually think it is VALUABLE to look at the evidence dispassionately. And damaging to look at it passionately. I'm happy to have political incentives direct my science, but I'm not happy to have it affect the conclusions I draw from the evidence. And I'm even less happy to have other people make erroneous inferences about my political motivations from those conclusions.

AND even less happy still to see conclusions drawn about the political motivations of a friend who has, to my certain knowledge, spent a vast number of hours trying to find out why the hell Bush is president.