Reply #168: A couple of things:

[Febble]

First of all, far from being "clearly missing" from the scholars you reference, miscounted votes as a source of exit poll distortion makes an appearance on page 7 of your first link:

In Florida, those who did participate, that is, the people who did report how they had voted, assumed that their votes were being counted. That was not necessarily the case. Many votes were not counted. Also, many people voted incorrectly on what turned out to be a very confusing ballot. The hanging chads, the not-fully-perforated chads, and the butterfly ballot became famous icons of voter confusion and disenfranchisement in the aftermath of the Florida vote. The failure to record some intended votes may have further distorted the exit poll findings.

Nonetheless, I take your point (indeed it is one that I have been at pains to make myself) that there are plenty of known sources of inaccuracy in the exit polls. And we do not even need to consider fraud to establish the existence of non-sampling error in the pre-election polls, because they are all intended to be samples from the same population. We need only compute the between-poll/within-poll variance ratio, i.e. do an F test, to establish that they are not samples drawn from the same population.

You state that "TIA is appropriately using multiple sources that serve as checks and balances against each other, or multiple sources of evidence." Using multiple sources can serve as "checks and balances" against each other, but if you don't know the source of the error, you don't know whether the mean will be closer to the true value than any one poll. If you have one clock that tells the right time, and several that tend to run fast, you will not get a more accurate estimate of the time by taking the average than by looking at the one correct clock. You will get a less accurate estimate. The problem arises when you don't know which clock is correct. You might assume that errors are as likely in one direction as the other, in which case, your best guess will be the mean. Or you might assume clock makers play safe and design their clocks to err on the fast side, in which case your best guess might be that the slowest clock is most likely to be correct. Or, if you were worried you were going to be late, your best assumption might be that the fastest clock was correct.

This is why assumptions matter. We have absolutely no information as to which of those 10 polls is the most accurate - all we know is that at least 9 of them are biased in some way. If we have reason to think that poorer methodology may tend to result in pro-Democratic bias the best estimate might be that the polls with the lowest margins were closest to the truth. However, if we think that poor methodology results in randomly distributed error, our best estimate might be the mean. But without more information as to the likely sources of non-sampling error, we cannot make this judgement.

So I do not agree with you that TIA is "appropriately" using his multiple sources. He is using them inappropriately, IMO, in that by using the mean value of the polls as his estimate of the true value in the population, he is assuming that any non-sampling error has a mean value of zero, which is not a justified assumption, and he is ignoring the highly significant between-poll variance in his probability calculations, which is simply wrong.

And as always, I say - if you want to demonstrate election fraud with numbers, go find some real numbers. There are plenty in Florida!